Click the map to create your own at The good news is that, one week from now, Hillary Rodham Clinton will be elected President of the United States. The better news is that Donald Trump won't be. It is hard to imagine that there has been a more venal, vacuous and vile major party nominee since Reconstruction, although George Wallace surely at least runs him close. Not that Clinton is in any way an inspirational figure in the mold of Barack Obama; she comes across as calculating and cynical, a cookie-cutter emblem of all that is wrong as politics as usual (although there is, of course, much to be said for the country electing its first female head of state). Yet there is, and has been throughout this campaign, a false equivalency. The choice is not between two equally flawed candidates; it is between a flawed candidate and a feces-throwing chimp. There really is no choice to be made.
The bad news is that a combination of her continued self-inflicted wounds, the media's obsession with the easy reporting of those wounds, and its normalization of a Republican nominee who has so many failings that would be disqualifying of any other candidacy, means that the margin of victory will not be as large as it should be. At one point a week or so ago, I dared to dream that maybe Arizona and even Georgia or perhaps Texas might be in play; now I suspect Clinton will fall short of 300 electoral votes. That will embolden the Trump wing of the Republican Party, and unless the Democrats also take the Senate, means that the Clinton presidency will be four (and almost certainly only four) years of unrelenting obstruction. What happens on November 9 and thereafter may prove to be of even greater concern than what has passed over the last 18 months or so.