I'll be the minority report here and say that I think Trump will win.
The debate worked to his advantage, not because he "won" the debate on debating points or debating style, but because a huge audience of Independents and undecideds - which really means people who don't like Hillary Clinton (everybody already knows her) - saw Trump, and what they saw was enough to give them permission to vote for him.
Hillary has shot her bolt. There's nothing new to know of her. She tried really hard to get Trump to explode at the debate, and he didn't. She came across as a more skilled debater and politician...and the reason Trump has gotten as far as he has is because huge numbers of people are tired of politicians and don't believe them anymore.
This election is an American Brexit referendum, and the result will be the same: Americans have lost faith in their Establishment, and will turn them out of power. Had Trump gone berserk and unzipped his pants or something, Hillary would have won. But he didn't. So the polls will continue to melt in his direction in the Rust Belt states, and she will be unable to turn that around - because she has shot her bolt.
When voters discount a candidate for a job because she has the type of skills that would be required of her if she got the job, and give a less experienced person kudos for not having "gone berserk and unzipped his pants or something" in front of a debate audience of tens of millions of people, it makes me wonder if my faith in democracy as the best available form of government is misplaced.
That Trump has gotten as far as he's gotten is an embarrassment and a concern for our nation and for the world. If the American electorate sobers up and elects Clinton, though, at least the Trump things will be held at simply having been embarrassing and concerning. If the American electorate has gone so far over the deep end that they actually elect Trump, though, I think we'll all be facing a very dangerous situation for the next four years, and there will be some things he does that our country will take decades or centuries to recover from, if it ever does.
People really need to understand that this election isn't a reality show. An earlier post compared it to the UK's vote to leave the EU, and I do see some similarities there- particularly in so far as I think some people will be voting for Trump as a protest and then wake up the next day, find out he's President and giving baffling interviews where they say they were just trying to send a message and didn't think he'd actually become President, or feel remorse once they really are faced with the prospect of the President they think they wanted as a definite reality (I base this on interviews with people in the UK who voted to leave the EU and within a day were giving those type of interviews to reporters). One difference, though, is that the UK government has been able to delay a formal declaration of an intent to leave the EU and may work out a bunch of treaties that amount to something similar to EU membership, negating some of the worst of the effects of leaving, whereas if the US electorate votes for Trump, he's going to be President January 20th. There is no constitutional way around awarding the Presidency to whomever gets the majority of the votes in the electoral college (Which are apportioned based on who gets the majority of votes in each state).
We may see some talk about electoral college electors flipping after a Trump victory to try to get Clinton in, but most are bound by state law not to switch, and most of the electors that are sent are handpicked by the winner's campaign. I don't view that as a realistic scenario. The winner of the electoral vote based on the popular vote in each state will become President as they always have.
There is a very slight possibility that the electoral vote will be close enough that a constitutional provision whereby the House of Representatives elects the President and the Senate elects the Vice-President will be triggered, but it would have to be razor sharp with neither candidate reaching 270 electoral votes, and I don't think it's ever happened. Anyone know if it's the *current* House and Senate that would vote on that, or the one that's elected in November that would vote on it?
In any event, the sad reality is that if Trump is elected on November 8, he will 99.9% take office as President on January 20th. The only way to realistically stop him is to vote for Clinton. I hope people do the responsible thing, even if they aren't particularly fans of Clinton or the Democratic Party.
