Tomorrow(today?), whatever, the 18th, is the last day to register to vote in Oregon, so you should get on that if you haven't already, the state is pretty safely blue as far as the presidency is concerned, but there are a fair number of other things to vote on and you don't even have to leave your house to do so, so get the hell on it lazy ass.
If you aren't in Oregon you had better check your local registration deadline and vote as soon as you can, things might not be a safe where you are so there is even less excuse, people died for your right to vote, use it.
Early voting has started in a bunch of states, and while we don't have enough data to state definitively how things will turn out yet, it does appear to be a pretty good situation for the Clinton campaign in general, they are outperforming Obama 2012 result in much of the south, and so far at least we aren't seeing much coming in that is different than hot polling predicted, things are less rosy in the midwest, but not enough to turn things around unless results end up dramatically different than polling.
A lot of this is guess and estimation, they aren't actually counting much yet, and won't until November 8, but the number of ballots requested by either party tend to give a reasonable estimate I think.
Meanwhile Clinton is officially going in on Arizona, putting more money in and sending Michelle Obama to campaign, while the Trump campaign has decided to announce a major ad buy in Virginia, a state that Clinton is leading in by a... significant margin. Of particular interest to me is that Clinton is extending her lead in all categories, including white men, which has long been his strongest group, it still is I suppose, but anything cut from that demographic is going to be nearly impossible to make up with his abysmal favorables with almost every other demo.
There is going to be talk for decades about this election and discussion about what changed to make Trump tank so dramatically will be a major part of it, most will point to the bragging about sexual assault video and the almost Cosbyian levels of accusers who have come out since, some idiots will talk about rigged polls and media collusion, others will talk about how the Republican party never really embraced Trump and seemed to be actively looking for any excuse to keep him at arms length.
Personally I think it is simpler than that, I think that the average voter just doesn't like him, and doesn't really support an explicitly racist and misogynist ideology. Oh they could fool themselves for a little while and talk about how they want to bring in an outsider who can shake things up in Washington. And it is pretty easy to convince yourself to hate on a minority group if they are visibly different and can be made out to be the enemy, but without consistent evidence, that hate is hard to maintain, and after more than a year I think that a lot of people are just not buying the outsider threat anymore, and going from implicit to explicit misogyny gave a lot of people the excuse to dump him regardless of the other stuff.
Basically, I think most people are pretty decent in general, and he has spent too long in the public eye to fool anyone anymore that he is anything but an enormous asshole.
There are a lot of people who still find that acceptable of course, but I am happy to say I think they are in the minority, perhaps not as small a minority as we would like, but a minority all the same.
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"Personally I think it is simpler than that, I think that the average voter just doesn't like him, and doesn't really support an explicitly racist and misogynist ideology."
Oh, but there are so many people at his rallies! How could he possibly lose?!
But seriously. I think the scariest thing about Trump is that if he had been a little smarter, more genial, less abrasive, less pigheaded, more on-message - y'know, like a politician - he would have done it. One thing I think we can be grateful for is that Trump is not a mastermind. He's just megalomaniac.
See I don't know about that, I think that if Trump was a different person, the campaign against him would be different, I mean if he was able to maintain a facade of sanity and civility then any of the things that would have ordinarily sunk any campaign but the one he actually ran, would have sunk him, unless he was literally someone without a hint of scandal, and I am not sure you can hold beliefs like that for 5+ decades without doing something horrible even if you aren't an irredeemable narcissist.
Additionally, you have to keep in mind that Clinton has had to do very little work this election, we haven't really seen the campaign go into full gear before roughly a couple weeks ago, and they are still sitting on mounds of opposition research that they literally can't use because it would distract from the scandals currently in the news cycle. A more restrained Trump would have been responded to in a more active way by the Clinton campaign I think.
Not to say it would be a walkover like we are seeing now, but I don't think Clinton would have just up and died either
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