Almost anything seems possible in such a crazy election year as this, and by now we’ve learned to abandon all faith in any of the formerly reliable political and cultural assumptions that had previously guided us through our lives, but our guess, which we readily admit is no better than yours or anybody else’s, is that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is leading Republican nominee Donald Trump as we head into the final weeks of the presidential race.
Just for the heck of it we still check in every day on the Real Clear Politics average of polls, and as of now they have Clinton leading by an historically formidable 5.5 percentage points in both the two-way and four-way national surveys, with the state polls showing her in a comfortable lead and with a potential blow-out in the Electoral College competition, and given everything else that seems about right. Those polls are all over the place, with Fox News showing Clinton up by eight and The Washington Post having her up by only eight, while NBC News has her up by eight which is a drop from their and that defiantly outlier poll from The Los Angeles Times still has Trump in a one point is down from its last polling, but average it all out and it comes back to that historically formidable 5.5 percentage point lead. Meanwhile, everything else in the news seems to confirm that statistical suspicion.
The Washington Post gleefully reports that the Trump campaign is no longer bothering to spend any time or money in the former swing state of Virginia, where pretty much all the polling, apparently including Trump’s campaign’s, suggests that she’s out to a double-digit lead. In the states where he’s still campaigning hard, Trump’s proudly unscripted speeches, unshackled from the Republican Party he has now openly at war with and the tele-prompters that he’s literally tearing down and refusing to pay for, are already alleging that his still-theoretical loss is only because of a rigged election. Back when the polls accurately predicted is Republican primary wins Trump was constantly touting them, but nowadays he’s convinced that Fox News is part of the the liberal conspiracy and that The Los Angeles Times is the only beacon of truth on the media landscape, and that it’s all a part of even broader conspiracy to deny him his mandate, which is not how winning candidates have talked in the past. Meanwhile Clinton is laying low, happily staying out out of the news while she prepares for Wednesday’s final debate and hoping all those damning Wiki-leaked stories on the front page of even the Washington Post and New York Times and Fox News and all the rest of the conspiratorial cabal don’t get as much attention as the stories about about grabbing ’em by the p***y, which suggests that her internal polling is confident enough to pulling out Virginia and investing time and money in such formerly reliable Republican states as Arizona and Georgia, or even a couple of southwestern states where third party challengers are threatening to take them out of the reliably Republican column.
Even in this crazy election we can’t foresee any scenario where one or the other of those two awful major party candidates doesn’t win, but at least we can take heart in noting that nobody seems to have much of a chance of getting a majority of the popular vote. Those daunting poll numbers have Clinton at at a mere 47 percent, at best, and at this sad point in this sad race we can only hope that whoever wins will do so with most of the country hating him or her.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 