One week to go

One more week to elect Hillary Clinton and show the Republicans that their ever-escalating lies and distortions failed to sway a majority of the country.  One more week to elect Hillary Clinton to preserve and extend Obama's accomplishments.  The alternative would utterly destroy those accomplishments and plunge the country into racial and social chaos as the narrow and bigoted spirit of the 1950s, risen hideously undead from the grave, stalked the land once more.  One more week to elect Hillary Clinton and keep our foreign policy and nuclear weapons in sane hands.

If things turn out as we hope, one week from now, no one will ever need to think or write about Donald Trump ever again.  In losing the election, he will give us back the most valuable thing we want back from him -- the space he now occupies in our thoughts.

Remember, too, that it's not just about the Presidency -- we need to get control of the Senate as well, to prevent the Republicans from blockading Hillary's appointees, especially to the Supreme Court.

A House majority is unlikely due to gerrymandering, but every seat gained will put us in a better position to take advantage of the looming divisions among the enemy.

And state governments matter too -- they're the ones that, in Republican hands, do all that gerrymandering, and spend their time and energy thinking up ways to harass gays, abortion clinics, and minority voters.  Support Democrats to get your state's leadership back to doing what it's supposed to be doing -- working for the people who live there.

Pundits like to emphasize the advantage Democrats draw from a far superior GOTV operation -- but that only works if people do, in fact, vote.

Based on the high turnout in early-voting states, and especially the high turnout of women, I'm daring to hope even now that we'll see a landslide that belies the tightening polls -- perhaps driven by a backlash of anger at the blatant Comey/Chaffetz effort to sway the election.  But we'd be foolish to count on that.  We have to fight every battle as if we could lose.

A few pre-election links:

FiveThirtyEight looks at the history of October surprises and concludes that they usually make only a small difference.

Sam Wang thinks Comeygate will have very little impact on the Presidential race (found via Hackwhackers), but Senate control is a different matter, with several states very close.  Here are some factors that may be decisive.

Racial vote-suppression tricks continue, in North Carolina and elsewhere.

Republicans brace for civil war after the election.

Just for fun:  North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory gets a newspaper endorsement -- from Virginia.