Predicting the next president

Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. Of course, predictions are easy to make. If you end up right, you can boast. If you’re wrong, no one remembers, so it doesn’t matter. But, arguably, the numbers point to a Trump victory in 2016.

National polling of Republican voters gives Trump twice the support of his closest rival. For example, a Fox News poll has Trump at 39 percent with second-place Ted Cruz at 18 percent. We all thought Trump was a summer sensation, then a sideshow with a low ceiling, but now he’s pressing steadily upward.

The mood of the country puts Democrats at a disadvantage. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows 70 percent of respondents think the country is headed in the wrong direction. There is more to the general direction of things than government policy, but the figure indicates heavy dissatisfaction with the status quo. The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows President Obama with only a 43 percent approval rating and a 52 percent disapproval rating. Seventy-three percent of Americans, according to the NBC/WSJ poll, want an approach to governing other than Obama’s. This is bad news for Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee and the party’s quintessential establishment candidate with close ties to the Obama administration.

The Fox News poll also shows terrorism as the No. 1 concern of registered voters, jumping from 11 percent in August to 27 percent in December, displacing the economy and jobs from the top spot. The NBC/WSJ poll has everything fading in significance compared to national security and terrorism, up from 21 percent to 40 percent as a focus of voter concern following the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks. This turns attention to where the Obama administration is seen as weak and where Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state, is deeply vulnerable. She has no accomplishment of note and her reset button with Russia and the Benghazi debacle associate her with weakness and incompetence. So it is no surprise she has been distancing herself from Obama’s foreign policy.

People are scared, and radical Islamic terrorist activity here at home is unlikely to diminish as a public concern. While Trump’s proposed temporary ban on Muslim immigration is unpopular, Clinton’s reality-denying statements like, “Muslims … have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism” will drive people to support Trump. Almost 50 percent of Republicans in the Fox News poll think Trump would be most effective against ISIS.

A USA Today/Suffolk University poll shows Clinton four points ahead of Trump in a hypothetical matchup, a statistical tie. But Trump has demonstrated an ability to move numbers in surprising ways. He has a knack for reading the public. He will appear authentic in contrast to Clinton’s political posing. But expect him to tone down his rhetoric as he moves toward the convention to capture the middle in November.

I don’t trust Donald Trump for reasons I have stated, but at times he moves me, and I can see people in the semi-aware political middle forgiving his past excesses if he changes his presentation in the summer of ’16. Otherwise, given present concerns, people will choose the brute over the scold.

But politics are full of surprises. The currently surging Ted Cruz would match The Donald in a two-man GOP race, and the FBI may yet put Clinton in handcuffs for mishandling top-secret information. Political prognosticating cannot be an exact science.