In January 2016,girlfriend used her for sex x video I wrote a column titled "Hey America, you may be sleepwalking into a Donald Trump presidency." A political lifetime later, it makes for interesting and prophetic reading.
This was before the Iowa caucuses, back when Trump was still widely treated as a joke. Many Democrats believed Trump would be an easier Republican presidential candidate to defeat than his chief rival in the polls, Ted Cruz. Trump was a buffoon, a loudmouth; if by some miracle he made it through the gauntlet of GOP primaries, he'd trip himself up with some supremely idiotic statement or other, and we'd laugh all the way to November.
SEE ALSO: Give America what it deserves: Make election day a holidayWell, here we are in November, and nobody on the anti-Trump side is laughing anymore. But they are indulging in hubris. Placing a little too much faith in week-old polls and hoped-for turnout levels, they ignore the distinct possibility that enough Hillary Clinton voters may stay home on Tuesday to send him to the White House.
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Admit it: we may stillbe sleepwalking into a Trump presidency.
It isn't that Democrats were wrong about Trump, either. He has been a buffoon to end all buffoons; his frothing mouth runneth over with idiotic and profoundly disturbing statements. He has been tagged as a serial sex abuser, a tax dodger, a puppet of Putin. He raised an online army of racists, went on bizarre revenge jags and lost three debates in a maelstrom of sniffles and incomplete sentences.
And yet Trump survived, brushing off his accusers with a chilling indifference to decency. Some shocking accusations — that Russian security services are blackmailing him, according to a veteran intelligence officer, or that he raped a 13-year-old girl, according to a forthcoming court case — are so horrible that even his most rabid opponents don't want to believe them.
Even Trump's well-documented transgressions are so many that it's hard to keep them all top of mind; it's like playing mental whack-a-mole. (Chances are you too have caught yourself thinking "oh yeah, I almost forgot about the birther movement/Muslim ban/Khan controversy/deportation force/wall.")
If you're tired of the election and weren't really following politics closely anyway, it's easy to fall for Trump's patter, his almost hypnotic self-assurance. This was always the danger with him; this is exactly what I was trying to warn about.
He is the ultimate used-car salesman of politics, and is all the more insidious for claiming he's not a politician. Despite all reason, many a customer will cave under pressure and buy that lemon he's had on the lot for years.
Trump likes to think of himself as a closer, and he's right. In the final week of the campaign, he has become scarily disciplined. He's managed to avoid any further outrage. He's reading speeches about trade deals and economic hardship from his Teleprompter. Republicans who swore they'd never vote for him are coming back to their candidate for the final stretch, while Democratic enthusiasm for Clinton is dipping in precisely the wrong places at precisely the wrong time.
The Cubs connection
The polls are tightening at both the swing state and national level. They were doing so days before the FBI director's ridiculously vague statement about a trove of Clinton-related emails last Friday. Statistics nerd Nate Silver's site, FiveThirtyEight, now gives Trump a one-in-three chance of winning — precisely the same chance the Cubs had in the World Series a week ago.
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Trump has made hay out of the FBI's misinterpreted misstep; you were probably one of the tens of millions of people who saw his dishonest attack ad during the 10th inning of Game 7 of the World Series, claiming the Feds were "closing in" on "Clinton corruption." If you think a significant percentage of swing-state voters won't fall for that crap while they're amped up on baseball and deep into their fifth beer, I've got news for you.
And so despite an avalanche of predictions of his demise, we find Trump an Electoral College anomaly away from victory. Silver's model — again, not his punditry, but a dispassionate and mathematical algorithm based entirely on polls and their past accuracy — now gives Trump a more than 1 in 10 chance of losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College. Just like George W. Bush in 2000, in other words.
And that's not counting the possibility of a tie. Remember, even if Trump gets 269 Electoral College votes — one vote short of a majority — that would throw the election into the GOP-dominated House of Representatives, where he's all but guaranteed to win.
In swing states, the momentum is all in Trump's direction. As of Thursday, FiveThirtyEight has flipped North Carolina and Florida into the Trump column (albeit by tiny margins — but that's all it takes). If the polls move or are mostly wrong in one or two more states — Virginia is all it would take — you can start picturing Melania holding the Bible while Chief Justice John Roberts administers the oath to President Trump.
Oh, and guess what.
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Take it from someone who suffered through the nightmare of Brexit: a smart country can stumble into a result nobody expected. Everyone put too much faith in the polls, too many people thought they could get away with a protest vote, and too many young people stayed home.
This election is all about turnout, and turnout can be skewed
Besides, focusing on polls masks the key point: this election is all about turnout, and turnout can be skewed. North Carolina has admitted in court that it is reducing African-American turnout by minimizing early voting locations in predominately black districts. As I write, the Justice Department is sending poll watchers to the state. It may already be too late.
It is barely talked about today, but I can't be the only political junkie who remembers George W. Bush winning his second election under dubious circumstances, too. He needed to win Ohio, and Ohio's Republican leadership was very strategic about where it had placed its polling locations.
As polls closed, there were still long lines of people waiting to vote in Democratic districts. Bush won Ohio by a little over 100,000 votes. The final three polls of the state had John Kerry ahead of Bush by one percent. It is possible that enough Kerry voters were shut out to flip the state, though we'll never know for sure.
Here in 2016, there are even more factors in play. Will Trump's evidence-free complaints about a "rigged election" do more to get out his vote — and have his supporters intimidate others into not voting — than Clinton's traditional GOTV operation? Will encouraging numbers in early voting help Clinton or hurt her, by leading too many people to assume the election is in the bag?
Nobody can say for sure. The uncertainty level is through the roof. If ever there were a year where polls cannot predict turnout levels on Election Day, where states may flip in unusual directions, it's this one.
My object here is not to sow fear, but to destroy all traces of hubris. If you've read this far, you are almost certain to vote. But will you talk to your friends, your family? Will you sign up for a phone bank, which you can do from the comfort of home? Will you help round up hesitant voters?
Will you combat a growing narrative of "Clinton corruption" with the boring truth that the whole email investigation is one giant nothingburger?
You may not be sleepwalking, stumbling through a nasty dream where small fears become outsized ones. You may not be paralyzed. You may be awake. But if you don't help rouse America, we may end up with the president of our nightmares.