Hillary Clinton will be the next POTUS. There will be no magical moment that, all of a sudden in the last three weeks, everyone changes their mind. But, hey, some folks love a horse race. So, for you that do, there’s always Congress.
Cracked has a great, long sympathetic piece on rural America’s view of the elite and city folk, well worth a read if you want to understand Trump voters feeling left behind:
How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
As a kid, visiting Chicago was like, well, Katniss visiting the capital. Or like Zoey visiting the city of the future in this ridiculous book. "Their ways are strange."
And the whole goddamned world revolves around them.
Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes -- either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.
This matters after the election.
Michelle Cottle/Atlantic:
It’s hard to say when exactly, but at some point I began to wonder: What is going to happen to Trump die-hards after November 8?
Short answer: nothing good.
Now, I’m not talking about what his supporters will do to the GOP if their hero flames out—which seems increasingly likely. I leave it to party leaders to angst over that looming horror show.
Rather, I’m thinking of the sad state in which Trump will leave his followers. Because, make no mistake, no matter how badly he behaves, Trump will end this race with his world more or less intact. Sure, he may lose some money and some friends and some invitations to Upper East Side dinner parties. But he will remain rich and privileged and more famous than ever, and, as a result, he will be largely insulated from the fallout of his latest exercise in self-promotion.
Molly Ball/Atlantic:
As the campaign enters its gruesome, death-rattle phase—yes, there are three and a half more weeks of this to endure—Trump is refusing to go down without a fight. He intends to drag them all with him if he can, down into the swirling chaos. Scary clowns have been popping up all over the country, and somehow this does not seem like a coincidence.
This, this massive crowd in a giant barn in the middle of Florida, amid a landscape dotted with auto-body shops and one-story houses and dripping with Spanish moss, is all Trump has left: his ravening hordes, the throngs that still flock to see him, impervious to the "reality" the crooked media portrays. The media, after all, is just an extension of the Clinton campaign, as Trump contends the emails conclusively reveal.
He has, too, his traveling circus, the shrinking crew of political castoffs still willing to sing his praises, starting with Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, who tells the crowd, "We're going to win! We're going to win Florida!" Giuliani says of the emails, "Don't they prove everything we ever thought about her was true? Now it's in writing, and all those conspiracy theories turn out to be correct!" Indeed, the emails have revealed a Clinton apparatus that is cozy with the media, unrepentantly globalist, and cravenly two-faced, just as her opponents contended.
Politico with a reality check:
Trump collapse clouds Paul Ryan's future
His career right after the election could take a number of turns, none of them especially attractive.
With GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump cratering in the polls and the House Republican majority at serious risk, Ryan's post-election career could take a number of different turns after Nov. 8 — none of them especially attractive. And as Ryan goes, so will Washington governance over the next few years.
Here's a look at the three strongest possibilities for his immediate future:
- Ryan retains slim House majority
- Ryan leaves Congress
- Minority Leader Paul Ryan
Monkey Cage Blog/WaPo:
Will Republican voters flee Trump, post-video? Here’s what we found.
But a much more important test suggests a gloomier picture of Trump’s standing with his Republican base. Twenty percent of Republicans believe that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has a more presidential temperament than Trump. That’s sizably higher than the 13 percent who said so just after the first debate. Even more staggeringly, only 35 percent of Republican voters – not even close to half of the Republican coalition – say that Donald Trump has the more presidential temperament. That’s an unprecedented level of disloyalty toward a major party candidate.
We did not see any increase in Republicans saying they would cross over to vote for Clinton. But all this suggests that Trump has reached his maximum support from Republicans. He may even lose some in the coming weeks. This is particularly worrisome for Trump, as he is already7 percentage points down nationally, and more than 100 electoral votes down in most forecasts. If he cannot gain his own party’s average level of support for presidential candidates, it is extremely unlikely he can gain more from independent or Democratic voters.
CPJ.org:
In an unprecedented step, the Committee to Protect Journalists today released a statement recognizing that a Donald Trump presidency would represent a threat to press freedom. In response to Trump's threats and vilification of the media during his campaign, the chairman of CPJ's board, Sandra Mims Rowe, issued the following statement on behalf of the organization:
Guaranteeing the free flow of information to citizens through a robust, independent press is essential to American democracy. For more than 200 years this founding principle has protected journalists in the United States and inspired those around the world, including brave journalists facing violence, censorship, and government repression.
Joseph Stiglitz/Project Syndicate:
So why would Americans be playing Russian roulette (for that is what even a one-in-six chance of a Trump victory means)? Those outside the US want to know the answer, because the outcome affects them, too, though they have no influence over it.
And that brings us to the second question: why did the US Republican Party nominate a candidate that even its leaders rejected?
Obviously, many factors helped Trump beat 16 Republican primary challengers to get this far. Personalities matter, and some people do seem to warm to Trump’s reality-TV persona.
But several underlying factors also appear to have contributed to the closeness of the race. For starters, many Americans are economically worse off than they were a quarter-century ago. The median income of full-time male employees is lower than it was 42 years ago, and it is increasingly difficult for those with limited education to get a full-time job that pays decent wages.
USA Today:
"Especially given the events of the last week, I think we’re going to see a reasonable number of Republicans" reconsider their support, Joel Benenson, Clinton's top strategist, said in an interview. "It’s now broader than educated white women," he said.
Trump’s backing is particularly weak among younger Republican males. Among Republican men under the age of 35, he's taking just 74% of the vote, a number that is typically about 20 points higher, said Mark Blumenthal, elections polling director atSurveyMonkey. With young Republican women, Trump is winning just 62%, according to weekly tracking polls of thousands of voters. The others appear headed toward third-party candidates, for Clinton or perhaps not voting at all, he said.
“It’s the place we’re going to be looking most intently,” Blumenthal said. Typically, at this stage of a campaign, a nominee is consolidating support among base voters, as the third-party vote shrinks into single digits. Even if Clinton can’t run up the margins with them, their refuge with third-party candidates could prove just as helpful.
Mother Jones:
HOW TRUMP TOOK HATE GROUPS MAINSTREAM
Don't underestimate the power of the presidency to legitimize marginalized people and deviant movements. If Barack Obama can legitimize gay marriage and transsexuals, Donald Trump can legitimize the Alt-Right.
The Economist:
The recording of him boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy”, long before he was a candidate, was unpleasant enough. More worrying still has been the insistence by many Trump supporters that his behaviour was normal. So too his threat, issued in the second presidential debate, to have Hillary Clinton thrown into jail if he wins. In a more fragile democracy that sort of talk would foreshadow post-election violence. Mercifully, America is not about to riot on November 9th. But the reasons have less to do with the state’s power to enforce the letter of the law than with the unwritten rules that American democracy thrives on. It is these that Mr Trump is trampling over—and which Americans need to defend.
Jamelle Bouie/Slate:
The 18 Craziest Days in Modern Presidential Politics
How a close race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump turned into a national referendum on misogyny and sexual assault.
Earlier in the year, New York magazine writer Rebecca Traister captured the essential—and ironic—dimension of this election. “There is an Indiana Jones–style, ‘It had to be snakes’ inevitability about the fact that Donald Trump is Clinton’s Republican rival,” wrote Traister. “Of course a woman who wants to land in the Oval Office is going to have to get past an aggressive reality-TV star who has literally talked about his penis in a debate.”
That is the truth. The Clinton/Trump contest will not wrap up with a discussion of policy or scrutiny of “gaffes.” Instead, we are going to fight over the misogyny and toxic masculinity represented by Donald Trump. We are going to confront the fact that Trump is not the only powerful man to escape sanction, much less punishment, for unwanted touching and assault against women. And Hillary Clinton will stand at the center of it all, as a woman running for president—the first woman to make it this far—as an individual whose husband is implicated in this larger conversation and as someone whose life is inextricably tied up in our national conversations (and arguments) over gender.
It’s more than fitting that the 2016 presidential election will end this way. It’s on the nose.