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I don't have any profound thoughts to share today, I should admit right up front. With one week to go before the election, I'm going to take the low road instead.
The 2016 presidential election has been the wildest rollercoaster ride I can remember, and it looks like the final week will be even wilder than anyone imagined. So welcome back to Electoral Math, where we try to make some sort of sense of the state-level polling, measured over time.
While it isn't exactly certain yet that Hillary Clinton will be our next president, at this point it is worth contemplating what will happen after the election if she does win. I did so yesterday on the subject of Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination, but today the news centers on how a Republican House would react to a Clinton presidency. In a word: petulantly. They are now promising endless investigations of Hillary Clinton, as far as the eye can see.
Assuming the polls are not "rigged," and barring any last-minute revelations in the campaign season, Hillary Clinton is going to be our next president. The chances of this becoming true have been increasing ever since the first general election debate, and they now seem to have crossed the borderline into near-certainty. If Democrats also pick up at least four Senate seats as well, we should all be prepared for a steaming pile of hypocrisy from Republican senators immediately thereafter, as they fall all over themselves in a rush to confirm Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court before Barack Obama leaves office.
Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had a mixed week in the polls. Some states strengthened for both candidates, and some states weakened. For the most part, though, the race remained essentially unchanged.
So we had the final presidential debate this week, and Donald Trump went right on being Donald Trump, which should have surprised precisely no one by now. Our subtitle today, of course, refers to the two most amusing (or horrifying, take your pick...) things Trump said during the debate. Since then, both "bad hombres" and "nasty women" are trending online. Hey, when bad hombres and nasty women unite, anything could happen, right?
OK, I fully admit that headline is nothing more than a bad pun. Will Donald Trump lose the election? At this point, the answer to that is "probably." But when he does lose the election, will Donald Trump completely lose it? That is the more pertinent question being asked now, as he's already signaling that he's not exactly going to take the loss graciously (as all losing candidates are indeed expected to do).
Tonight was (finally!) the last presidential debate of the 2016 election season. I thought it was a better debate (if less entertaining) than the first two, personally. A lot of actual policy positions were discussed, the candidates interacted with each other without so much of the "everyone's screaming at once" interludes, and the moderator kept the subjects moving along at a good clip. So my overall impression of the final debate was that it was a lot more like a normal presidential debate than the previous two.
Senator John McCain just got caught in a "Kinsley gaffe," which is defined as: "a Washington politician accidentally admitting an obvious truth." For which I'd like to thank McCain, because it could actually pave the way for Senate Democrats to combat Republican obstructionism in a very effective manner. McCain's gaffe was on the subject of the Senate's confirmation process for Supreme Court justices. He confirmed what some had already been suspecting -- if Hillary Clinton becomes president, the Senate Republicans might just band together to refuse to confirm anyone she names to the high court. Period.
There is an excellent chance that when Republicans look back at the 2016 presidential election, this will be the week they'll point to when Donald Trump completely collapsed. This collapse may not be over yet, but it surely began in the wake of not only the disastrous Billy Bush tape but also the continuing stream of women publicly accusing a major party's presidential candidate of sexual harassment or sexual assault.