Take a deep
breath and repeat after me: Donald Trump is the Y2K Bug of 2016. He's a pretend
fear. He will never sit in the Oval Office.
Bookmark
this page and come back to it every time you read another panicked poll or
terrified Facebook post from one of your friends. This is your safe space. It's
not going to happen.
Let's go
through your biggest fears one by one, and see if we can't talk you off the
ledge:
1. He's really close in the polls!
No he's not.
His numbers had a brief bump about three weeks ago, shortly after the FBI
decided there were no grounds to prosecute Hillary Clinton for any wrongdoing
around her emails - people were a bit upset about that - but he's lagging
woefully now and has been for almost the entire race.
In fact
Trump is losing so badly that he even gets mouth-frothingly excited when his
numbers teeter vaguely into the vicinity of Hillary Clinton's, even though
they're still worse:
The most
comprehensive amalgamation of all the polls can be found at Real Clear
Politics. At the time of writing, they have Clinton at 47 to Trump's 40.
Election
forecaster Nate Silver, who's like Dexter from Perfect Match when it comes to
polling predictions, gives Trump a miserable 20 per cent chance of winning the
White House at the time of writing, compared to Clinton's 79 per cent.
Trump thinks
he's winning because his rallies fill stadiums. But stadiums are not states,
nor are they votes. Congratulations - now that you know this, you're smarter
than Donald Trump.
2. Everyone hates Hillary Clinton!
That's true.
We're in the unique position of seeing two of the most unpopular US
Presidential candidates of all time go head-to-head.
But very few people can
give a coherent answer about why they hate Clinton. Both the email and Benghazi
scandals have been found to be baseless, which leaves her haters with little
more than a defiant "I just don't trust her."
Fine.
Luckily voters are beginning to realise that they trust a man who cheerfully
invites Russia to hack US government emails even less.
3. Michael Moore said he can win!
"I have
... awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November,"
renegade filmmaker Michael Moore lamented in an oped at the end of June.
Michael Moore has said a lot of smart things in his time. This was not one of
them.
As politics
nerds like to say, elections are all about maths and Donald Trump simply
doesn't have the numbers - not in "the rust belt" that Moore thought
he'd focus his campaign on, nor, critically, in any minority group or in any
significant swing state.
I can say
with all sincerity, and quite probably accuracy, that Trump is more likely to
accuse New Zealand of starting the Second World War or appoint a half-eaten tin
of Spam to CEO of one his casinos, than he is to win the presidency.
4. No one throught he'd win in the
primaries and he did!
The
Republican primaries measured one thing - how much hardcore, time-rich,
registered Republican voters liked Donald Trump vs. the other Republican
candidates. There were 17 candidates at the outset and Trump averaged less than
third of the votes during each state primary - enough to knock out his
competitors, but hardly a convincing majority.
Think about
that for a minute. He only secured a small fraction of the votes from a small
fraction of the Republication party. That's very different to securing the
votes of an entire nation who mostly think he's crazier than Lindsay Lohan
after a big night out.
5. Everyone thought Brexit wouldn't
happen and it did!
Actually,
the polls said pretty categorically that Brexit would happen - or at least be
very, very close. It's just that no one dared believe it. One more time. Donald
Trump is being destroyed in every poll, even the ones taken by his friends.
6. But no seriously what if he wins?
It's safe to
say Donald Trump thinks "impeachment" is a fruit cocktail served at
one of his failing casinos, but it's what will happen if he does win and tries
to implement pretty much any one of his proposed policies.
Trump wants
to kill entire families of terrorists? Yeah, about 2km from Trump Tower is a
place called the "United Nations", where that policy is better known
as an "international war crime".
He wants to
pick out random countries he doesn't like and attack them with nuclear weapons?
About 5km from Trump Tower is a place called "Manhattan Psychiatric
Center", where people who crave nuclear war in 2016 generally wind up.
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