Rainy days and Mondays

I’ve “heard” that there’s a lot of data suggesting that this far out from a presidential election head-to-head hypothetical matchups aren’t much more than name recognition tests, at least in regard to how well the challenger does relative to other potential challengers. I certainly hope that’s true, but even with that massive caveat this is more than a little alarming:

Note that if you hold everything else constant, Trump could drop two of these six states and still win, unless one of the two is Florida. Also:

Who are these people and how often were they dropped on their heads as infants?

Anyway, it’s a cold fact that Trump could lose the national popular vote by ten million next November and still pull out the election. (My current three favorite internet auto-proofs that someone isn’t worth engaging with are “Actually, Arabs are semites too,” “Technically it’s ephebophilia,” and “Actually, it’s a republic, not a democracy.”)

Trump is by far the most unpopular president in American history, as measured by peak popularity, and will certainly remain so. He could also well get re-elected, because of the insidious interaction of our profoundly dysfunctional political and media cultures with our increasingly absurd electoral system.