05/24/2016 07:21 am ET
President Donald J. Trump?
In this feverish year, the most recent symptom of distemper is media blather that — based on polling nearly 6 months out — America is on the cusp of electing Donald Trump. Before this conjures the megalomaniacal horror of Trump’s inaugural address, let me offer a consoling reality — that political fun house mirror known as the Electoral College.
We may not love it but, like shingles and pneumonia, this particular college will forever be with us. And so, a spoiler alert. At the end of this piece, I’m revealing who won the presidency in November, right down to the last electoral vote. Faced with a national nervous collapse, it seems unkind to wait.
I’m not alone in trying to be helpful. One day after the Indiana primary, the New York Times predicted the electoral vote count for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. A day earlier, I went through a similar exercise, and got an identical count.
My conclusion? Either the folks at the Times and I are idiotic to precisely the same degree, or this really isn’t all that hard. Since then, a brace of experts — Larry Sabato , the Cook Political Report, and the Rothenberg & Gonzáles Political Report — have landed on or near this same number. The fun for me, and I hope for you, is in examining why.
The special sauce for this recipe is, of course, the inimitable Donald Trump. Among his other distinctive features he is, as of now, the least popular presidential candidate in modern American history.
Despite this, a spate of recent polls matching him against Clinton have caused the ever-febrile commentariat, ravenous for plot twists, to announce that Trump could become our president. This chorus of lemmings ignores a couple of factors which, unsurprisingly, have closed the polling margin: the Pavlovian tendency of Republican loyalists to come home after the party’s nomination has been settled, and the fact that Hillary Clinton and her party are still being battered by Bernie Sanders. more
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