Okay, what this thread needs is another dose of dogged confidence and optimism in the face of the pervasive Chicken Little stuff coming from the media and the pollsters, who have a stake in keeping the horse race going. This was from Thursday, just as the chorus of oh-noes was beginning:
SALON.COM: Poll panic is here! Yes, Trump is closing, but here’s why it’s meaningless: This week's polls may suggest Trump is inching closer to the White House, but the truth is he remains miles away
http://www.salon.com/2016/09/15/its-already-happening-yes-trump-is-closing-in-on-the-polls-but-heres-why-thats-meaningless/
Yes, the polls have tightened in some of the swing states and may still tighten more. Yes, this is affecting the down-ballot races to the point where it may impact the Democrats’ chances of retaking the Senate. Yes, that will hurt Clinton’s legislative agenda if she wins. Yes, if you assume everything lines up perfectly for Trump, he still has a slightly less narrow path to victory than he did last week.
But the presidential race was always going to be competitive, much as liberals might have laughed like stoned hyenas when it became clear the GOP was going to nominate Donald Trump. The electorate is so polarized and the parties so ideologically rigid that any Republican candidate always starts with a floor slightly north of 40 percent of the vote. Any Democrat was always likely to be just a few points higher than that. The onus was always going to be on the GOP candidate to run a perfect campaign to catch up, something Trump has proven incapable of doing.
It is possible the stakes for a loss feel higher this year. That is partly because we may have forgotten how high they felt in, say, 2008, when Sarah Palin had a shot at being a heartbeat away from the presidency. It is also partly because Trump is a genuinely dangerous person — a racist demagogue who knows less than nothing about governing, legislating, diplomacy, foreign policy, economics. The list goes on. He is a narcissist with no empathy for anyone not named Donald Trump, and he’s got skin so thin he’s liable to order an invasion of China if Panda Express forgets to include a fortune cookie with his takeout order.
We should all be genuinely horrified that this xenophobic Creamsicle has any shot at all at winning the White House. But he is still much more likely to lose than win, no matter what the polls and the media tell us over the next couple of weeks.