Here we are with less than five weeks to go until election day, 2016. Even though the Republican Party never had a chance of winning the presidency no matter who their candidate turned out to be, we’ve been forced to endure many months of the corporate-owned “news” sources trying to tell us that it is a close race.
Even today, alongside stories that Donald Trump may have had the worst week of any presidential candidate ever, there were still stories claiming that this next week is Trump’s last chance to turn his behavior around in order to win the election. How many ‘last chances’ does this guy get to have? It seems his long slew of last chances began almost a year ago. Has he turned his behavior around for more than a day at a time since he began his campaign? How dumb do they think we are?
It was plain to see during the first presidential debate last Monday (September 26, 2016) that Trump’s disdain for Hillary Clinton had intensified to the point that he could barely stand to be in the room with her. He’s spent so much time and energy trying to vilify her to his angry followers during his small stadium tour that he calls his presidential campaign, that he now has so much hate for her himself he can’t contain it when she’s around. He could not stop himself from constantly interrupting her and basically acting like a child. It was embarrassing to watch. The only deficit in Alec Baldwin’s SNL Trump debate impersonation was that it was too accurate. It was hilarious, but it wasn’t very exaggerated from Trump’s actual performance.
Still the pundits are saying that Trump has a chance. Can his campaign team tame him before the next debate less than a week away? Will he stay on message and not go off into another twitter rage? Tune in next week!
Do they really think a seventy year old man who’s been acting like a spoiled child his whole life is going to suddenly become presidential this week? They’ve made the same prediction every week for the last year and it hasn’t happened.
The real story is that electoral math has made it impossible for the Republicans to win the white house because demographics have and will continue to change. The Republican party tried for their last time to be inclusive under Bush, but the Republican base would not accept his and Rove’s attempts to do so. Instead, they hardened their positions against immigration, LGBT issues, and women’s rights.
They’ve won the popular vote in only one of the last six presidential elections, and in previous elections they’ve gone so far as to commit treason in order to insure their victory. And their disdain for the first black American president has forced them to retaliate in a way that has attracted the deepest, darkest white supremacists in a way that may not be able to be turned back. By doubling down on maintaining that base support, they’ve ostracized 62 to 70% of Americans.
They would need to win back A LOT of these 62 to 70% in order to win. But their presidential candidate has no campaign, no ground game, no get-out-the-vote strategy, no nuts and bolts way of winning. The Clinton campaign has hundreds of campaign offices, thousands of campaign workers and volunteers, President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Biden, as well as Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren traveling all around the country throwing rallies and get-out-the-vote efforts. Trump has no Republican elected officials as surrogates except for his VP running mate. Clinton has also raised many times more money than Trump, and the Democratic Party has raised much more than the Republican Party.
Libertarian party nominee Gary Johnson’s 9% support will dwindle when people actually go to the polls in swing states, and the support he will maintain will mostly take more away from Trump. Trump’s erratic behavior will certainly not improve as he faces the inevitable reality of losing, his most hated thing. How do bratty children act when they don’t get what they want?
This will not be a close election. It was never going to be close. And the better the voter turnout, the less close it will be. Some are predicting record voter turnout this year, and I hope those predictions come true. It will show more of what we know is the true America and not the made-for-TV version, and the rest of the world can breath easy when we prove that this whole Trump thing was all just a really unfunny joke.
