Calling it

The final pre-election day polls are in, and in the aggregate they show Clinton holding about a four-point advantage in the national popular vote.  I think the Dems’ vastly superior GOTV operation will bump that some, and that Clinton will end up winning the popular vote by something close to the 7.2 percentage points by which Obama defeated McCain (he won by 3.9 points over Romney).

I think HRC will win Florida and North Carolina, and will finish with around 320 electoral votes.

One thing to which the media’s election coverage has yet to adjust is the extent to which voting now takes place before election day.  It’s estimated that as of yesterday nearly 40 million votes had been cast, i.e., close to one third of what will be the final total.  Early voting is a great defense against voter suppression efforts (The absence of any easy early voting option in Michigan helps explain why Clinton and Obama are both in Michigan today, while Trump was there yesterday).

As for the Senate, who knows?  Election day turnout will be especially critical in this regard.

This is all very much shaping up as a glass half full situation. The good news is that the executive branch won’t be in the hands of an ignorant racist authoritarian demi-fascist, at least not for the next four years.

The bad news is that the ongoing long-term demographic collapse of the party that nominated Trump, and that then deployed all its institutional resources in an all-out attempt to make him president, isn’t going to stop that party from continuing to control very large parts of both the federal and state governments for at least another decade or two.