Presidential Election 2016

This has certainly been the craziest election season. End of August now. Trump is possibly the worst candidate who's ever run. Hillary has some massive negatives (whether true or not). Either side should be able to slam-dunk the other, but it ain't happening.

Why?

Hillary is polling ahead, although not excessively so. Do the polls tell you much? Those involved certainly think so, but there are some spectacular failures in the not-too-distant past.

You can readily find speculation that there are a lot of R people who will secretly vote for Hillary but not say so in advance. And that there are R people who are saying now that they won't vote for Trump.

I suspect that this is wrong. I think that what's likelier is that people who have always voted R will do so again, because once they are in the voting booth, they will simply be unable to vote for her. Trump gets the same voters Romney did. All of them.

So those non-crazy Trump voters...what are they thinking?

Voting for Trump is a protest vote. Simple as that. It doesn't matter one bit about whatever his crazy statements are, that's not important...what is important is that he is so non-politician that he will really shake things up.

I know about protest voting. I voted for Ross Perot in 1992. Ross would not have been that good a President, he was a little wacko, although not like Trump. I knew that Ross wouldn't win, but I didn't like GHWB or Bill C.

(aside: recall 1991: Gulf War 1. GHWB handled that well, although you could argue that he should have rolled on to Baghdad anyway. By late 91 he had the highest approval rating a President ever had, like 93%--he could have achieved ANYTHING. And he wasted it, because he had no vision. And when he was running again the next year "I'd like to be there to handle whatever comes up" was his reason for running. Brilliant. Doofus.)

So all the questions today on the D side about "what are these Trump voters thinking?" They have misunderstood completely. It's about protest, nothing else is relevant. Need to shake up Washington really bad. Trump will certainly do that, Hillary will not.

Of course Trump's crazy supporters want all non-white people booted out of the country. Or eligible for target practice, like in "The Purge". As though that will fix anything. As though the white folks who don't have a job right now would take a suddenly vacated job being done by someone brown.

So time for the inevitable prediction: well, several of them.

Option 1: Hillary 50, Trump 48, Johnson1, Stein 1.
Option 2: Trump 50, Hillary 48, etc.
Option 3: Hillary 60, Trump 30, Johnson 5, Stein 5.

I think option one is the likeliest. I think option 3 is least likely--Trump's "floor" as it is called, is not the 28% you can read about, it's more like 46%. All those Rs who've said they won't vote for him are lying, to themselves and to everyone else.

Option 3 happens if all those who were R but say they will vote D actually do so. I find this unlikely, but if the "women who vote for Hillary because it's the first chance [only chance] they get to vote for a woman" do in fact vote for her, I think Hillary gets 52%

Remember what happened in 2008 when the first black man was a candidate. Lots of votes for him for just that reason. He didn't have the negatives.

I also think:

Warren 65, Trump 25, Johnson 5, Stein 5.

Elizabeth Warren has the positives without the negatives, and picks up the Bernie voters. She crushes Trump. But it'll never happen...she's too old for a retry in 8 years.