The Next Terrifying Crisis That No One's Talking About

Earlier today I was idly turning over the shards of all this fractured lunacy and I came to a terrifying hypothesis. The antecedents take a few lines each but I hope not to waste too much of anyone's time with this. I didn't revise for language, so I hope you'll forgive the noticeably folksier style for a start. But for better and for worse, here, first, are the building blocks that self-assembled for me over coffee this morning:

1. Hard-line Republicans aren't hypocritical and disingenuous by accident; they say the things they say because they've convinced themselves that the other side are *so* horrible and *so* worthy of hatred that any means can be justified as long as Democrats are kept from power. 

I had an extremely smart, extremely conservative student in Gainesville who in October 2004 said to me in total seriousness and good faith, "John Kerry's stated objective if he wins the election is nationalize all private-sector businesses." (Emphasis original.)

This was, I reiterate, an extremely smart and apparently critically inquisitive guy -- and by the way, not a kid either: I'd have put him in his early-to-mid-30s at the time. And there he was saying something so inherently ludicrous that in any other context he would have seen it as utter gibberish from six blocks away. 

A better thinker than I said the same thing recently, though I couldn't find the link just now. His version went like this: "I don't trust my used-car salesman, but if you told me he was cannibalizing dead children from a failed pedophile ring that he'd been running out the back room of a pizza parlor, I'd still have a pretty hard time taking you seriously." You can't just distrust someone to get to this kind of monstrous de-humanization of their point of view. You have to hate -- literally and viscerally -- before you can get to a place like that. Rationality has to be skewered to a corkboard in the next room.

2. For these people the Covid-19 epidemic has thus never, never, never actually been about whether or not it's real or a hoax.

From the very beginning, and like everything else, it's been about optics: If I say it's a hoax, it's not that I think it's a hoax; it's that I'm sowing a very particular and premeditated uncertainty that will undermine your otherwise inescapable conclusion -- that my one and only savior of the country messed this up.

If you hesitate to agree that this is how modern Republicans operate, you need only examine just how drastically and how abruptly the Republican foreign policy reversed direction when Trump came to power: Clearly those folks never actually cared any more than the rest of us did that Constantine Chernyenko was repressing Christianity in suburban Moscow. They wanted *YOU* to care more than the rest of us, so that you'd vote for the guy who wasn't a Democrat. Because that, that was what had mattered all along.

3. When reality comes into unusually sharp collision with this kind of faithlessness in an ideology, people never, ever, ever respond by coming out with their hands up about it.

The simple explanation is that they've already pushed too many of their chips on the "no it's not" square, to retreat with anything like graciousness and preserved credibility. This is why sixteenth-century philosophers get jailed for looking through telescopes: The aggrieved cohort have all already said that the earth is the center of the universe, and they know better than the rest of us that they've said it in an absence of good faith -- and with the ugly ulterior motive of using it to control the social discourse and economic- and political mobility. If they say, now, "Okay, maybe the earth isn't the center of the universe after all," they haven't lost the point; they've lost the game. And they know it.

4. These factors taken together would make the present crisis with the President's health artificially unnerving at *any* time. 

Even before I was able to assemble the pieces, the thought of just how gleefully un-grounded the narratives will have to get from here, was enough to just about stop the heart. But here's the thing about that:

5. A cornered faithless ideologue isn't his usual run-of-the-mill dangerous when we're only a month away from his preferred guy's appointment with electoral defeat. 

Okay, roll-play time: Imagine that your life was defined by the thought that Joe Biden was a puppet of forces bent on harming everything you value and rely upon, from your job to your dominion over how you raise your children. Now imagine that something happened to make it extremely unlikely -- even in your own mind -- that Joe Biden would emerge from the crisis in a much stronger political position than the persons you support. Imagine that this thing, whatever it was, happened thirty days before the election, and with no apparent timetable for its remedy or even enough time for an attrition-based change-of-subject. Imagine that your only sources of information are unhinged, screaming vitriol, and that every time you try to inform yourself, the purveyors of that vitriol only agitate you even more than you were before you checked the news.

Now imagine one more thing. Imagine that, in anticipation of whatever awful terror might befall you at any liberal whim or any post-election moment, you have been proudly and overtly arming yourself for years. 

You see where I'm going with this?

A few days ago I posted on Facebook that Donald Trump was only going to be more dangerous now that he was cornered, but I'm afraid that post managed to quite spectacularly miss a terrifying point: It's not that Donald Trump is going to be more dangerous because he's cornered; it's that his followers are. 

Not to put too fine a point on it, the conclusion to which I came this morning when this realization finally presented itself, is that someone will very shortly now be making a credible attempt on Joe Biden's life. Someone's going to try to shoot him. 

Will there be mass casualties? Maybe. An incident at a rally would certainly check all the familiar boxes. But to dismiss the idea that someone will probably now at least try for the candidate himself, is to discount the principle that Mr Trump's base can and often does choose self-defeating violence over admitting that it was wrong. And anyone who would dismiss *that* idea, has been watching a very different electorate than I have for the past four years. 

David O'Gorman 

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

4 October, 2020

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Things to Watch For (and Not to)!

***Just a quick reminder: I will once again be live-blogging the election returns this evening, but this time around I won't be able to start until roughly 9:00pm because of a teaching commitment.***

 Well, it's official. No, not that. Rather, I've officially given up trying to think about anything else today, regardless of relative personal importance. It's true what the pros say about election day: There isn't really all that much to do except sit around, gossip, fret, and wait. Mercifully that wait is once again almost over. In the meantime, thanks to all who've gotten back on the Cinema Democratica bandwagon: yesterday was our biggest single page-view day, ever -- surpassing even the 2008 live blog -- and I doubt any of this would be nearly as much fun without you all. And none of us, apparently, can stand the suspense.

And so as we all await the results of this at-once-wacky-and-yet-maddeningly-stable election, I thought I would take a few moments of excess nervous energy to share some thoughts about what sorts of tea leaves might make the best reading material before the final calls are in. To my thinking, the "pre-available information," if you will, falls into four categories: red herrings, stubborn and quick-to-fall states, partial precinct data, and demographics. Let's have a quick look at all four, with a word or two about how seriously to take each one. 

Red Herrings
Every election cycle the major polling firms all conduct exit polls, and every year the exit polls turn out to be completely useless. There's a simple reason for this, which is that there's no way to adjust exit polling data to reflect the larger voting cohort: Whomever happens to be emerging from the polling place at a given time, and is willing to be interviewed about it, finds his or her way into the data, regardless of whether he or she proportionally reflects the true mood of the state in question. This is called self-selection bias, and it's an instant deal-breaker as to the reliability of the data in question.

Suppose for example that a college -- even one which shall remain nameless -- decides to abandon the time-perfected practice of conducting student opinion surveys in class, on paper, preferring instead to allow students to elect to participate in the opinion-survey practice entirely on their own. Two things will naturally follow: First, those students who have the strongest opinions about the professor or the class will of course be unscientifically over-represented in the results. Second, since the poll itself is anonymous, there will be no way to weight the results in such a way as to better reflect the opinion of those students' non-responding counterparts.

The most famous example of this problem in electoral politics was election day of 2004, in the afternoon of which staffers for John Kerry confidently predicted that he would win -- basing their confidence entirely on the results of exit polling. More generally the problem seems to be (in part) that patterns of voter turnout over the course of the day are non-randomly distributed across party affiliations, and there just isn't time for the polling firms in question to carry out the sorts of labor-intensive adjustments necessary to correct for this phenomenon before getting scooped. Point being, readers would be well advised to take any news about exit polling with about a 250-pound block of salt.

This year a new source of potential information mischief has waded into the murk, in the form of a series of geek-based efforts to pre-project the outcomes of entire states in full view of the public. Cooler heads will refrain from even clicking through, but it's an open question whether the political commentariat can resist the temptation to meta-cover these scientifically dubious efforts, and the fear on the part of many is that any crack in the mainstream media's traditional embargo on this sort of thing could tip the result somewhere. It would be a fool's errand to ask readers not to patronize the geek-off, but don't let the media stories about it (if any) concern you too much either way, because the reporters in question won't know that they're talking about people who don't know what they're talking about.

Stubborn / Quick-Call States
It's utterly shameless self-promotion to say this, but I consider it no small feather in my cap to have correctly anticipated that Indiana's stubborn refusal to be called in 2008 would set the tone for that historic night for Barack Obama and the Democrats. (And entirely by the way, is it just me or does that moment seem like it happened a hell of a lot less than eight years ago?)

This year the two states to watch are New Hampshire and South Carolina. Both of them close relatively early -- South Carolina at 7:00pm and New Hampshire finishes its staggered closing times at 8:00 --  and any combination other than an immediate call for S.C. and a stubborn lack of resolution to New Hampshire is almost certainly the end of the road for The Orange One. I predict exactly the opposite: that, despite the two weeks' worth of solid media narrative about how tight New Hampshire has become, Secretary Clinton will be called the winner at the first possible second, while South Carolina will be this year's Indiana, just hanging there, and hanging there, and hanging there.

Barack Obama eventually won Indiana in 2008, but it was far from necessary and almost certainly won't happen again. The real point is that an surprise un-called state alters the media coverage disproportionately -- precisely because it's such a surprise. I'm sticking my neck out on this one more than usual, but I honestly think that the combination of a sneaky-high percentage of Hispanics in the Palmetto State, together with Mr. Trump's less than flattering words for George W. Bush, will bring the matter at least to within the margin of error, and set much of the tone of the night for the major anchors.

Partial Precincts
I am not popular company with my closest friends when questions of expertise are at issue: it's a blind spot of mine, owing its origins to a childhood in which no one could correctly pronounce my (very, very easy to pronounce) last name, and which was solidified when I chose economics as my field -- an area of human intellect in which every single drunk asshole at the bar has a self-awarded honorary Ph.D. Point being, I don't do well when I know something, and it's right, and other people won't just take my word for it. The most successful people in the world have all sorts of coping mechanisms for this, and I am forty-seven years old and not about to learn any of them.

How this is relevant in the present context, is that every four years I find myself saying the same thing about the partial-precinct reports that scroll across the bottom of the news channels: as an overall barometer of how the two campaigns are doing statewide, they are utterly, sumptuously, radiantly useless. Yes, precinct reports come in at random, in terms of their distribution across a given state, but that's just the thing: The voters themselves are *not* evenly distributed across that same state. The most notorious case of this leading to some distortions in the public's perception of how things are going was in 2000, when the last precincts to report in Florida were (as they always are) from the deep-blue enclaves of Palm Beach, Broward and Dade Counties. And if you've seen Fahrenheit 9/11, then you don't need me to tell you how this fact was manipulated by Karl Rove to create the appearance that Mr. Bush had won the state before he had.

This being said, partial precincts can shed useful light on the state of a state -- provided that they are viewed against the voter splits in previous elections. If, in Duvall County Florida, for example, Hillary Clinton is running well ahead of where Barack Obama ran in that same part of the state in 2008 or 2012, then -- then -- we know something. Not based on the raw numbers from there, which will almost certainly show Trump with a lead.

Demographics
We're already seeing big indications that the Hispanic portion of this year's vote was badly under-anticipated in the demographic modeling of the major polling firms. Hispanics (and by the way, women too), are turning out in larger numbers than anyone expected, and if this trend continues it will spell a very bad night for the GOP. So as you follow the news -- including here -- pay special attention to any apparent surprises vis-a-vis the makeup of the electorate (if the non-affiliated electorate in Florida continue to include an outsized proportion of Hispanic voters, for example).    

Well, that's it. At this point, all of us have done what we could, and all that's left is to wait, and enjoy the live-blog. Thanks again for following these pages, and if you haven't done so already -- for God's sake, *VOTE*!

Dave O'Gorman
Associate Professor of Economics
Santa Fe College
Gainesville, Florida


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The States to Watch are Not the Ones You Might Think

First, a bit of light housekeeping: As in 2008 and 2012, I will once again be live-blogging the election returns as they come in tomorrow evening -- with a big caveat: I have a teaching obligation that doesn't permit me to begin until roughly nine o'clock on the east coast. But I promise to be here as soon as possible, and to get caught up as quickly as I can.

Second, with all the kerfuffle about whether the race is tightening, or stabilizing, or tightening only in the battlegrounds, or not, I thought it might be an idea to point out that little has changed about the structural underpinnings of this election: Donald Trump didn't really have a plausible path to 270 electoral votes in late September, and he doesn't really have a plausible path to 270 electoral votes, now.

To emphasize this point, I want to take a moment to imagine a scenario in which, late tomorrow night, we all find ourselves unable to call any of Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, *or* New Hampshire. (These are the states that have consistently been listed as the most likely tipping points for the 2016 contest, in some combination.) I know this scenario would require an odd set of circumstances, but just play along while I spring the punch-line on you:

As long as Secretary Clinton holds Michigan and Pennsylvania, and consolidates her leads in Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada, nothing else actually matters.

...And nothing else actually does.

As far as I can tell, Clinton stands on 274 absolutely solid electoral votes. That is, before any of the supposedly decisive states are even factored into the equation.

Nevada, as it happens, and the positively gob-smacking performance of the Harry Reid machine in securing such a prohibitive early-voting lead for Team Blue, will be the story of things tomorrow night. If it even gets that far, which it may well not, since I think Clinton is going to win in Florida before the polls in Nevada have even closed.

I'm a homer, so I also think Clinton's vaunted ground game is going to make the difference in Ohio (late indications are that her position is improving there), as well as in North Carolina (where the GOTV effort is only being helped by the presence of a polarizing race for US Senate *and* the Governor's Mansion. I also think she'll hold in New Hampshire, as her non-response bias problem with recent polls there fades into the dusty archives of history alongside Director Comey's Fifteen Minutes of Fame. As other commentators have noted elsewhere, a quick blue call for New Hampshire after polls close there will spell a seriously long night in a certain gilded Manhattan penthouse. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, will hang on in two out of Iowa, Arizona, and Georgia, but not the third one -- though at this hour I'll admit that I have no idea which.

Your final map, early Wednesday morning, would thus look (something) like this:

Whether I've got the exact states right is (semi-obviously) beside the point of this column, and also of this election: Barring something genuinely unforeseen in any of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado, or Michigan -- and assuming Jon Ralston isn't wrong about Nevada in a way he's never been wrong before about anything in his life -- we will all wake up two mornings from now to the first female President-elect in our nation's history. Eventually to succeed the first black President in our nation's history, next January.

And in this white man's opinion, it will be about, freaking, time. 


Dave O'Gorman
Associate Professor of Economics
Santa Fe College
Gainesville, Florida
 
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Cinema Democratica Exclusive: Conversation With Ohio

With the early-voting data out of Florida and Nevada so encouraging for Team Blue, your faithful correspondent turned his sights to trying to get a better handle on what's happening in Ohio. As luck would have it, a seasoned political reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Andrew J Tobias, was gracious enough to take time from his impossibly hectic schedule to talk with CinemaDemocratica on the record about where things stand in the Buckeye state, and to bandy some possible theories as to why. Links for following Mr. Tobias on social media are provided at the conclusion of this column.

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Sorry, Donald (and Nate): Any Polling Error Will Favor Clinton

For much of this last Sunday before election day, I grappled with the challenge of how to write -- and then stagger -- two separate blog columns. (#whitepeopleproblems.) The first of these two hypothetical columns was supposed to be a summary of where things stand with respect to early voting; the second one was supposed to be a friend-of-the-court brief regarding the geek war between the editors of the Huffington Post, and Nate Silver. And it's no small testimony to the sloppy file structures inside my head that it took until late this afternoon for me to realize that these had actually been the same column, all along.

Unless you've been vacationing on Neptune, you probably know by now that most of the leading polling firms have shown a marked tightening of the electoral horse race between Trump and Clinton -- presumably in response to the October cudgel delivered to Trump campaign HQ on a silver platter by the Director of the FBI. Timed to inflict maximum political damage, Director Comey's letter to Congress about his re-opening of the Clinton/email investigation was released at the precise moment that early voting began in many of the most crucial battleground states.

The effect has been to dramatically alter both the complexion and the media narrative of the race: from one in which Clinton was as inevitable as any Presidential candidate since Nixon's reelection bid in '72, to one in which literally anything could happen and probably would. But a funny thing happened along the way to Comey's role in upending the fate of the world: In terms of the actual dynamics of the race, there seems to have been much less impact than the polling data might otherwise suggest. The polls are, with apologies to Mitt Romney's supporters from 2012, genuinely and provably missing the drift of this thing, this time -- and Secretary Clinton is the direct and ubiquitous beneficiary of their collective mistake. This is an unusually long column even by my standards, so I hope you'll bear with me.

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Don't Kid Yourself; Hillary Clinton is in Trouble (But Still Leads)

If you've been anything more than a one-time-casual reader of these pages, you're almost certainly a progressive who -- grudgingly or otherwise -- supports Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in this year's Presidential Election. And like me you're probably troubled on more than one level by the FBI's October bombshell, and you're probably worried about the possibility that the bombshell could actually explode the election and deliver a most improbable victory to Donald Trump. Well, the point of today's column is that you'd be absolutely right: This is no time to shrug these latest twists off -- but neither is it time to panic. Yet.


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The Most Effective Campaign Commercial of All Time

For whatever reason the internet loves hyperbole -- particularly of the sort that ignores all but the last eighteen months in the sweep of human history. I had this pointed out to me in 2002 by a smart colleague at my workplace, recounting the tale of a student of his who had just uploaded an essay entitled "The Twenty Greatest Blu-Ray Movies of All Time," and who then refused to see the irony of same when my colleague patiently tried to point it out to him. We all do this, now: Things change so much faster than they used to that we forget how recent the distant-seeming stuff really is.

So forgive me while I chew some precious bandwidth to make the argument that Hillary Clinton's latest one-minute spot, "Captain Khan," is very probably -- and will very probably be remembered for a long time as -- the single most devastatingly effective political advertisement, ever.

But first do yourself the honor of watching it again, because it's worth it.

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Republicans are (Probably) in Bigger Trouble Than They Think

Election polling is, as ever, a good news / bad news proposition. The good news about following polling data in an election season is that there is always a great mass of data and there are always a great many stone-cold pros crunching that data and writing articles about it, as well as Nate Silver. But this volume of data and expert analysis happens also to be the bad news -- because the more stone-cold pros there are, the more likely their predictions are to diverge in meaningful ways. And never is this more true than when it comes to predicting so-called "wave elections," in which the mood of the electorate turns so decisively against one or the other of the two political parties that even the best models under-count the damage.

Worse, this kind of mistake is what statisticians refer to as a "systematic error": one in which the divergence between prediction and outcome only manifests in one tail of the probability distribution. For recent examples of this phenomenon, the United States has experienced "wave" elections in three consecutive midterms -- 2006, 2010, and 2014 -- and in all three of them the most trusted and professional pollsters and poll analysts, and Nate Silver, have all missed the victorious party's margin to the low side. But then this much is nearly tautological: Having failed to diagnose a wave, it would be impossible to then over-estimate its size, since missing a congressional margin to the high side would itself constitute the correct prediction of a wave.

So the bigger, more vexing question, then, is why pollsters and poll-analysts so often miss waves altogether -- and whether those explanations could proffer any guidance in predicting the outcome of this year's electoral horse race. Personally I believe that the explanations for un-diagnosed waves are mostly straightforward, and that they do, in fact, offer real promise that the Democrats could be positioned to do much better down-ballot than the punditry is currently predicting. Let's look at the factors that might substantiate this possibility.


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(With a Big Caveat,) Clinton Only Needs One More State

If the saying is true that a week is forever in politics, then it can be no coincidence if the inner circle of the Trump Campaign feels as though the past fortnight has been a double-eternity. Charging forth from his own, suitably(-?) raucous convention, Mr. Trump found himself in a flat-footed tie with Secretary Clinton, herself still reeling from the damaging final report of the FBI regarding her private e-mail server. He wasn't leading much of anywhere, but in the national tracking polls he'd pulled nose-to-nose with the once seemingly invincible Clinton juggernaut.

To say that things have not gone well for Mr. Trump in the fourteen days since is to say that matters have not recently gone well in Syria. Always the bombastic narcissist, Trump has responded to the conclusion of his biggest private show to date with a series of otherwise stupefying unforced errors -- the most well-known of which, his public feud with Khizr Khan, may not even effect the deepest or most lasting damage on his candidacy.

Consider just one twenty-four hour window from the past fourteen days, during which...

• In a Washington Post interview, Trump declined to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan against his primary challenger
• He reiterated that he hasn’t endorsed Sen. John McCain and said the onetime prisoner of war “has not done a good job for the vets”
• He slapped out at Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, saying “she has given me zero support”
• He suggested that Americans should pull their 401(k) funds out of the stock market
• He said he’s “always wanted” to receive a Purple Heart but that having one gifted to him by a supporter was “much easier”
• He said that the handling of sexual harassment has “got to be up to the individual”
• He accused Khizr Khan of being “bothered” by his plan to keep terrorists out of the country, and said that he had no regrets about his clash with the family
• He appeared to feud with a crying baby during a rally
• He reiterated that “if the election is rigged, I would not be surprised”
• The sitting president of the United States publicly called Trump “unfit to serve” and urged Republicans to withdraw their support for him.
• Trump spokesman Katrina Pierson suggested that Obama and Clinton are to blame for the death of Humayan Khan, who died in 2004, despite the fact that neither were in the executive branch at the time
• An ally of Paul Manafort told John Harwood at CNBC that the campaign chairman is “mailing it in,” leaving the rest of the staff “suicidal.”
• Sitting GOP congressman Richard Hanna, HP head Meg Whitman and former Christie aide Maria Comella all said they plan to vote for Hillary Clinton
• The Washington Post released a transcript of its full interview with Trump, indicating among other things that he paused five times to watch TV coverage in the middle of the sit-down
• A GOP source told NBC’s Katy Tur that Reince Priebus is “apoplectic” over Trump’s refusal to endorse Ryan and is making calls to the campaign to express his “extreme displeasure”

All of this, understand, happened in just one news cycle out of the fourteen in question (hat-tip: Teagan Goddard's Political Wire).

The effect of all this chaos on the political horse race is only just now beginning to register -- but as of this writing, Secretary Clinton has surged to a comfortable lead in the national poll of polls. Her biggest lead, according to Fox News (!), shows her up by ten points. Mr. Trump is in big and self-inflicted trouble, and it's beginning to take its toll on the firewall of support he's previously enjoyed even through what seemed to be his gravest missteps of the primary season. 

Thing is, the United States doesn't pick its President on the basis of a nationwide popular vote: it picks the winner according to the weighted outcomes of fifty-one individual contests at the state level (including the District of Colombia). And as has been reported on this site at various times, the state-level polling often lags the true picture of the election by several days, for various abstruse reasons. Even without a return to normalcy in the dynamics of the race and/or its media coverage, we probably won't have a clear sense of where the individual states are running for another few days, possibly a week. And the point of today's column is that this is very, very bad news for Trump and his supporters, indeed.

To see why, we turn to the excellent and highly underrated reporting of Dr. Andrew Tanenbaum at electoral-vote.com. An expat living in continental Europe, Dr. Tanenbaum has since 2004 chronicled the day-to-day fortunes of Presidential candidates by tabulating their respective standings in the electoral college in real time, tallied according to the most recent polling data available by state. Tanenbaum doesn't project anything from polling data or polling trends, which has the paradoxical effect of making his reporting much more reliable than at least one inexplicably more popular (and very often spectacularly wrong) colleague of his. Instead the tone of Tanenbaum's site is reserved, sometimes downright diminutive, but it more-or-less has to be if prognostication is to be expressly verboten in this fashion. Point being, those of us who read him every day take the rock-solid surety of the thing and the clamped-down rhetoric as the necessary halves of an important and under-represented corner of the political blogosphere: If Andy says it, you're never going to be embarrassed because you repeated it at a cocktail party. He has a lot of friends. He deserves them.

All of which brings us to a report appearing in his August 3rd edition, in which co-contributor Christopher Bates tabulated the safe states for each party in a "blue wall" and a "red wall," and then commented at some length on the dis-equal electoral vote tallies of the two resulting floors, and on the dynamics of the race in the few states that fell in neither secure camp. Here is a reprint of the graphic used by Bates to inform his commentary:

The "blue wall" column in this graphic shows exactly what the name would suggest: the complete list of states, with their electoral vote tallies, which have gone for the Democratic Party's candidate for President in no fewer than six consecutive election cycles. The Republican equivalent was divided by Bates into a "red wall" and a "pink wall," owing in part to a fairly sizable discontinuity in the Republican winning streaks of the two sub-groups.

But even adding the "red-" and "pink wall" together, the two subgroups of states only afford Mr. Trump a starting "floor" of 180 electoral votes, while the corresponding floor for Secretary Clinton is shown as 242 -- in a contest where it only takes 270 to actually win the damn thing. This is an enormous built-in advantage for Team Blue in the big contest, and it has been this way for some time -- independent of a self-destructive opponent. The graphic above would look exactly the same if Mrs. Clinton were running against Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Chris Christie or Jeb Bush.

Probably, not definitely, but probably, Mrs. Clinton would be correct to bank those 242 electoral votes against any rival. A case can be made that Pennsylvania might be more- or less competitive, given a certain specific Republican candidate; a similar case can be made regarding Wisconsin or Michigan or Oregon. But these are the arguments we hear from Republican strategists every four years, and somehow every four years the blue wall seems to hold. Remember, this is Andy Tanenbaum we're talking about here: he and Bates aren't calling anything for this November. They're merely stating the cold, hard fact that the Democrats have carried these 242 electoral votes through good election cycles and bad ones, in some cases over the span of much of our lifetimes.

It doesn't take your present reporter to note how close 242 is, to 270, or that a Democratic win in either one of Ohio or Florida -- all by itself -- would run Clinton's total over the top. So it may seem strange, in such circumstances, that the states I'd like to talk about here aren't Ohio or Florida, but Iowa and New Mexico and Colorado and New Hampshire.

And yes, that does seem strange, so do bear with me.

It happens that Iowa finds its way into the "swing state" category of Bates' table on the basis of one, single, solitary election: 2004 -- during which it flipped from Gore in 2000, to a Republican candidate whose name escapes me for the moment. I think he flew airplanes for the Texas National Guard for a while, if memory serves. Or maybe he didn't. But at all events, Iowa was one of just two states John Kerry failed to hold from the Al Gore coalition (the other being New Mexico), and for that reason Iowa is listed objectively as up for grabs. Except this is a state that hadn't gone for a Republican before that war-on-terror-soaked fiasco since Ronald Reagan. Notably, Iowans even chose Michael Dukakis over George H W Bush in 1988, a distinction shared by just nine other states and the District of Colombia.

If for the moment we assume away Karl Rove's magical anti-gay-marriage gambit and the senseless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq including Humayun Khan, the streak of Democratic victories in Iowa would stand at seven -- the same as Hawaii and New York. It seems reasonable to me to consider such a state a relatively safe bet for the good guys. I'll be happy to take a wager or two on the subject if anyone's interested.

This is a counterfactual, of course, and once one plays such games with the data there is no hard limit on where they can lead. But let's put it this way: To believe that Iowa is in play this year, you must believe that Mr. Trump is capable of appealing to a wider coalition of Iowans, or a narrower coalition in much deeper numbers, than were willing to cast their votes for either George Bush Senior, Bob Dole, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. Let me just repeat that last part: Mitt, freaking, Romney didn't win in Iowa. And Mitt Romney won 27% of the non-white vote in 2012.

Yes, Iowa is whiter than the country at large -- but so is Minnesota, and in both places the under-structure of that homogeneity is a smart and well-funded school system and a long tradition of deep commitments to Democratic-Party ideals, if not practices, on issues ranging from organized labor to agricultural subsidies. Maybe Iowa really is a swing state, but as someone who suffered and bled for John Kerry more than most (I was unemployed at the time), I just can't see it.

The other state that Mr. Kerry failed to hold, is New Mexico. And here the swing-state status is rendered even more dubious by the large and growing Hispanic population -- effectively none of whom are planning, even now, to cast ballots for Mr. Trump.  New Mexico didn't vote for Dukakis in 1988, but except for 2004 it has turned blue on every election night since, which would peg its counterfactual, John-Kerry-less streak at six, or the same as California and Connecticut. I'll be happy to take wagers from any Trump supporters on that one too, thank you very much.

Next door to the Land of Enchantment is the much more defensibly swingy state of Colorado, which in the last six elections has gone twice for Barack Obama, twice for George W. Bush, and once for- and once against Bill Clinton. On paper at least, it doesn't get any swingier than that. But these historic data points harbor an even bigger problem than the large and growing Hispanic population in the inter-mountain west, which is that Colorado is also home to a large and growing population of former Californians, most of whom owe their relocation to the wild successes of the American technology sector, and are therefore much more liberal. The dynamics of the race in The Centennial State have been sour for Mr. Trump almost from the beginning, and they have soured so dramatically in the past few polling cycles that the Clinton Campaign has quietly non-renewed their advertising buys in the state until further notice.

Across the country, if not the ideological spectrum, is the Granite State of New Hampshire, whose status in Bates' swing-state table is owed to the most heartbreaking and little-known fact of this entire column: The fact that it, and it alone in the Northeast, voted for George W. Bush in 2000. Without those four electoral votes, Bush would have lost to Al Gore despite all the shenanigans in Florida.

People love to say that a few hundred votes in Florida determined who would be President in 2000, but with all the controversy surrounding that state's count we may never confidently know for sure. What's much less in dispute is that Bush carried New Hampshire by fewer than 7,000 persons -- meaning that if 3,500 of them had reversed themselves, much of the unspeakable carnage and global heartbreak that has followed would never have happened. It is an idea not to be borne any longer, so let's leave it there by observing that, if we reverse New Hampshire's outcome in 2000, their streak of Democratic-Party victories would also stand at six. Again, wagers are welcomed and encouraged.

For any of these states to fall for Mr. Trump, a person would have to believe that one-time victories in some of them are better predictors than pulled advertising in others. This might be the conservative play in some parallel universe with an election that featured two grown-ups, but in this election it seems nothing short of willful. More specifically, considering these four states to be in play any more than Michigan or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania represents a stretch of sufficient proportions to raise equally valid questions about the predictability of the blue wall itself. In other words, I fail to see how one can confidently bank Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for the Clinton team, and not include the four states I've listed here.

Okay. Assuming you've stayed with me this far, let's add Iowa, New Mexico, New Hampshire and Colorado to Secretary Clinton's blue wall, and see where that leaves things (courtesy of 270towin.com).

Cosmetically, at least at first, there's nothing terribly different about this map from any number of unresolved maps of the electoral college we've all been playing with on this site and others for the past dozen years, now. Some states are blue, some are red, and some -- five, to be exact -- are legitimately up for grabs: Nevada, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and of course Florida. At a glance, this is dog-bites-man stuff. 

But incline a little closer to the map and you'll notice something genuinely arresting about it: Unless you disagree wholescale with the arguments I've employed to get us to this point, Secretary Clinton stands exactly one state shy of being President. She can lose any four of the five gray states above, as long as she wins the fifth one, and she's over the top. This, you understand, is before we factor-in the structural problems Trump is encountering in such otherwise predictably red states as Mississippi and Georgia and Arizona. If he loses any of these, it's truly curtains. And Mrs. Clinton is currently ahead in Arizona, together with North Carolina, Florida, and New Hampshire. Even a nimble political pro -- even a Jeb Bush -- would be in seriously deep kimchi at this point. Remember, most of the data we have on where things stand at the state level has not fully accounted for the blizzard of self-devastation to rock the Trump Campaign over the past few days.

And the caveat suggested in the title? It's not the one you're probably expecting. Yes, all of this can change on a dime: Hillary Clinton could be caught in some fresh firestorm of mendacity tomorrow. A bunch of nitwits could fly a plane into the side of a building in the name of a God who teaches us to be nice to everybody. Markets could crash or Boris Johnson could move to Poughkeepsie. But that caveat is both implicit and peremptory: The whole point of an electoral college map in August is to see where things would stand today, if the election were today, and to use that information as a proxy for theorizing about how things might proceed between now and November 8th. The big day is still a ways off, much can happen in-between, and these things needn't be said.

The caveat referenced in the title is that, for all his self-destructive behavior, Mr. Trump doesn't seem to be hurting the GOP's chances down the ticket very much. Tanenbaum has a running tally of where things stand in the Senate, and the headline that inspired the present column from yours truly was that, if the election were today, the Republicans would hold the Senate majority and it wouldn't even be terribly competitive. And the thing is, this is the result of a conscious and I believe ill-advised decision by Secretary Clinton: to reach out to Republican candidates in pursuit of their support.  

Calm down. I'm not about to go on one of those un-moored Bernie-Brothers' rants about how Secretary Clinton is effectively campaigning as a moderate Republican. She is, and as Democrats we're stuck with that much. We got some real movement out of her on some key issues, and whether she means it or not is academic at this point because she's the nominee. (For a more in-depth consideration of why it might make sense to vote for her anyway, see my most-recent previous column.)

The error in judgement here, it seems to me, is in her apparent expectation that the Republicans who benefit from this outreach will perceive some sort of indebtedness to her come January, and that with this indebtedness to her credit Mrs. Clinton herself may look forward to more substantive and collegial legislative success in her Administration. Nobody has said this, exactly, but it does seem to fit hand-in-glove with Clinton's curious gaffe a few weeks ago in which she praised Nancy Reagan for having raised awareness about AIDS -- despite the fact that Nancy Reagan not only did nothing of the kind, she did the very opposite. Only a politician who thinks she can woo the other side into voting her agenda would make that sort of gaffe.

As strategic expectations go, this one is beyond baffling and into the realm of the delusional: Nobody, but nobody, in the Republican Party is going to take any position toward a President Hillary Clinton that isn't cravenly antagonistic, and for all her supposed political acumen she really ought to know as much by now. It's not that elected Republicans are all monsters (well, perhaps it's not just that elected Republicans are all monsters), as much as that the echo-chamber media outlets favored by their constituents will see a Clinton Presidency as a ratings bonanza, and will fan their viewers into the same sort of full-throated acrimony that can only be secured by someone who isn't just Barack Obama's third term, isn't just a Clinton, but a WOMAN, to boot. No doubt some of the Republicans who benefit from Clinton's non-confrontational approach will feel deep remorse at having to assassinate the character of their benefactor from the House- and Senate floors, but assassinate it they will. They'll simply have no choice if they don't want to get Cantored.

In such a context, the only sensible strategy is to do the exact opposite of what Mrs. Clinton has been doing: to run up the score as much as possible. To wallpaper the airwaves with campaign ads that morph Republican House- and Senate candidates into Donald Trump, and blend their most odious statements back and forth until the persuadable voters among us can barely tell the difference. Only by defeating Republicans, instead of trying to curry their indebtedness, can Secretary Clinton realistically expect a successful Presidency. Only with Democratic support in Congress can she realistically expect to accomplish anything but four more years of stalemate.

And on that particular proposition, I'm afraid I won't be taking any wagers.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...