Hillary Clinton’s Open Road to Victory

October has been good to Hillary Clinton and bad for Donald Trump. Clinton’s lead has grown in just about every national poll, and several battleground states that look competitive towards the end of September have now swung convincingly in Clinton’s favor.

Last night’s debate proved once again that Donald Trump is totally unqualified to become President of the United States. His refusal to state that he would support Hillary Clinton if she is the choice of the voters on November 8 goes against  American tradition, and today many Republicans were criticizing him for his refusal to support whomever the people choose at their president.

The FiveThirtyEight election website gives Mrs. Clinton an 86.2% chance of winning the election compared to just 13.7% for Mr. Trump. The same site is projecting that Clinton will win 343 Electoral Votes to 194 for Trump. The folks over at Real Clear Politics show similar results with Mrs. Clinton up by double digits in some national polls.

Flush with money and confidence, the Clinton campaign is pushing into red states such as Texas, Arizona, and Utah, where Democrats haven’t won in decades. The goal is not only to help Mrs. Clinton achieve a landslide victory on November 8 but also to bolster Democrat chances of winning control of the Senate.

Things are looking good for the Democrats in the battle for control of the Senate, The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics currently has the both the Republicans and Democrats winning/holding 47 seats with six seats rated as toss-ups, but with Mr. Trump making increasingly bizarre statements the public is rapidly turning blue.

While a long shot, there is even some talk of Democrats taking back control of the House of Representatives. According to some Republicans, Speaker Paul Ryan has warned that it is a possible outcome, pointing out that the Republicans lost 21 seats in 2008 when Barack Obama beat John McCain by seven percentage points. The Democrats would need to beat that number by at least nine seats, as they need a minimum of 30 seats to reinstall Nancy Pelosi in the Speaker’s chair.

Yet now, with less than four weeks to go, Democrats are suddenly hopeful they can pick up the 30 seats they need to recapture the majority.
— Politico

Clinton supporters and many Democrats, seem to feel the election is already won, a feeling also being expressed by a growing number of Republicans. The Clinton’s are probably too experienced in politics to take anything for granted and are aware of the risks in relaxing with 19 days still to go in the campaign.

Mr. Trump’s campaign shows few signs that they can move past the revelations that have rocked his campaign since the release of the Hollywood Access. A tenth woman came forward today with her story of Trump’s unwanted sexual advances, and his argument of ‘blame the victim’ is increasingly lame.

In the meantime, there continues to be a steady stream of emails being released by WikiLeaks and hacked by the Russian government. To date, there has been no ‘smoking gun’ in the released documents, and while some are embarrassing to the Clinton camp, the hacked emails do not appear to be causing damage to Mrs. Clinton in the polls.