Come on now, be honest. Did you panic on Friday night? Are you still panicked over the emails that might cost Hillary the election and cost you your sanity? Are you angry that Hillary set up a private email server in the first place? Even angrier that FBI Director James Comey had the gall to insinuate himself into the election?
I’m here to tell you that you are wasting precious emotional and intellectual capital by doing any of those things. Hillary Clinton will be elected president on November 8 and chances are good that the Democrats will control the Senate, if only because Vice president Tim Kaine will be around to break ties.
What makes me so confident you say?
First and foremost, there doesn’t seem to be anything that indicates this new batch of (10,000+) emails came from Clinton’s server. They are messages that Huma Abedin had because she was printing them out or they were duplicates of emails that Clinton had already given to the FBI. Of course, there could be some messages that we don’t know about or ones that Anthony Weiner saw and shouldn’t have, but that’s what the FBI is looking at. The GOP can say all it wants about investigating Clinton’s server, but that’s not an issue here.
Also, the Clinton campaign will make this about James Comey, and will do so effectively. He will need to defend his actions when other Justice Department officials told him that they opposed releasing such a bombshell so close to a presidential election date. He will ultimately need to say that he doesn’t know what’s in these emails and that to conclude that the are in any way incriminating would be wrong. Then the GOP will attack him and the story will continue to be about James Comey, not Hillary Clinton.
I understand why he sent his letter to Congress, because to sit on this information until the election was over would open him up to accusations that he wasn’t following the law. And obviously if there was something incriminating he has his duty to release it, but there isn’t any. In fact, his letter to FBI employees states specifically that they don’t know what’s on the computers. This is irresponsible. Imagine if you did that on your job. The job you would then lose, I mean.
The other nonissue is that most voters have already made up their minds and either have voted or wouldn’t dream of voting for Trump. This is where polarization works to Hillary’s advantage. If the GOP had a reputable candidate and the election was close, then I could see being worried. But Donald has already overreached by calling this as big as Watergate and I’m assuming that Comey will need to clarify that the FBI doesn’t know what it has, so that will undercut Trump’s attempts at blaming anything specific on Hillary. Plus, the email issue is nothing new and it won’t erase the terrible things that Trump has said over the course of the campaign.
What about the polls, you say? The polls have been tightening, right? Well, yes and not-so-yes. The margin by which Hillary has been leading, since July, I might add, is getting a bit smaller, but that seems to be because recalcitrant Republicans who were repulsed by Trump’s misogyny are coming back to the party. They’ll regret it later, but Trump’s improvement has been almost entirely built on his getting a greater share of GOP voters than he did earlier this month.
Most state polls, which are the ones that we should be watching, show that he’s behind in most of the swing states and has never led in the Electoral College projections since the campaign started. He could even win Ohio, Nevada, North Carolina and Florida and still lose, assuming that Clinton wins Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, which she will, so I don’t know why you’re bothering me about this. Probably because you’ve been consulting the mainstream press, which has an interest in creating uncertainty so you’ll continue to consume their messages. Please stop.
The most important thing that Democrats can do now is to vote. I know that some thought that Hillary had this in the bag, but that’s not true if people don’t vote for her and Democrats for House and Senate. Vote early if you can. This election is too vital not to.
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