A Brief Look at the Current State of the Presidential Election Race

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | September 6, 2016 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | September 6, 2016 |

If you believe the media’s alarmist headlines, the race to become President this fall is not just close, but Trump has pulled ahead. The media is hellbent on manufacturing a race here (much more on that in the next hour), so in polls where Clinton’s lead may have evaporated from an 8 point lead to a 6 point lead, the media still characterizes it as a “tightening” race, or one in which “Trump narrows the gap,” rather than what it actually is: An election in which Hillary Clinton is running so far ahead of Trump that Texas is actually a toss-up state.

Texas.

Hillary Clinton is not going to win Texas, but Donald Trump is not going to win the Presidency, either.

I’m not suggesting that anyone should relax here, or not go to the polls in November because the race is out of reach for Trump, but the race is out of reach. Demographically speaking, Trump cannot win. In the electoral college, Donald Trump cannot overcome the insurmountable lead of Clinton. With nine weeks to go, Clinton has a solid 250 electoral votes. Trump has around 115 electoral votes in hand. Candidates — especially ones as incompetent and hated as Donald Trump — do not win 150 electoral votes in swing states. They just don’t.

This is not the same as the primaries, where we all wrote off Trump despite the fact that he was winning state after state after state. He’s losing right now, and he’s losing badly (at least, badly relative to other modern presidential elections). Granted, anything could happen, but with nine weeks to go, we know everything about the candidates. Another dumb email is not going to shake the resolve of Clinton voters, and another dumb/racist/sexist statement from Trump is not going to change the minds of his dumb/racist/sexist voters. The debates might push the needle a point this way or that, but beyond the huge ratings they will earn the networks (and the page views they will earn sites like ours), they’re not going to matter that much.

Don’t worry about day-to-day polls. Don’t worry about “narrowing gaps” or shrinking leads” or outlying polls that show Trump pulling ahead. There are a lot of white men without college degrees in this country, and they support Donald Trump by an overwhelming margin, but there’s simply not enough of them to counterbalance the nonexistent support Trump has from non-white voters or the lack of support he has from women. The numbers do not work for Trump. It’s math, goddamnit!

Assuming everyone turns out as they should — and Clinton’s ground game is light years ahead of Trump’s — there won’t be any surprises in November. Our national nightmare will finally be over. That doesn’t mean we’re going to ignore Donald Trump in the next nine weeks because his every boneheaded mistake, racist comment, and poo idea needs to be catalogued and advertised as a constant reminder of what an open sore he is. We’re not going to be silent about this man, but we’re not going to scare you into believing that Donald Trump has a shot in hell, because he doesn’t. He just doesn’t, no matter what the latest scary poll might say.