Trump sees hope in 'angry' surge

America on Sunday kicked off the one-year countdown to Election Day 2020, with US President Donald Trump betting an “angry” Republican surge can deliver him a second term, as the Democratic battle to win back the White House heats up.

The building political clash — dramatically fueled by the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into Trump — appears to virtually guarantee another year of sharp division in a nation long weary of such drama.

Polls suggest the country couldn’t be much more divided.

The latest projection from a University of Virginia political science team points to a dead-even 2020 race, with each party leading in states totaling 248 electoral college votes, 22 short of the 270 needed for election.

The division is reflected in the House, where the vote last Thursday to formalize the impeachment inquiry passed almost entirely on party lines — more partisan than any of the three previous impeachment votes in US history.

As that inquiry proceeds, Trump has lashed out in increasingly angry, personal and crude terms, seeking to damage his political foes while energizing his fiercely loyal base.

In a speech on Friday in Tupelo, Mississippi, he called Democratic leaders “mentally violent,” denounced the impeachment inquiry as a “hoax” and said former vice president Joe Biden, once a Democratic frontrunner, was getting “slower and slower.”

Trump has even retweeted, with apparent approval, a warning by an evangelical pastor that his impeachment could “cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation.”

Amid all the furor, the top Democratic candidates have struggled for a share of the spotlight while anxiety grows among some in the party that a clear, strong challenger with mainstream appeal has yet to emerge.

Trump’s focus on Biden — and the allegations, for which there is no evidence, that he and his son were somehow tainted by corruption in Ukraine — has weighed on the former vice president.

He has slipped from a dominant position in the large Democratic field to fourth place among voters in the crucial, first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Friday.

That survey put Senator Elizabeth Warren in the lead, at 22 percent, followed by Senator Bernie Sanders, at 19 percent, with a surging Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, at 18 percent, one point ahead of the far better-known Biden.

But many Democrats fear Warren and Sanders are too liberal to win in a nationwide vote.

In his combative appearance in Mississippi, Trump insisted that the talk of impeachment was fueling a Republican surge that would propel him to re-election.

“I tell you the Republicans are really strong,” he said, touting the emergence of “an angry majority.”

Polls show increasing support among Democrats and some independents for impeachment but a recent average of surveys showed Trump clinging to 42.8 percent approval rating.