All is not lost, ladies and gentleman. But there has been a great darkening, a great unwokening. May I turn your gaze to two different election forecasts. First – the one that the entire internet is losing its collective mind over: the New York Times poll, which currently gives Trump an 88% of winning. The FiveThirtyEight poll, which has always been more bullish on Trump from the get go, isn’t quite as dramatic – had Clinton slightly ahead for some time.
But that lead is collapsing fast.
So what does this mean? The general conversation hasn’t quite accounted for the potential of an actual Trump victory and what it would really look like. So let’s take stock of what the realities are right now. We can’t say for sure, but it’s looking like Trump could very well take the White House. Let’s just assume he will.
There are a couple of certainties here too. The Republicans are almost certain to take both the House of Representatives and the Senate. So if, by some miracle, Clinton limps over the line, it’s going to be a hollow fuckin’ presidency: she won’t be able to get any new Supreme Court judges through, her legislation would be paralysed, the chance of any kind of progress has basically been ripped from underneath her. So, in practical terms, she can’t win at all.
Reminder that Trump win means he will control unified house and senate, plus long-term SCOTUS picks and 2020 gerrymander. Dem Apocalypse.
— Richard Cooke (@rgcooke) November 9, 2016
But if Trump does win – and I stress that I reckon it’s a pretty high chance of that happening – he’ll have wiiiiiide space to do whatever he pleases, more or less, as long as he has the support of the Republican legislature. Which, to be honest, he will. For all the NEVER TRUMP bluster from some ‘moderate’ (lol) wings of the Republican Party, they’ll be pretty fucking gleeful to have their hands on the levers of power and they’ll run with it all the way.
He’ll also control the county lines for the next election – meaning the Republicans can redraw them any damn way they like. This has huge impact on the electoral map and can make it even harder for a Democrat to win next time around.
He’ll also have room to select the Supreme Court judges he wants. He’s promised to pick very solid conservatives for the Supreme Court, which dooms it to being an extremely conservative judiciary for the next couple of decades. D E C A D E S. If you’re a progressive, that should concern you even more than the presidency itself.
How about all those promises Trump’s made? The Muslim ban? The big fucking wall? Impossible to tell at this point. I don’t think the United States federal government has the institutional capability to pull together the labour effort to contribute to a wall like that. I just don’t see it happening the way Trump has promised. The Muslim ban, though? I’d fucking worry.
There you go, folks. Turns out the kind of weak, centrist liberalism proposed by someone like Hillary Clinton wasn’t enough to topple far-right populism. It was proved with Brexit, and it’s being proved again by Trump.
The next couple of decades are going to suck.
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