Program Note: Today and tomorrow, I am turning my column space over to a regular commenter at my website (ChrisWeigant.com), who wishes only to be identified by her login name "Paula."

Paula took it upon herself -- unasked, entirely on her own initiative -- to begin conducting "man/woman on the street" interviews with strangers she interacted with in her daily life (she lives in Akron, in the bellwether state of Ohio), to see what they thought about the election season. Such interviews are, of course, anecdotal -- they are in no way a scientific survey of public opinion writ large. But in a lot of ways, they are much more representative than most of what you hear in the media about how real people are actually reacting to the election process. The responses are a lot more authentic and genuine than anything you'll hear from inside the Beltway, in other words.

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We're really in the home stretch of the Democratic primaries now, as the last few territories and the last eight states will all be voting in the upcoming weeks. Tomorrow night, Oregon and Kentucky will weigh in, and then the last six states (who, for some unfathomable reason, all decided to go last this year) will finally get a chance to vote on the seventh of June: California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

Before I get to predicting tomorrow night's races, as usual I have to take a moment to update the stats. Last Tuesday, I called West Virginia for Bernie Sanders, predicting he'd win by double digits. This turned out to be true, which gives me one more in the "win" column for Democrats. As I mentioned last week, since Donald Trump is the only candidate left on the Republican side, I won't be calling any more of their races (Republicans in Oregon vote tomorrow, too), and my Republican record for the year can now be considered final.

Total correct 2016 Democratic picks: 34 for 44 -- 77%
Total correct 2016 Republican picks: 37 for 47 -- 79%
Total overall correct picks: 71 for 91 -- 78%.

Those numbers may look pretty good, but I have to say I was chagrined to learn that there is a spoof pundit out there (Carl "The Dig" Diggler) who has also been playing this game, which was intended by the people behind the prank as satire of the horserace-obsessed political press. They intentionally ignored the polls and went with gut feelings designed to poke fun at how some pundits operate. This led them to write such lines as: "Wisconsinites are mostly a simple people. They eat their three lunches, kiss their often enormous children on their often featureless faces, and go to church so they can pray for the 2 Broke Girls." Pretty funny, I have to admit, but the sobering part is that their record of predictions is astoundingly good -- a fact which shocked even the people behind the spoof. Carl "The Dig" Diggler called 87 primary races so far. He got 77 of them right, for a very impressive 89 percent correct. My own record doesn't look so good, stacked up against what was intended to be a prank. It's stories like this which keep you humble about the whole business of political prognostication.

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Today, let's just start with some silliness. It just seems appropriate, somehow. Maybe because it's Friday the 13th? For whatever reason, silliness seems like the place to begin (and end) this week. Because, after this silly start, we're going to end this column with a contest to come up with the best playground taunt to call Donald Trump -- and you can't get much sillier than that!

There was both some sad news and some amusing news from the internet recently, so let's get the sad news out of the way first. There will be no "RSS Boaty McBoatface." The British government announced that after it had held an online contest to name its new polar research vessel, the will of the online voters would be ignored. "Boaty McBoatface" won in a landslide, but the vessel will not be christened the RSS Boaty after all. Instead, in a massively disappointing downgrade, one of the robot probe ships on board the research vessel will get the name instead. Our favorite tidbit from this story: one of the other rejected names was: "RSS It's Bloody Cold Here," which we feel would also have been a great name for a polar research vessel.

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Bernie Sanders, once again, is enjoying a resurgence of attention, after handily winning West Virginia's primary earlier this week. He'll likely pick up Oregon next week, and even has a good shot at Kentucky as well. If he hasn't dropped out by then, he's even got a decent chance to upset Hillary Clinton in the biggest blue state of all, California.

But in the midst of all this optimism for Bernie, the fact remains that he's still very likely to lose the race for the nomination. At the moment, Sanders has won 19 state primary contests, while Clinton has won 23. He'll win more delegates than any populist challenger in the Democratic Party since Teddy Kennedy (if you consider Teddy a populist, that is -- some do, some don't). He'll likely win three times as many delegates as Howard Dean, John Edwards, or Jesse Jackson ever managed -- Sanders already has more delegates than all three of these candidacies combined, in fact. That's impressive, and he'll only build on this total the longer he stays in the race.

But I can't help but keep wondering if things might have been different for Bernie if he had flipped the one state that Republicans always obsess over. If Bernie had won Ohio, could the ultimate outcome have been different?

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Tomorrow, all eyes in Washington will be on the meeting between Donald Trump and Paul Ryan. Some Republicans hope this "summit" between two of the leaders of the Republican Party will signify how the party as a whole will move forward with Trump as the presidential nominee. Ryan surprised some last week by his refusal to endorse Trump -- yet. The big question is whether the two will exit the meeting with their arms around each other (figuratively if not literally), step to the microphones and announce that Trump will support Ryan's congressional agenda while Ryan will support Trump's candidacy. Anything short of full-throated enthusiasm for each other will be big news, to put this slightly differently.

Putting aside the question of what they'll do for the cameras after the big meeting, it's pretty easy to see what each of them wants from the other. Neither would fully admit to these positions in public, of course, but anyone who has watched the two men's political careers for the past year can tell what they're both hoping for.

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As we await the primary results from West Virginia, we have to note we've reached a milestone in the "predict the primaries" contest. With the exit of Ted Cruz and John Kasich from the Republican race, Donald Trump now stands alone, as he's the last Republican still in the race. Since he is now the presumptive nominee, we will not be calling any future Republican primaries (starting tonight, by ignoring the West Virginia and Nebraska GOP results). This is because calling a race with only one candidate is so easy it counts (in our rules, at least) as cheating -- pumping the score up by calling contests that are foregone conclusions. So what this all means is that I've now got a final score for my 2016 Republican primary picks.

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Last week, the Washington Post ran an article titled "Five Not-Totally-Crazy Electoral Maps That Show Donald Trump Winning." The article was a cautionary note to Democrats who are blithely assuming Hillary Clinton will easily beat Donald Trump this November. In it, the authors provide five maps that show Trump beating Clinton, by winning anywhere from 270 Electoral College votes (the minimum necessary to win) up to 283 Electoral College votes. I'd like to answer them back with five maps of my own, which show scenarios that are a lot more likely to become reality. I do understand why the Post authors wrote their article -- Democrats getting complacent about their chances of victory is indeed a danger this election cycle, and who knows how many crossover votes are going to happen (in either direction)? But at the same time, it is easy to see the monstrous advantage any Democratic candidate for president now enjoys, and it's a lot easier to see a very wide and gentle path to victory for Hillary Clinton.

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It's been a pretty momentous week in the history of American politics, folks. The Republican Party is going to nominate Donald Trump to run for the highest office in the land. Politics and entertainment are now one. The trend that Ronald Reagan began -- furthered in no small part by Sarah Palin -- is now complete. In other words: welcome to the next episode of Who Wants To Be President?

Of course, this news was such a bombshell that many stunned politicians have no idea how to react. Many Republicans are indeed singing the refrain: "It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to..." as they contemplate the chances of success they're faced with in November. Decisions must be made. Follow Trump, distance yourself from Trump, or fully denounce Trump and all he stands for? When else in living memory has a major political party faced such a stark division -- at the precise moment the general election presidential campaign begins? The word "stunning" doesn't even begin to cover the magnitude of the Trump political earthquake.

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Obama Consolidates His Gains

As I predicted last month, President Barack Obama consolidated his recent gains in public opinion polling in April, and only showed very slight improvement in his job approval and job disapproval numbers. While this doesn't sound very exciting, it does show that Obama's recent gains were not temporary, but instead show some real staying power. Let's take a look at the new chart.

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

April, 2016

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It is now official. Seventeen candidates ran for the Republican presidential nomination, and the sixteenth of these just suspended his campaign. This leaves Donald Trump as the last man standing. A whole lot of people who never thought we'd arrive at this point are now going to have to get used to the phrase: "Donald Trump, Republican nominee."

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