Welcome back to Friday Talking Points. We went on our annual hiatus last Friday, to bring everyone two chilling Hallowe'en nightmares, but we found that it was actually quite hard this year to come up with anything more terrifying than "the other candidate wins" -- for either side of the aisle. Such has been the 2016 election season.

However, regular readers of this column are going to have to wait yet another week for a standard Friday Talking Points offering. This week we are throwing out our format entirely, and instead providing an explanation of who we're voting for, followed by a call for reform in an effort to inject a possible silver lining to what promises to be a very contentious Election Day (no matter who wins). Yes, there will be optimism at the end of this column, specifically provided for people who are tired of the apocalyptic tone of the final pre-election week. So there's that to look forward to.

As we sat down today to write our usual talking points, we realized that it would be an almost pointless exercise. By this point, Democrats already know what to say about Donald Trump -- and they've been loudly saying so to anyone who will listen. Our attempts to add to this cacophony would be virtually meaningless now. So too would rehashing the past two weeks, since America has been breathlessly following this storyline on an almost hourly basis.

Instead, we're going to first explain who we're personally voting for, and then we're going to attempt to interject a little optimism for the near future at the end. We promise that next week we'll return to our usual format (either in triumph or in sorrow), after the election is over. And we didn't want to disappoint regular readers, so we have managed to fill roughly the same amount of pages as we normally do on Fridays (translation: get ready for an insanely long column, as always).

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A Second-Term High

President Obama is having the best year of his entire presidency, in terms of job approval improvement. In the ten months of 2016 so far, Obama's monthly job approval average has risen eight times, and only decreased twice. His job approval number has improved so much that he's now at the second-highest point of his entire second term. The only month he was at a better point was January of 2013, when he was sworn in a second time. On top of this, his daily job approval average hit the highest point of his entire second term last month. All in all, it's looking like Obama will finish his time in office in a pretty comfortable place. After falling back a bit in September, Obama roared back in October. Let's take a look at his new chart for this month.

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

October, 2016

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America is in the midst of a dramatic shift in public opinion, one which began at least a decade ago and shows no signs of reversing any time soon. The concept of fully legalizing marijuana for adult recreational use must now actually be considered the mainstream opinion in America. The latest nationwide poll (that I have seen) put national support for legalization at a whopping 60 percent -- higher than it has ever previously been. Next Tuesday, five more states will vote on the issue on their ballots. Two of those states are on the East Coast. One of the five is the most populous state in the country, with over 39 million people living in it -- fully one-eighth of the total US population. Polling is sketchy on the issue (it always is), but it certainly looks possible that recreational marijuana legalization has a good shot of winning, in all five states.

The concept of legalization has now been fully normalized. What I mean by that is that it is no longer considered some laughable proposition that deserves nothing more than ridicule and stoner jokes from the media. You don't hear a lot of Cheech and Chong jokes being made this election cycle, to put it another way (or Harold and Kumar jokes, for a younger generation). In fact, the media stories now mainly focus on the vast amounts of money to be made by legalization -- and not just for the people involved in the trade. Millions and millions of tax dollars are also at stake, which is something national journalists seem to take a lot more seriously.

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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.

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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.

I have to begin with a rather large caveat -- virtually none of the polling data below reflects what happened last Friday. In most states, no polls have happened since then, and even in the ones where it has, the story of the F.B.I. letter to Congress on the emails on Anthony Weiner's computer is still sinking into the public consciousness. So anything could happen in the polling in the next week, and in many states there won't even be any fresh polling to measure any public opinion shift. A wild ride indeed, as we head into the homestretch of the 2016 election.

Even before James Comey's bombshell letter, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump saw some strengthening at the state level, but also a significant amount of weakening. Overall, this news was worse for Trump than for Clinton. Trump lost three states from his column last week, two to being perfectly tied, and one all the way over to Clinton's column. Clinton saw some weakening in her states, and also saw a state flip to Trump.

Let's start by taking a look at the overall total in Electoral Votes (EV). As always, this is how the Electoral College would vote, if the election were held today and if all the polling is correct. Hillary starts from the bottom, in blue; Trump starts from the top, in red. Whichever color crosses the 50 percent midpoint will win.

[Click on any of theses images to see larger-scale versions.]

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Boo!

Yes, it's time once again for our yearly frightfest, where we toss out a spine-tingling nightmare for folks on both sides of the political chasm. Right and left will be quaking in their boots after contemplating the following twisted tales! [Cue: shrieking and chains clanking]

Because we've already traveled this road once (last year's frightful horror stories already involved none other than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton), we decided to make it hard on ourselves today. This is because the horrorshow on both right and left is so easy to imagine for everyone, at this point, that they could fit on a couple of tweets: "For GOP -- President Hillary Rodham Clinton!" and "For Dems -- email scandal throws election to Trump!" So instead of taking things easy, we've instead decided that the Republican nightmare will begin with Trump winning and the Democratic nightmare will start with Clinton winning the election. This made coming up with these fearsome tales more challenging, we felt.

One apologetic note, before we begin. Each year, we take the time to carve pumpkins into Jack-o-lanterns, to accompany our nightmares. Sometimes they come out looking like what they're supposed to, sometimes not so much. So, just in case anyone can't interpret the first of these, that's supposed to be the White House with a giant "TRUMP" sign on the top of it. As we discovered, the White House is a lot harder to carve onto a pumpkin than we had initially thought. Just wanted to avoid confusion for everyone.

OK, enough apologizing for poor pumpkin art (Trumpkin art?), lets get right to our haunting tales of dread and woe for Republicans and Democrats alike. We tossed a coin, and it determined that the GOP frightful fable would be first. So buckle your seatbelts, here we go....

Republican Nightmare -- Jobs for all!

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No column today, sorry. Busy carving pumpkins for tomorrow's (rather early) Hallowe'en column.

But I would advise everyone to reload this page in their browser, otherwise you might not see our holiday header, above. Boo!

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

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.

This shouldn't be all that unfamiliar territory, for anyone who was politically aware during the 1990s, since endless investigations of Bill Clinton were pretty much par for the course while he was president. Whole right-wing industries were built on the foundation of attacking the Clintons, in fact. Some of them are still around today, and are still just as eager to begin attacking Bill's wife, pretty much from the first minute after she's sworn into office.

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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.

Right after Antonin Scalia died (indeed, literally before his body was even cold), Republicans swore they were going to completely ignore their constitutional duty altogether. They cited precedents and traditions (which did not actually exist), in the hopes of running out the clock until they could wrest the White House away from Democrats. But if Hillary Clinton is going to be in the Oval Office for the next four years, Republicans are almost certainly going to do such a dramatic Immelmann turn on the issue that the entire country risks getting caught in the whiplash.

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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.

I should point out that most of the polling has not yet reflected any shifts in public opinion from the final debate. It takes time for such shifts to show up, so by next week any such change should be a lot more apparent.

As both Clinton and Trump look to shore up their support in the states they think they have a chance in, one thing is becoming clear: Hillary Clinton is free to make a play for states previously in the Republican column, while Donald Trump has almost completely failed in his effort to flip previously-Democratic states. Trump looks like he'll pick up Iowa this time around, and possibly Ohio -- but both of these states have traditionally been swing states, not Democratic locks. Clinton, on the other hand, has locked up Virginia, and is leading in Florida, North Carolina, and Nevada (all previous swing states). But now she's also investing campaign resources in places like Arizona, Utah, Georgia, and even Texas. None of those four have been considered anything but solid Republican in a long time. Clinton looks like she'll have her best shot at Arizona, and possibly Georgia.

The fact she has been able to redraw the map while Trump has only picked up Iowa shows that the basics of the race haven't changed this particular week: Clinton is still the odds-on favorite to win. Let's take a look at the overall totals, which is how the Electoral College would vote if all the polls were correct and the election were held today. The graph measures Electoral Votes (EV), with Clinton's blue starting at the bottom and Trump's red starting from the top. Whichever line crosses the midpoint line will win.

[Click on any of theses images to see larger-scale versions.]

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