Professor says Trump will win 2020 unless Dems impeach

WASHINGTON

A college professor who has correctly predicted all presidential races since Ronald Reagan was elected to his second term in 1984 says President Donald Trump will be re-elected unless congressional Democrats "grow a spine".

Allan Lichtman, a political historian who teaches at American University in the nation's capital, told CNN this week that Democrats moving to impeach the president would be both "constitutionally" and "politically" right.

Lichtman has developed a system of 13 criteria which he calls "keys" to help determine whether a president will win re-election and said impeachment would increase the chances that Republicans would lose the White House.

"An impeachment would nail down the scandal key, a fourth key. It might trigger other keys like a real challenge to his renomination, or a third party, enough to defeat him," Lichtman told CNN, noting that there must be six "keys" for a party to lose the Oval Office, and right now, only three have been met.

"Let's not forget: impeachment is not just a vote in the House. It involves public hearings as part of the impeachment inquiry, and what everyone forgets: a public trial in the Senate in which House prosecutors present evidence," he said. "Richard Nixon, before all the public revelations, was at 67% approval. It was the public revelations of his misdeeds that drove him down to 25%."

Top Democratic lawmakers, however, have been reticent to broach impeachment, fearing that doing so could cost them at the ballot box in 2020 by energizing Trump's base.