Cheer Up, Everybody

And by everybody, I mean: Democrats. Republicans: don't cheer up. You have no reason to do so. As FiverThirtyEight, Nate Silver's website, points out, Trump really is losing badly.

The main question now is how many Republican Senators, Congresspeople, governors, mayors, judges, city councilpeople, dog catchers, etc, etc, Trump will drag down to defeat with him. And there's nothing for Republicans to cheer up about there, either. A few months ago very few people were talking about the possibility of the GOP losing control of the Senate. Now we see headlines like: it's possible the GOP will keep the Senate, despite Trump.

Yeah, and it's also possible that your guy won't keep shooting his mouth off, GOP. And that the huge and growing wave of prominent Republicans renouncing Trump won't convince a lot of people that Trump isn't really your guy. It's possible, in sort of the same way that monkeys might fly out of my butt.

Also possible, and much more likely, in my opinion, is that Trump has peaked, and that his peak looked a whole lot bigger in the GOP primaries than it will from here on in, and that it's all downhill from here for him. Nothing gets more people more intimately familiar with someone than running as a Democrat or Republican for POTUS, and it's possible that the better the general public gets to know Trump, the less they will like him.

It also seems that as people get to know Hillary better, less of them hate, distrust and fear her. Seems some people are beginning to see through some of the bullshit which the GOP had flung at her over the decades and which stuck. Trump's base may never get tired of hearing nonsense about Hillary's emails and about Ben-Gazhi; the general public seems to be getting tired of that sort of thing.

And that's just more bad news for Republicans, because, unlike the jaw-dropping things Donald says, the smear campaign against Hillary is mainstream Republican stuff. The less Republicans succeed in making Hillary look bad, the more dishonest and unprincipled they themselves seem.

And all of this is before we even get to the actual issues of policy on things like women's health and freedom to choose, green energy, tax breaks for Big Oil, labor unions, whether one fears that the government has too much control over corporations or that corporations have too much control over the government, whether the best way to help all of us is to help the poorest and weakest or the richest and most powerful, whether or not everyone should have access to affordable health care, whether too many tax breaks are available to corporate CEO's making 8 figures a year or more or to teachers and firemen making $50,000 a year or less, whether GLBT's don't have enough rights or whether they have too many, whether or not it's time to revoke the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, whether or not drilling for oil and gas in national parks would be a good idea, whether it should be easier or more difficult for people in the US to obtain guns and ammo, whether or not Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim Communist, etc. On every single one of those topics, the majority of voters favor Democratic positions more than Republican ones.

Imagine if undecided voters actually educated themselves on things like candidates' positions on things like those, and voted accordingly... *sigh* That'd be sweet.

Straight Democratic ticket is what I recommend. On some ballets you can still choose a straight party ticket. On others you have to try a little harder to make sure you actually voted the way you wanted to. Resources like Vote 411 are helpful with that. Or ask your local Democratic Party HQ.