What to do? What to do? Normally, these kinds of things come down to heart vs. head kind of thing, but this election cycle is unlike anything anyone has seen since, oh, perhaps, Reagan in 1980. In my view, it might be even more so than that: after all, Jimmy Carter was just an incompetent running against a former actor who actually had experience in politics, whereas Hillary Clinton is an entrenched, corrupt, and evil Washington pol with no business running for President against a coarse, blunt, businessman with no political experience whatsoever.
Look, I can respect the differences between political parties and voting one’s conscience and political interests, but Hillary Clinton has sold this country and its interests down the pike all for the purposes of financial gain. She and husband Bill are political grifters of the highest magnitude, and the fact that Democrats have made her their presidential candidate shows just how morally bankrupt that party has gone under the likes of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
But it’s much more than that.
I can respect people who vote for who they see as the better candidate. But I have no respect whatsoever for anyone who would vote for someone who not only should be in prison for her e-mail shenanigans and turning the State Department into her own personal “pay for play” money-laundering operation, but someone with the blood of brave Americans on her hands – someone so evil, so vile, and so empty in her soul that she could straight-faced lie to the faces of those whose loved ones died in Benghazi all for the sake of political cover. She should rot in hell, and I pray she does.
Excuse me, if you will, for these strident tones, but I really do see this election as one about, if not good vs. evil, then at least one not evil vs. evil. Last I checked, Donald Trump didn’t vote to send any soldier to Iraq, didn’t cast a vote either for or against Obamacare, didn’t vote for or against anything, for that matter. And in that regard, to think that he could be any worse than Hillary Clinton in a White House with husband Bill shaking down foreign leaders for presidential favors and Chelsea greasing the skids for some choice Senate seat to ensure another generation of Clinton graft ought to be sufficient reason enough to warrant a vote for Trump, or, at the very least, no vote at all.
But I digress. After all, I promised y’all predictions, and predictions you shall have.
There are two minds at work here. First of all, you have two veterans at the election projections wars, ElectionProjection.com and Nate Silver, each predicting a pretty solid Clinton victory. I’ve respected their work in the past and it would be foolish to not take them into consideration. Anyone who does (at least in my mind) does so at their own peril.
On the other hand, I have my so-called “guy” high up in the AZ GOP party structure who has contacts (if he is to be believed) at the highest levels of the Trump campaign, and this relative newcomer to the polling analysis wars. While he/she is a supporter of Trump, his/her website has fairly closely reflected the ups and downs of Trump’s fortunes during the election cycle, and even a month ago had Trump’s campaign sagging, albeit not as much as the so-called “mainstream” pollsters.
I think – and this has always been the case in this election cycle – that the pollsters are missing a significant demographic in the American voting populace. Not because they want to, but because they can’t. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that the political environment in 2016 has become toxic and – in the case of Democrats and liberals – vindictive to the point of neo-fascism. It’s not Trump supporters stealing Clinton signs from back yards. It’s not Trump supporters fire-bombing Democratic political headquarters, or vandalizing cars, or committing acts of physical violence against supporters of the other candidate. It is Democrats and liberals. And some might shrug it off and say that both sides do it, or that there are radicals or reactionaries on both sides, but last time I checked it wasn’t Trump supporters doing these things and blocking highways and forcing the other candidate’s rallies to be cancelled under threats of violence. It’s the so-called tolerant and accepting liberals and supporters of Hillary Clinton. In this environment you’d have to be nuts to tell anyone you’re supporting Trump. You could lose your job, lose your family, lose your friends. After all, the mainstream media has been feeding almost from day one the narrative that if you’re a Trump supporter you’re obviously a racist, sexist, homophobe, or xenophobe. Who in their right mind, in such an environment, would open themselves to that kind of abuse?
The other thing is relying on pollsters who have consistently over-polled Democrats and their participation from the start. Does anyone truly think that Hillary Clinton has the same kind of emotional tug as Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012? Does anyone really think African-Americans will come out in droves to support Hillary as they did Obama? Of course not.
My guy in AZ politics says the election has been a Trump +6 race since Labor Day and nothing – not the debates, not WikiLeaks, not Hillary’s e-mail woes – has changed it since. He also doesn’t think there are as many undecideds as the media has portrayed. He thinks the polls showing 12-point or six-point swings in their polls over a span of weeks are a joke, created solely for a hungry media desperate to portray this election as nothing more than a horse-race between personalities and nothing about substance. His view (as is mine) is that substance is everything when you have a change election as this one is. People either like the way things are going and choose to stay with the party in power, or reject the way things are and vote for a change.
I believe Nate Silver and the folks at ElectionProjection rely too much on pollsters who aren’t willing to take this dynamic into account. Therefore, I’m going with Trump winning overall 48-44 percent, with somewhere around 310 electrical votes (he takes OH, FL, PA, MI and one or two states no one saw coming). I think the Republicans hold both the Senate and the House, and I think there will be a lot of mainstream media folks forced to look at themselves and the pathetic excuse for what has become journalism in this election cycle. The mainstream media is a joke, and a dangerous one at that. But their ability to influence minds like they could even four years ago has been replaced by a social media the sees through the bias.
Of course I might be wrong and if I am that’s OK – I can handle it. But for the sake of this country and its future I sure hope not.
Hillary wins the raw vote totals, but the electoral is too close to call. No more than 10 votes difference either way.
GOP retains the House pretty easily, but Senate too close to call. If Kelly Ayotte pulls out a win in NH, the GOP likely retains the Senate.
If Hillary does win, she gets even less than Obama ever did as far as her proposals go, as she will have even less of a mandate than he ever had, and she’ll really have to moderate her SCOTUS picks to get them approved.
Comment by Dave Richard — November 8, 2016 @ 5:43 am
Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead
Comment by The Great White Shank — November 8, 2016 @ 11:56 pm