WASHINGTON
:
Hillary Clinton is tightening her stranglehold on the US Electoral College despite her relatively passive performance in the second debate, with polls showing she is now leading in most battleground states, including Florida, Pennsylvania, and marginally in Ohio too.
Iowa and Arizona are about the only toss up states where GOP nominee
Donald Trump is still ahead, and at current numbers, Hillary will crush him 340-198 in the 538-member electoral college which decides who will be the winner regardless of the nationwide popular vote. Real Clear Politics' poll of polls also shows Clinton ahead by about 5% (47.9-43) in nationwide popular vote, with expanding leads in key states that will determine who gets the electoral votes from there in a winner-take-all system.
For instance, a CBSYouGov poll put Clinton 46-42 ahe ad in Ohio, giving her the full quota of the state's 18 electoral votes if she wins it. She's also comfortably ahead in Pennsylvania for the state's 20 electoral votes, and without winning one of these big industrial rust belt states, Trump cannot hope to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to be elected president.
Trump's fading appeal appears to be an outcome of dimi nishing support from voters offended by his crude, lewd objectification of women as revealed in taped interviews more than a decade ago. An NBC News Poll before the tape surfaced showed 63% of likely voters saying Trump did not respect women, a number that jumped to 69% after the tape.
Whether his counterstrike to neutralise the negative view of him by raking up
Bill Clinton
's philandering will put him back in the race remains to be seen, but it appears unlikely .Still, there doesn't appear to be any diminution of support from his hardline base of white, blue-college voters with limited education.
Trump's own advisors and aides believe he won the second debate, or at least staunched the bleeding from his “lockerroom talk“ with his gambit of attacking Bill Clinton's alleged womanising and putting Hillary Clinton on the defensive. His campaign chief Kellyanne Conway called it a “masterful performance“ that kept Clinton off-balance, and his vicepresidential nominee Mike Pence tweeted “Congrats to my running mate @realDonaldTrump on a big debate win,“ setting at rest speculation that he might drop out of the race.
But the Republican Party itself is in a shambles with the likes of John McCain decamping from the Trump bandwagon, and it has become increa singly clear that the moderate wing of the party will at the very least abstain from supporting the maverick billionaire.
Trump himself is disdainful of them and has threatened retaliatory action, and some of them up for re-election in polls that are concurrent with the presidential election could lose, endangering existing Republican control of the Senate and even the House, where it has a comfortable majority . On Twitter, Trump attacked the Republicans fleeing his campaign as “self-righteous hypocrites“ and predicted their defeat at the ballot box.
All this is of immense consequence to the rest of the world, which is either tied to America's coattails or joined at the hip, mostly in economic terms.
The loss of civility and bipartisanship, evident in the fact that the two candidates did not even shake hands before the debate and Trump threatened Hillary with jail if he wins, means Washington will become a hard place to do business.