This does not require a revolution. What it requires is enough white voters to get excited in the right states. Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, president of Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies, framed the election outlook for Clinton in blunt terms: “If turnout is 70 percent white, I like her chances,” he said. “If it’s 74 percent … I’m very worried.”
There are other ways the widespread discontent with politics as usual could express itself on Election Day in a way that winds up hurting Clinton. Garin, for example, notes that while the candidacy of Libertarian Gary Johnson is “largely a wash, millennials are more likely to back a third party, and that hurts us more.”
More broadly, what if the fantasies of Hollywood screenwriters—that an engaged citizenry will rise up and flood the polls on Election Day—become real with a very different kind of electorate? Back last August, I argued in these pages that every once in a long while a dormant, disengaged, alienated slice of voters discovers it had a power it never realized it had; and that realization alone becomes a significant force.
If that’s what’s going on now—if voters find it empowering to upend the table, break the crockery and send every member of “the Establishment” running for cover—then all the turnout models of all the experts might be thrown into a cocked hat. It means we could continue to watch as the statements and actions that would destroy any other candidacy have little or no effect on Trump. It means that an implicit renunciation of the core mutual defense provisions of NATO carries no consequence; or a profoundly ignorant comment about Crimea—Trump apparently did not know of Russia’s involvement—has no impact.
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