FTT Off-Topic: The Super And Always Close Presidential Race

Chad Me

Not sports, but also not long, so read or don't. 

Back when the American Presidency was misleading the public into broad support of a war of choice, there were two groups with a vested interest in making Al Qaida look as powerful, popular and terrifying as possible. The first was the American Government, and the second was Al Qaida. No one was ever going to call those guys a minor threat or something we could handle with the current resources, because that would mean no more money, or extraordinary measures, and their eventual deaths and defeat would be, well, meaningless. Which leads to a more than exceptional amount of suspicion over how potent those guys ever were, and if they got their big terror project done without help. (Note: I am not looking to discuss the merits of any conspiracy theory here; just the conditions by which such theories flourish.)

Now, let's pivot to the presidential aspirations and chances of either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, depending on which you find more terrifying. (We're going to ignore Bernie Sanders here, because when the guy who is on the wrong end of the 13 million to 10 million aggregate vote wants to talk about how the system is rigged and he should win anyway, we are into the realm of Losing Arguments, and need to move on.)

I am certain that, no matter what polling might say, or what either candidate says, we are going into a 5+ month "news" story of how this is too close to call, tightening in these key battleground states, and so on, and so on. 

Because there is absolutely no media entity that profits from a blowout race. There's also no candidate that would ever admit to being on either side of the blowout, because it would lead to less donations, and more casual voters not showing up on Election Day and hurting their down-market allied races. There's no one in this whole compromised process that gets paid for telling you that it's a blowout.

Imagine, if you will, if the same rules applied for sports. Every game would go down to the last minute, every referee decision would be seen through the filter of fix, and you'd never bet on it again. Or financial news, where the Dow goes up every day, except for that one day a month where it corrects back to reality and destroys people's lives. And so on.

So enjoy the upcoming race, folks. It's going to be a close one. And will never be anything but close ever again...