Prediction for the election at the end.
In thinking about Donald Trump, the best analogy I can come up with is Prohibition (maybe that’s why people are drinking so much these days). Prohibition, the 18th Amendment, and the Volstead Act. Society had some problems, but rather than face them appropriately, folks railed to ban the drink instead. 13 years later, recognizing their grave mistake, they admitted their own fallibility and recanted. And drank some more.
That’s what Trump looks like to me. He looks like the 18th Amendment: an overt affront to liberty and justice to try to deal with a very select subset of problems. He’s a bullet that misses the mark but may well take off the side of America’s face.
Trying to deport over ten million people will not go well. It will hurt socially, economically, and spiritually. It will throw chaos far and wide as people, human beings, seek refuge from the grasp of the law just as under prohibition. It will raise prices and cause economic turmoil, as prohibition did.
Before giving my completely non-scientific, mathematically illiterate prediction for the 2016 election, it’s important to point out certainties that exist. Chief among these is climate change. While various sites and news organizations have polled who should or will be president, giving aggregated probabilities, we know with certainty that the world faces climate change.
While we don’t know how much the seas will rise, precisely, or just how fast it will happen, we do know that heat melts ice and oceans will rise. There’s nothing political about it. Your opinion doesn’t matter. It’s physics, and it’s going to make prohibition or foolish policies on trade look like they’re potholes while we ignore the ‘road ends’ sign.
It’s also clear, based on history and rhetoric, that only one candidate will even try to turn before we head off the end of the road. Hillary Clinton has modest plans, as Obama has had, but compared to the certainty that the Republican candidates find themselves utterly unable to admit that action is needed (you’d think with all their bravery in saying “Radical Islamic Terrorism” that they could say “climate change,” but they can’t).
So I predict with high certainty if we do not deal with climate change, fast and hard, it will deal with us.
I predict Hillary Clinton wins with either 307 or 322 electoral votes (depends on North Carolina).
In the Senate, I predict Democratic control with 51 seats (could be 52 if either NC or NH break a little harder for Democrats).
In the House, I predict a majority for the Republicans on the order of 15-20 seats.