A crucial week in the campaign is ahead of us
Nate Silver is unsure whether the unmistakable Clinton slump is an aberration or something she should worry about. It seems clear that Clinton's physical health is of concern to voters; Trump's mental health has not been as conspicuously at issue as usual.
In any case, Silver says that if the race still looks like this a week from now, the Democrats (and thus, though he doesn't say this, anyone planning to survive the next four years) should be worried.
A prediction: should a demonic miracle occur and the Trumpmeister somehow win, there will be a schism in the Republican party and a new opposition party of real conservatives and traditional Republicans will be born.
Meanwhile, I'm told by sources in the McMullin campaign that the candidate is ahead of Jill Stein in Virginia and that he's beginning to show up in other polls. The trouble is that omitting McMullin from the polls becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: people won't take him seriously as long as they're told, in effect, that people don't take him seriously. This is ironic, because as an anti-Trump traditional Republican McMullin has a much larger potential base than either Stein or Libertarian Gary Johnson.
McMullin's strategy is to finish third in the electoral vote and throw the election into the House. There, plenty of Republicans who don't like Trump and Democrats who don't like Hillary might be tempted to choose McMullin, who served as an aide to House Republicans and is quite well known personally to the membership. It's a longshot, of course, and will continue to be one as long especially as the polls continue to insist on excluding him.
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