Program Note: What follows is a repeat column from eight years ago, and the only time I've ever sat down and typed out a transcript because I was shocked that it didn't already exist on the web somewhere. This was the first time I ever laid eyes on Craig Ferguson's late-night comedy talk show, and I have to admit I was hooked from this point on. Oddly, he almost never mentioned politics again (except for the occasional sex scandal jokes) -- this was a completely out-of-character rant for him.

One technical note, I have removed the link to the video, because the guy's blog doesn't exist anymore. So if you want to see it you'll have to look it up on "the Googley web" yourself.

I'm running this repeat column today because there just isn't anything left to say about this election. We can all join in the comments as the results roll in tonight, but I just don't have anything to add today, other than "Go vote!" I mean, I could have ginned up a column on being annoyed at some political pundits (who really should know better) who have recently started misusing the political term "The Big Blue Wall," by somehow changing the accepted definition to only mean Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania -- something that's been annoying me for a few days. But it just isn't worth it, and my guess is that after the dust settles the term will revert back to its actual meaning (the 242 Electoral College votes that Democrats begin the race with in their pocket). In fact, sooner or later that Big Blue Wall is likely going to be expanded (I wrote about this earlier this year, with my guess being that Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia will soon join the crowd). But until that point, it has a very specific meaning, at least to the wonky pedants such as yours truly.

But it just wasn't enough for a full column -- it barely even made a decent paragraph, there. So instead, I decided to just post Craig's excellent "Go vote!" rant, and then head on down to the polling place myself. Until the polls close, here's a nostalgic look back at the halcyon days of the 2008 race. Craig even gets almost prophetic when he warns about complaining: "when we wind up with President Sanjaya!" That's not all that far off the mark from President Trump, now is it?

[Originally published September 11, 2008]

As a public service, today I am running a full transcript of Craig Ferguson's monologue (from The Late Late Show on CBS) from last night, 8/10/08.

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Welcome to the final Electoral Math column of the 2016 election season. After a very quick rundown of the past week's polling activity, I'm going to dispense with my usual hedging and just go ahead and call every state for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

As with all my political prognostication columns, I always admit my own record up front, so you can see my past performance. While my record for picking primary winners is only fair-to-middling, my record at picking states in presidential elections is a lot better. In 2008, I only called two states wrong, as I was so overly optimistic that Barack Obama was heading for a historic landslide that I rashly predicted he'd win Georgia and Missouri. Missouri did wind up being incredibly close, but John McCain won Georgia by a full five points. I also failed to predict that Nebraska would split its Electoral College vote, with one out of their five votes going to Obama. Counting Washington D.C. as a state, my 2008 record was 48.8 for 51 contests. In 2012, however, I correctly predicted every state, for a perfect score of 51 for 51. Now, I seriously doubt I'm going to do that well this year, because it's been such a wild and wacky race all around. Meaning there are sure to be surprises at the very end, as well.

But we'll get to all of that in a minute. First, let's take a final look at the graphs where we've been charting both candidates' performance over time. I'm going to keep the commentary on the graphs to a minimum for this final column, as I'm really just providing them for completeness' sake. After a quick run-through of the final charts, I'll get to naming my picks for each candidate and my final map of the 2016 election.

Here is the overall total count of Electoral Votes (EV) for both candidates.

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

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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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