Oh joy, oh Rapture! Election 2016 is almost over! And on a barely habitable planet out on the fringes of the Milky Way Galaxy, a not inconsiderable fraction of the American electorate now seeks a new life on planet Pmurt (pronounced Murt -- the “p” is silent). These folks are the "Secret Trumpsters" The Donald told us about, ones who were purported to be Democrats, Independents, Greenies, and even #NeverTrump Republicans. Or who couldn’t make up their minds. Or flat out said they would never vote for Hillary, whatever. But these suspiciously anonymous folks never got the chance to voice their support at the ballot box. Other than those Not-so Secret Trumpsters who hedged their bets, of course. The rest were, instead, early Monday night Raptured directly to Pmurt.
Just in the nick of time, once the Polldrums set in, advanced word from the highly accurate open-source and reproducible Dynamic Beyesian Forecasting showed an advance look at Hillary Clinton’s most probable Electoral College numbers. They were stunning. The poll showed her most probable count at 325 electoral votes, with the next closest just shy of 350. And 400+ was not out of the realm of possibility. This meant that everyone else, including much-admired Nate Silver, was merely blowing smoke up a massive number of wazoos right up to Election Day with a puzzling overuse of the phrase “tight race.”
So it was high time for the entire sentient universe outside our solar system that knew better to gear up for a humiliating loss for Donald Trump. The question for all concerned was: How would both secret and open-carry Trumpsters react at Trump’s crushing defeat? Not support the election results? Sporadic mayhem? Improper spelling and syntax on protest signs? There was so much uncertainty.
It was far too chancy to leave matters to what some have called “the deplorables.” So rather than allow millions of secret Trumpsters to go to the polls en mass and throw a monkey wrench into Election 2016, not to mention American constitutional democracy as we know it, the Powers-That-Be stepped in on Monday night and stealthily whisked them all away to Pmurt. And there they sit.
The interesting thing about this particular Rapture is that no one knows they’re even gone! Ipso facto presumpto, they won’t be missed. We never even got so much as Facebook links, so as far as the rest of us are concerned, it’s like Secret Trumpsters never existed in the first place. Or the polling and analysis sucked.
Our hope in this section of the galaxy is that it’s not a round-trip ticket where they’ve all been...gulp, pardoned ...and will show up again in 2018.