From your keyboard to God’s ears!

I still hold out increasingly delusional hope that, with a week to go, both of these horrible choices will back out. Maybe Clinton will go due to her email. . . maybe Trump will go due to his business interests.

I know that this won’t happen, but I wish it would. Then we’d get two new candidates on a crash basis and I could laugh at all the people who insisted on voting early.

Honestly, I’m too charmed you spelled my name correctly to be mad about the rest. So few do! Thank you!

Unfortunately, if we do not change something very quickly — preferably by dumping Trump — Hillary Clinton is going to be elected president. If that happens, I will be very sad indeed.

We want the same thing: to stop Hillary. You just believe, in defiance of all available evidence, that Trump is the best man to achieve that goal. ~James

How about now? 😀

It’s interesting looking at the previous answers, the few there. I find it hilarious that your graph colors for question 4 are inverted. I seem to be your poorest respondent.

I’ve become more politically active since the last comment I’ve left. I’ve done some campaigning for a Senator and joined a couple of political groups. So, if the Citizen’s Party takes off, I’ll have some experience I can offer.

The number of times that has failed and it helped the Democrats is enormous. Mugwumps, Bull Moose, Rockefeller and Perot all tried to do this and the only people it helped was the Democrats. In each case we see the electoral infighting by the Republicans have allowed left wing policies (in order by group; Civil Service Professionalization; Union created Labor Laws and Prohibitions, Great Society etc) to become the law of the land despite a large coalition of Republicans theoretically having a majority.

Rightist political parties don’t have souls. They are diverse groups of people with different goals and different views about what conservatism looks like. Its why Mormons and Trumpites and Evagneicals and Libertarians hate each-other more then they hate the left. The Left on the other hand has the same goal; equality and fraternity. Their differences are based on how fast they should get there. Its why Bernie fans might be mad but few, if any, are going to try to tear the democrats apart with it. They realize that this election cycle, they decided to go slow rather than fast. They just need to bide their time until they can go fast again.

Its a fundamental asymmetry in American Politics which is why the left has been winning for all this time. To fight against it is to misunderstand just what is going on in our electoral system.

A very high percentage of Republicans find Trump repugnant, but are left with disagreeable choices otherwise. The same is true of Clinton and the Democrats. All of which shows the insanity of the acceptance of a two party system that isn’t a system at all, simply a habit.

Trumpism, in near retrospect, may have been with us longer than Trump.

This may be true in two ways. First of all, the GOP laid the groundwork for this by some rather cynical pitching it’s done since (and during Clinton I). So Trump is the fruit of that tree, it’s just that the GOP never thought the fruit would ripen.

Secondly, extreme populism has been with us for well over a century. It waxes and wanes, but from time to time it nearly takes the Oval office. We haven’t seen this for a very long time, but the nation has seen things like it before, albeit never anything identical to what we’re currently seeing.