It HAS To Be a Blowout

(Update: Thank you, Infidel753, for the link!)

The ongoing news about the 2016 Elections is going well: Hillary's numbers are up and Trump's numbers are down.

The big buzz is how certain states for the Electoral College are being viewed as safely Blue (Democratic) to where Hillary can cut back on the ad campaigns in Colorado and Virginia. From Jim Newell at Slate.com:

The withdrawals are shocking because these are not traditional blue states. Barack Obama converted them in 2008 and held onto them in 2012. It takes the mind some time to adjust first to the changing of the colors and then, after multiple elections, their deepening. But the numbers seem to check out. Clinton has always polled strongly in Virginia, and there haven’t been any new public polls since the Democratic convention or her selection of Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate—or, for that matter, since the beginning of Trump’s ongoing nightmare week. Colorado, meanwhile, hasn’t looked competitive for a while.

Take these two states and their 22 electoral votes off the table and Trump’s available paths narrow from a few to … two. Let’s start with the 2012 map as a baseline. Trump could flip Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to get to 273. He could win Florida and Ohio, lose Pennsylvania, and then win Nevada, Iowa, and New Hampshire to get to 269—i.e., an Electoral College tie and a vote in the House of Representatives. There’s still time for other states to enter competition: Maybe Michigan or Wisconsin starts feeling the red itch. And then there’s always the path in which Trump wins every state, beautifully, by a landslide, look at these crowds, and it would be terrific, just terrific.

Cut back on the sarcasm, Jim, that's MY job.

The point is, Trump is losing any chance of garnering the swing states he'd need to pull off a victory. Essentially, every state that voted for Obama in 2012 - save for Ohio, where the polling is in flux - isn't flipping to the Cheeto-faced ferret-wearing sh-tgibbon any time soon.

Even better for the forces of sanity, Trump is losing the reliably Red states:

• Arizona - where the Hispanic population is NOT in the mood for Trump's BS - is up for grabs.
• Mormons in Utah STILL hate Trump.
• Texas - the largest state out of the Top Five (CA, TX, NY, FL, IL) still reliably Republican - could well be vulnerable. If the GOP loses Texas, that's it game over. 
• And speaking of Florida, lick it up wingnuts lick... it... up...
• My personal favorite, my birth state of Georgia now has a poll with Hillary clinging to a slim lead.

Granted, polls don't equal actual votes. But the polling has been 9-out-10 accurate (or close enough) this election cycle to where it's going to take a literal shift in Earth's orbit to shake things up.

Why I'm thrilled Georgia is showing signs of flipping Blue on the map is that if this happens - if November 8th comes and Hillary and the Democrats are able to make major gains in Red states like North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas - this can well be the death-knell of the Republicans' Southern Strategy.

What has been the keystone for Republican game-planning for over 40 years since 1968-1972 of the Nixon campaigns, the Southern Strategy is what created the hard conservative ideology of the GOP that maintained discipline and won the occasional Presidential election, as well as grant them demographic control of the House of Representatives by using gerrymandering to craft safe Far Right districts.

It also helped turn the modern Republican Party into a bunch of racists, dog-whistling about black crime and illegal immigrants and ungodly women and sinful gays. Okay, I may exaggerate: There are still a good number of registered Republicans who are not haters at heart, who are as embarrassed and flummoxed by all this nightmarish stuff as the rest of us. But those Republicans are in hiding and refusing to confront this elephant - couldn't avoid this metaphor - in their room.

Conor Friedersdorf over at the Atlantic muses if the "White Identity Politics" has already poisoned the GOP to death:

The self-interested reason for conservatives to fear white identity politics is demographic: there’s an expiration date on any coalition that wins white men without college degrees but alienates a “Rainbow coalition” that includes college-educated whites. That date may have already passed. Imagine choosing now, of all moments, to run a campaign that actively antagonizes Hispanics who were born in the United States.

That date did pass, Conor. The second Trump made his campaign announcement by shitting on Mexicans and NOBODY in the Republican ranks did anything to shut him down, that was kinda the end.

This is why it's important for states like Georgia and Virginia and North Carolina and Texas (!) and MAYBE Mississippi and MAYBE South Carolina (!) join with Florida (which hasn't been really part of the Deep South since Disney World turned a profit) and vote Democrat. It has to be done in defiance of the most openly racist candidate we've had since George Wallace in 1972. It has to be done in a way to break the Far Right White-Boy dominance of the southern states.

It has to be done to break the Republicans' desperate game-plan to use racism to win their elections.

It won't be enough for the election to be a close win for Hillary / close loss for Trump. If it's close, the GOP handlers and candidates ambitious for 2020 will think to themselves "It could have worked if Trump weren't so obviously scary to picture in the Oval Office" and "I can win running his type of campaign, just smarter and organized."

It has to be decisive. It has to be clear to even the most blindly devoted psychotics at Fox Not-News that their way - fearmongering about the Other - no longer works.

It has to be Hillary winning big, racking up all of Obama's 2012 states as well as picking up North Carolina and Georgia and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas And Kansas and Arizona and Utah and Missouri and heck let's throw in one of the Dakotas.

It has to be the Senate campaigns - all thirty-four of them - flipping to the Democrats, a defiant slap in the face to the Republican Senators refusing to do their jobs like filling Supreme Court vacancies.

It has to be House Republicans - sitting in many a gerrymandered district thinking themselves "safe" - losing enough seats that the Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress after six years of Republican obstruction and incompetence.

It has to be the state governments of Kansas and Michigan and North Carolina and Florida getting cleaned out of Republicans who have mismanaged those states into bankruptcy or worse.

It has to be a blowout: Republicans losing their power across the board.

Maybe then - it's a fool's hope to think they will give up their Godly Narrative of Guns and Tax Cuts and White Pride, but still one must hope - they will wake up, stop dreaming it's 1985 1955 1855, and move into the 21st Century.

Get.
The.
DAMN.
VOTE.
OUT.
America.

And vote against everything the modern Republicans represent.