This is our map, projected. Make your own map here.

The Big Picture - 
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — These are the last words I will write and publish before the election on Tuesday, Nov. 3, and I have to be brutally honest.

There will be no pretense or posturing here. I could turn out to be wrong, but I don’t think so.

We are down to the licklog now, as they say in cattle ranching, or down to the last second before the cattle are slaughtered after a last trip to the salt lick and water pond to put on their final pounds before being weighed for beef.

At this time in November, 2016, with most pollsters and pundits fairly certain of a win over Republican Donald Trump by Democrat Hillary Clinton, I was reporting that the race was still too close to call with Trump trending in the final two weeks with a good chance of winning the race.

US Presidential Election Too Close to Call in Final Week

I reported that a 10-point drop in African American turnout for Clinton in urban areas coupled with a 5-point increase in turnout by white Republicans in rural areas could flip the race to Trump.

That’s exactly what happened, so we would seem to have a little more credibility than the mainstream mass media and big name pollsters on TV.

The LA Times poll actually had Trump up by 7 points, but that was thrown out as an outlier by poll aggregators.

I was also worried that while Hillary was very popular with Democratic women, she had high negative numbers with many voters, including white and black men. Not my opinion. Just a fact.

The mainstream media and even the FBI was still talking about her emails, a story that should have been settled as irrelevant back in the summer. Also her campaign was ignoring key districts in some key battleground states, and mostly putting out boilerplate political public relations statements (PR) that was not catching on with users on social media.

Like her statement on the Dakota Access oil pipeline being constructed to cross the Missouri River at Standing Rock, North Dakota, where she never went to talk to Native American leaders. It was political gobbledegook, and she lost the Native American vote — and the election — because of it.

I know, because I was there in the final days of the campaign, on a 6,000 mile, 28-day trip out west.

From a Lakota Perspective, the Holocaust Against Native Americans Must End: Standing Rock Sioux Protest is About More than Stopping One Pipeline

This time things are different.

After four years of dealing with the daily chaos of Trump’s tweets, except for Trump’s white, racist redneck followers in rural areas, mostly in the South, the American people are exhausted and fed up with this crazy crap. Especially in the middle of dealing with the most devastating health pandemic ever, not to mention the wildfires and hurricanes.

Like many Americans, I have been afraid for the future over the past four years, especially the past year, when everything that could go wrong seemed to go, well, all wrong. It was a Murphy’s law kind of year.

It may not all be Trump’s fault. But he didn’t do a damn thing to try to fix anything. He seemed to think that his reelection chances, his power and wealth depended on keeping everybody mad, confused, scared, and up in arms. His strategy was the same as Russia’s, to undermine democracy itself and try to create an authoritarian dictatorship in its place.

It doesn’t seem to have worked in the end, unless we turn out to be horribly wrong in the days ahead.

A Landslide in the Making

According to nearly all the polls and other indicators this time, including record-setting early voter turnout and massive mail-in voting by Democrats, young people and the trend showing older voters turning against Trump for his careless handling of the coronavirus and rudeness in dealing with his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, Tuesday looks to be a massive landslide with Trump on the losing end of the vote.

Biden’s lead in the national popular vote has held steady at 9 points for weeks. There is no way Trump can carry the popular vote. He won in 2016 with 46.1 percent. Virtually all the polls now have him at 42 percent, at best.

Now I know many people don’t trust the polls anymore after what happened in 2016. Many people have told me that over and over again on Facebook over the past few months as I shared the links and wrote about public opinion anyway. It is social scientific research that we must follow to get a glimpse of what the American people are thinking at given points in time. Any one poll is just a snap shot. But we can also see trends over time.

But my prognostications are not solely based on the polls.

I saw working class people for myself with my own eyes in 2015 and 2016 in Mobile, Alabama — Jeff Sessions’ home town — show up at the first big football stadium rallies with their red Alabama jerseys and red MAGA caps to see the famous reality TV star and “businessman” ramble on and on about making America great again. This is empirical research. I saw how these voters, many with no college degrees just jobs from the old newspaper classified ads, respond to Trump’s key words and catch phrases like “build the wall” and “Killary Hillary” and “lock her up.”

I even talked to a number of those voters, including one neighbor who delivered Frito’s corn chips for a living. He was not a blatant racist or a member of the KKK. But he liked Trump and what he was saying, compared to the first African American president, Barack Obama, who talked over their heads as a Harvard lawyer.

We found out later about all the research behind those key words and phrases, and how they were used on social media and television to fire up many disgruntled people to vote, many of whom had never voted before.

But Trump’s appeal to the under-educated rural white vote has now peaked, keeping him around 42 percent at best in the polls. There can’t be many new voters out there who will stand up with this guy at the polls on Election Day.

Joe Biden

Meanwhile, in spite the constraints on campaigning in the era of COVID, Joe Biden has not missed a news cycle, handled himself well in the debates, and the numbers are showing him winning by numbers well outside the margin of error.

The race in some key states like Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina are still fairly close, but Trump is losing in Arizona and Wisconsin by wide margins. This tells me that Trump’s support is fading and the Biden-Harris ticket is trending up in the final days.

The Democrats also seem to have a good shot at winning a majority in the U.S. Senate, and will hold the House.

Election Night Outcome

While we have joined other news outlets in warning people that we may not know the winner on election night or election week for that matter, as we close in on the day I feel very confident that we may in fact see a landslide on Election Night. The numbers are there. I am feeling it.

So much so that we had a Halloween Party of sorts just north of the D.C. line in College Park, Maryland, Saturday night, toasting to Trump’s expected loss and Biden’s victory, with fingers crossed behind our backs.

Again, I could be wrong. But if there is trouble on Election Day or the day after, it is clear that far more Democrats than Republicans voted absentee or otherwise by mail. When those votes are finally all counted, there is no way Trump can win this election.

Trump is going down, baby, one way or another.

He and his followers will make a lot of noise, and threaten people, especially with scary lawyers, but they may as well be wearing Halloween costumes. It’s all just a show.

At the end of the day, Trump will leave the White House, one way or another, and his followers will either shut the fuck up and accept the will of a majority of voters, or the Biden FBI can just lock them all up and let them fight it out with the gangs in federal prison.

We may come to thank Trump for one thing: Bringing all the right-wing, racist, neo-Nazi militias out of the woodwork and into the open. We know who they are now.

As I was putting the finishing touches on this Sunday column, I heard a group of these Trump supporters who ride around in pickup trucks parading with blue Trump flags tried to force a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas, where it appears Biden has a good chance to take those 38 electoral votes. That would no doubt clinch the election. If Biden wins Texas, he won’t even need to carry Florida.

Well we know who those proud boys are now, and they will face charges soon. They raise their Confederate flags and “Don’t Tread On Me” flags in an effort to preserve their “freedom,” although it is clear they don’t quite understand that First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees everybody’s freedom of speech, press and religion, not just theirs.

Their actions will guarantee the end of their freedom, behind bars. Maybe some of them will end up in those scary private prisons for profit they so love that have been filled up beyond capacity with black and brown prisoners. It’s time to diversify the prison population and lock up some of these white assholes who don’t get the fact that they lost the American Civil War 155 years ago.

We Can End the Civil War Once and For All Time on Tuesday, Nov. 3