Sort of completing my point

rick is right on this and the political science has long backed him up.https://t.co/Kk87peLn7r

dem strategists need to read this stuff

— Freddy Shoop (@mclarkweston1) August 1, 2019

Yeah, policy is irrelevant.  But note what's buried in this precis of the book advertised in the tweet:

Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate that voters—even those who are well informed and politically engaged—mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly.

The talking heads and political punditocracy, of course, will be appalled at this news.  But 'twas ever thus.  And that points to why Trump will lose, unless the Democrats put forward another campaigner as awful as Hillary; or Kerry, Gore, or Dukakis.  Consider:

A big part of the reason why Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 was that he captured a not-insignificant percentage of voters who did not necessarily like him but chose him anyway over Hillary Clinton. Only 38% of the electorate reported having a favorable opinion of him, according to the national exit poll, but he won 46% of the vote, meaning that he ran eight percentage points ahead of his favorability. Clinton, whose favorability was 43%, got 48% of the vote, meaning that she only ran five points ahead of her favorability. Additionally, Trump won 47%-30% among the 18% of the electorate who held unfavorable views of both Trump and Clinton.

That Trump was able to capture voters who held an unfavorable view of him suggests that perhaps he could do it again in 2020, particularly if the eventual Democratic nominee also becomes unpopular. This helps explain why Trump is desperate to make the election a choice as opposed to a referendum.

However, in some early ballot tests, there is some indication that Trump is not only failing to pick up support from people who don’t like him, but in some instances he does not appear to be winning every poll respondent who approves of his job performance.

Let’s look at three well-established, live-caller national polls released over the last month that asked both about Trump’s approval rating and tested the president in ballot tests against the leading Democratic candidates: Fox News, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, and ABC News/Washington Post.

The Fox News poll released last week found that Trump’s approval rating among registered voters was 46%, but he only attracted between 39%-42% of the vote in matchups against the top-polling Democratic presidential contenders (Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders — Biden usually does the best in these head-to-heads with Trump at this point). The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released in early July found Trump’s approval at 45% among registered voters, but his support in ballot tests against the four top Democrats was just 42%-44%. The ABC News/Washington Post survey conducted right after the first debates found Trump at 47% approval among registered voters, but Trump was only at 43% against Biden: against the three others, Trump was between 46%-48%, effectively equaling his approval.

The differences here are slight, but this is something worth monitoring because Trump’s path to victory probably entails him either improving his approval rating so that it’s in the mid-to-high 40s as opposed to the mid-to-low 40s, or running ahead of his approval by capturing a small but significant number of voters who don’t approve of him. But if Trump is actually losing a small number of voters who approve of his job performance, he may have a very hard time cobbling together another Electoral College majority.

I want to be fair and not reduce that to what it doesn't say, but the point is in the first and last paragraphs:  Trump is in trouble even with people who approve of his job performance.  He faces an uphill fight to re-election, something an incumbent really shouldn't face.  Then again, W. won because he faced Kerry, who really wasn't all that impressive before he was "swift-boated."  Trump could win, and yes, the smart money is that an election that is a referendum on his first four years is not good for him.

I'm not sure that referendum needs to start until the Democrats have decided who their candidate is.  And they can't really decide that if every candidate says "I hate Trump more than anybody else running for this nomination!"  Interestingly, while Elizabeth Warren is one of the most progressive and outspoken candidates (and political poison in many key electoral states, or so Rick Wilson would argue), she's still not the front runner, and even Bernie declined to attack her in the second round of debates.  That protection won't last long, however, and it could work in Biden's favor; or Buttigieg's, or Harris's, or any other less "progressive" candidate.

Hell, it's just now August.  Nobody's casting a ballot until January, and who knows who's going to be on that ballot by then?

To be clear, horse race polls this early in an election cycle are not predictive, and there are not huge differences in Trump’s approval and his horse race polling. But one might generally expect an incumbent president to win a share of the vote commensurate with his approval rating. In some national polls, Trump is running behind his approval. It’s worth watching whether that continues as the marathon campaign meanders on.

It's a marathon, not a sprint; and the horse race matters only to the candidates right now.  The fat lady's not even warming up in the wings, yet.