The Glade 4.0

Not who do you want to win, not who are you voting for, but who do you think will win the presidential election.

Not at this point, or at some other irrelevant date, but on election day, Tuesday, November 8, 2016.

Me, I think Hillary will win with 54% of the popular vote. I'd guess higher but there are a lot of people who truly hate her and/or mistrust her.

Trump will be lucky to break 40%, with Gary Johnson getting most of the third party votes.

There will be a surprising number of write in votes for Bernie Sanders, despite him not being on any tickets.

All comments are considered to be opinions. Think them out or go off the top of your head, I don't really care.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Hillary with a plurality, probably around 7 points ahead of Trump. I expect the 3rd party count to be high, with Johnson leading nationally. I give it 50/50 odds that at least one state's electoral votes go to a third party -- either McMullen in Utah or Johnson in New Mexico. I don't think Hillary's electoral map is looking bad enough for her that it prevents her from 270 if a third color gets added to the map, though.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight remains the only one I trust for number-crunching elections.

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/201 ... id=rrpromo

He's got them at:

Electoral Votes
Hillary Clinton - 341.1
Donald Trump - 196.2
Evan McMullin - 0.6
Gary Johnson - 0.1

Popular Vote
Hillary Clinton - 49.6%
Donald Trump - 43.0%
Gary Johnson - 5.9%
other - 1.5%

I'm hoping to vote early next week, though being in Tennessee it is somewhat difficult for it to not feel like it's all bit fait accompli here (though Alabama was still worse, neither state splits their electoral votes). :/ Still, in all of the years and all of the candidates I've ever seen, while I can find many have held beliefs and opinions I find deeply wrong and impossibly different, I've never once felt as though there were an actual bad actor in the bunch: someone who didn't feel as though they wanted to make things better, to work for the common good, despite how much or how vehemently I disagreed with their methods.

Until now, that is.

Silver is pretty good, but his predictions have been all over the place this entire election cycle. I'm going:

Hillary: 48%, 322
Trump: 42%, 216
Johnson: 6%, 0
Stein: 3%, 0
Other/write-in/etc: 1%, 0

I've intentionally excluded that McMullin guy; I feel like he could be anywhere from 0-4% and could potentially win Utah in some sort of weird confluence of events, but I feel like it's too hard to predict.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Hillary, easily.

Trump shot himself in both feet, the dick, and only one of his tiny baby hands. Interestingly enough, it was the hand that held the gun.

In the end he was right though, he could stand in Times Square and cheerfully shoot someone, and his base would *still* vote for him. There were even female supporters ready to repeal the 19th just so he could win.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I think Clinton will win. I'm surprised it's taken this long for Trump's numbers to start slipping. Either way, we lose.

Neither of these people should have been their party's nominee.

Yay Tennessee! Clinton is going to win the election, and Trump is going to win Tennessee. You are therefore free to do whatever you want, devoid of any sense of obligation to do your part to save the world. I for one will vote Gary Johnson, and do my bit to see whether a 3rd-party candidate can reach that magical 5% of the total popular vote threshold. Seeing the Libertarians become eligible for Presidential Election Campaign Fund grant money in the 2020 cycle would be a nifty thing.

By the way, that data from Silver was wonky. It should be Johnson at 5.9% of the popular vote (woo!) and 1.5% other.

Yeah, I thought so. McMullen might have a better shot at winning electoral votes because he's got the Mormon solidarity in Utah pulling strong for him, but that's pretty limited to Utah. Johnson's fairly level nationally, in comparison, with some speculation that he's got an outside chance of voters going "**** it, we liked him" in his home state.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

This is exactly what I'm doing in Texas and for exactly the same reason.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Erp, that was my bad. I used the list from the first set and didn't remember to look and match them to the second.

'S'all good! I did a double take at first though. I stopped seriously paying attention months ago, once I wrapped up deciding what I was going to do with my vote. My first reaction was, honestly, McMullin? Who the heck is this guy and why is he polling 6%? Because I had no idea. From there I went straight into tinfoil hat conspiracytheoryland, where a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, with no chance of winning, goes and runs Independent only to draw off potential 3rd-party votes and, in effect, help maintain the two-party hegemony. I like him a lot better when he's just polling favorably with the Mormons. If Johnson gets <5% and this guy does anything significant outside of Utah, I'll be super bummed.

'S'all good! I did a double take at first though. I stopped seriously paying attention months ago, once I wrapped up deciding what I was going to do with my vote. My first reaction was, honestly, McMullin? Who the heck is this guy and why is he polling 6%? Because I had no idea. From there I went straight into tinfoil hat conspiracytheoryland, where a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, with no chance of winning, goes and runs Independent only to draw off potential 3rd-party votes and, in effect, help maintain the two-party hegemony. I like him a lot better when he's just polling favorably with the Mormons. If Johnson gets <5% and this guy does anything significant outside of Utah, I'll be super bummed.[/quote]

If that's what they were doing they did a terrible job of it, since almost no one has even heard about this guy until the last couple weeks when his Utah success became something of a curiosity. There was an initial attempt to set up a serious anti-Trump conservative prior to a lot of state deadlines passing and they wanted some staff writer at National Review named David French to do it. French basically said "lol no."

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This is pretty much how I feel.

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Raell Kromwell

Yeah, I meant to imply I was being tongue-in-cheek about it. I really don't expect anyone in politics to do something diabolically Machiavellian. Well, maybe in House of Cards. But who needs that when the real deal has gotten so entertaining on its own?

Interestingly enough, Texas may actually go to Hillary now.

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Holy shitsnacks!

That's almost certainly not going to happen. It will be significantly closer than in the past, but the idea that it will go to Hillary is pretty far out there. Obviously it's not impossible, but it's down in the McMullin winning in the House category of unlikely.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Oh, agreed. But the fact that it *is* so close shows what a **** candidate Trump is.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Sort of. It also shows Democratic exploitation of identity politics.

On the other hand, the fact that it took this degree of **** on the part of Trump and this late in the game to open a 6 point lead shows what utter **** Hillary is. She's a reflection of the fact that a ***** female lawyer is automatically assumed hypercompetent by the left, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I really don't expect anyone not in politics to do something diabolically Machiavellian. If it's ever going to happen, it will be in politics.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

The Republicans have been exploiting identity politics every bit as much for the last 50 years. They just target white, Christian and male identity politics.

The Republicans have been exploiting Democratic exploitation of identity politics. The Democrat strategy has been to create special benefits, privileges, and protections based on identity groups on the basis that they're needed to remedy past inequalities - but then never admit to any actual improvement created by these efforts, and simply demand more of them. They garner support for this by painting any opposition as "racist" or "sexist", and then when people (rightly) resent being called racist or sexist, or resent the caricature of an "equal" society where groups get permanent special privileges based on an ever-shifting definition of oppression, the Democrats invariably claim that it's all about the bigotry these groups supposedly possess - while ignoring or excusing much more open bigotry within their own groups.

So yes, the Republicans have been appealing to the effect that the combination of open hypocrisy and blatant goalpost-shifting creates among whites, males, and Christians - and they would not be able to do this had the Democrats ever embraced actual equality instead of a perpetual cycle of victimhood. The identity politics you claim the Republicans are exploiting are a product of the Democrats' tactics - they are not a desire to return to some 1950s or before state; almost no one thinks that's either achievable or desirable no matter how nostalgic they might appear. That generation is either elderly or dead.

I'm sure you'll try to contest this, but you said it yourself "The last 50 years". 50 years ago was the combination of civil rights legislation and the Great Society/War on Poverty. Lyndon Johnson really cared about neither - he saw a way to buy votes. It's stayed that way for 50 years, and the left is addicted to the idea that there's perpetual oppression that needs to be fought and knows no other way to put forth a message. Working-class voters with jobs like coal mining and manufacturing haven't gone Republican because of identity politics by Republicans; they've gone that way because they've realized the Democrats have paid lip service to their economic concerns on one hand while pushing trade deals and calling them racists on the other.

Bernie Sanders even fell afoul of this - he actually got arrested protesting for civil rights as a much younger man, but he framed his message in economic terms, and as a result he was attacked for having a support base (and representing a state) that was "too white." The Democratic party is terrified of having to deal with politics that do not contain a strong identity component - they literally do not know how; the politicians that did are all dead, or are Jimmy Carter's age. The irony is that if they did change, the Republicans wouldn't know what to do either. The Republicans have just started figuring out that their own voters have no more patience for this nonsense, and want someone to actually stand up to it - something the average person could have told them 25 years ago, but it took Donald Trump to finally get them to maybe start pulling their heads at least partway out of their asses.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I can't wait for all the dinosaurs to die.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Yes, let them all die...then you live in fear of the day all these entitled **** start to get elected to things. Do you think they have a safe space in the Capital Building?

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Raell Kromwell

He's trying to convince himself. When people undergo a religious conversion, its pretty normal to throw yourself into it as hard as you can. We've got some posters here still trying to convince themselves of some things after decades.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Like trying to convince yourselves that entire generations of people feel entitled to things and have no hard-workers.