FT:

Followers of sport will be familiar with the concept of the emotional hedge. On the sound premise that money beats gallows humour as consolation, people bet against their own teams to soften the trauma of defeat.

Even if gambling were legal across the US, the markets would not be liquid enough to meet the demand for such wagers on Donald Trump. Soliciting opinions on the eve of 2020, I find that people who least desire a second term for the US president are the quickest to predict it.

Foreign diplomats are no less resigned than the American liberals who will have to suffer it in person. They sometimes over-reach in their certitude but, if Mr Trump is not a sure thing, he is eminently competitive, even after impeachment, even after everything. The trick is to explain why.

One reason is the longest economic expansion in US history. Surveys indicate that voters, wise to the impersonality of the business cycle, withhold credit from Mr Trump. But the boom forces his challengers to prove that they would not endanger it with tax rises or regulations, even ones that are popular on their own terms. The most left-leaning field of Democrats in a generation is exposed to the charge of needless risk-taking.

As important as the economy is the structural role of partisanship. Such is the group loyalty in US politics, almost any sentient mammal who stands for a major party can count on 45 per cent of the national vote. Not since 1996 has a Republican or Democrat flunked that mark, and it took the spoiling candidacy of billionaire independent Ross Perot.

For all its viciousness, partisanship makes for a perverse kind of stability in which electoral outcomes only ever vary within a tight range, even when one candidate is an impeached Twitter addict. The incentive structure this sets up for politicians is too dismal to contemplate, suggesting as it does that one can do literally anything and remain electorally viable for the grandest office on Earth.

America’s boom and its tribalism are well enough understood abroad. Mr Trump’s elemental force as a campaigner is an even better-known factor in his advantage. There is something else that accounts for his enduring competitiveness, though, and it is easy for those with too rational a cast of mind to miss.

It is almost impossible for Mr Trump to disappoint people. They never had hopes to dash. In 2016, it was forgivable to characterise his voters as innocents who believed that he would repatriate factories to Ohio and clean up politics. Logic implied that when he failed in these endeavours their support would melt. In retrospect, this was only ever true of some.....

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