Northern lights on US election III : According to Nate Silver almost 43% of American voters … etc, etc, etc

Oct 16th, 2016 | By | Category: In Brief

Nate Silver at work.

I hope Dr. White is right about some new mood of bipartisan co-operation rising from the ashes, “even just vaguely,” in some reborn saga of democracy in America.

And I pray David Brooks will finally prove right when he wrote last Tuesday that the day after Trump loses, “there won’t be solidarity and howls of outrage. Everyone will just walk away.”

A certain undeniable sinking feeling nonetheless also sets in when you start to ponder Nate Silver’s latest FiveThirtyEight 2016 Election Forecast at any length.

Here, eg, are his popular vote projections as of 11:00 AM on Sunday, October 16 : Hillary Clinton 49.5% ; Donald Trump 42.9% ; Gary Johnson 6.1% ; Other 1.5%.

(And note btw that “Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight … correctly predicted the winner in all 50 states during the 2012 presidential election and 49 out of 50 states in 2008” – though he has more recently had to confess that “Blowing Trump’s primary win made me humbler, smarter.” )

On these numbers Hillary easily enough wins the November 8 election, with 339 of the “538 Electoral College votes.”

(Where 270 votes qualifies as a bare majority. And note too : on Silver’s current projections there is a 65.2% chance that Democrats will win control of the Senate, if not the still highly Republican-gerrymandered House of Representatives.)

But it remains true as well that even after the almost palpable Trump meltdown of the past week and more – and all the appalling lies he incessantly spreads across our TV screens (how can his supporters complain about the mainstream media which gives him so much attention, etc, etc!) – more than four out of 10 interested Americans still support the mercurial man who still rules something from the top of Trump Tower !!!!

“Former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos says Donald Trump sexually harassed her.” And she does seem hot enough to qualify on his own testimony about his tastes.

And, really, how can this help but give a rocky start, at best, to any new Clinton II administration in January?

The passing of the torch from an older to a newer America has without doubt begun under President Obama.  It will surely carry on even if something quite strange suddenly happens over the next few weeks, and Donald Trump actually wins in some big surprise on November 8.

Yet even if Hillary does comfortably enough take well over 300 Electoral College votes, as FiveThirtyEight currently predicts, it still seems undeniable that there will remain a lot of metaphorical blood to be shed in the further US domestic struggles that lie ahead.

It may take someone younger and with much less old establishment baggage to finally lead the way into the sunshine of the new democratic promised land, a little further down the road. (Meanwhile, as matters stand, more Americans (%) still support Donald Trump than Canadians (%) voted for Stephen Harper in 2011 –  or Justin Trudeau in 2015! )

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