I have said this elsewhere but Trump is going to win the election. I'm sad about this but have moved on to acceptance. Facts don't matter with him and there are enough disaffected and stupid people who still think the economy is trash and that illegal Mexican immigrants are taking all the jerbs to put him over the top. You cannot prove Trump wrong on any issue ever because as I said, facts don't matter with him. He has a powerful reality distortion field and people lap it up. It's a bit like the Obama effect to be honest in that people (myself included) really though Obama could change the way our political system works. Instead, it got significantly worse under Obama even if a lot of the blame for that doesn't go to him.
The point is that we all believed it then even though the evidence pointed to the opposite. The same thing is going on with Trump only instead of optimism and hope, his tools are fear and derision. But people want to believe he can make America great again so they give him a pass on practically everything.
Plus, Sanders is doing a stellar job at ensuring young people won't vote for Hillary because FEEL THE BERN IT'S A REVOLUTION MAN.
The odds still seem to point towards a Clinton victory on demographic grounds. It is notable that even during Bernie's Last Stand (the couple of weeks leading up to California) when most of the Republican elites rapidly came around to a grudging acceptance of Trump while Sanders was swinging desperately at Clinton, the polls were no worse than tied. It's now something like Clinton +3, while the Dems have about a 2-point popular vote advantage in the Electoral College thanks to the Blue
Wall Picket Fence. I'd give Trump about a 25% chance at this point.
I supported Bernie, but now his campaign is pointless if not counterproductive and he needs to find a way to get the rest of his supporters on board with Clinton.
As for the bitter nihilists voting for Trump out of morbid curiosity, they're yet another reason I refuse to be a patriot. How can I possibly support my country over others when I have far more in common with your average, say, German voter than I do with these barbarians? I'm ashamed to call them my countrymen.
Maybe your voting might mirror Germans in particular, but across the border in Austria, a far-right candidate only lost the presidential election by 0.6%. Within Germany, AfD will probably do quite well in the next Bundestag elections. Trump is a manifestation of the growth of right-wing populism on both sides of the Atlantic, and if anything he's an example of US politics becoming
more like that of Europe, not less. Right-wing populism is likely to push out extreme neoliberalism as the most popular right-wing ideology, as neoliberalism loses ground on both sides of the aisle. It's a scary change, but real political change usually is scary.
The darkest quarter or so of my personality is aligned with the nihilists. Trump is change I actually do believe in, although what change it will be isn't totally clear. Probably a significant number of people would get hurt, and yet it would still be fascinating to see our political system undergo a phase transition to something completely different from the current political setup. It also provides an opportunity to watch the people who thought they controlled the political system of the country get to eat some humble pie, which appeals to me. Now overall I very much would prefer continuity under Clinton to disruptive, authoritarian, and discriminatory actions under Trump, but I can't say I don't understand the nihilistic side. There is also a faint hope that Trump could shake up the political system in such a way as to unjam it, and/or that his isolationism might result in a reduction in the power of the American empire.
I assume that they imagine that once Trump is elected, some kind of an "uprising" will happen. Something will change. At this point, I'm wondering as if people aren't voting in some sort of a protest vote, as opposed to actual malicious intent against non-whites and poor people, with the idea of "breaking up the system". Of course, that's ridiculous, as Trump IS the Establishment. He's a bloody multi-millionaire and the fact he acts as your racist uncle doesn't help.
The protest vote thing is true: many people who support Trump do so because he's not a "real" politician. My sense from watching some neutrally conducted interviews of his supporters is that the majority of his supporters don't actually trust him to be telling the truth about lots of things either, and they do know that his business past has been slimy. But they've lost faith in the American political system so completely over the past decade or two that they're willing to vote for a known charlatan as long as he's not more of the same politics as usual.
After a long period of real wage stagnation and relative decline, along with marked increases in rates of drug abuse and suicide, much of the white population of the country woke up from the American Dream. When a large proportion of people lose faith in an ideology that had been holding together a society for decades, the system becomes brittle and prone to abrupt and disruptive changes. I think that's where we are now.
... In fairness FarmBoy is constantly warning me of exactly this... that "USA #1!" becomes "Ohio #1!" becomes "XYZ race/religion etc #1!"
