How many apostates will come home?

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

We are back to the razor’s edge, a likelihood of a close one- to three-point victory either way, and an even closer vote in the Electoral College. Once again, eyes focus on the Never Trump camp.

The more inept Clinton, Inc. — shrill, ad hominem, and conspiratorial — becomes on the stump, oddly, the calmer Trump finally campaigns — again, prompting the question of whether enough Never or Against Trumpers will have second thoughts that might help Trump win close swing states such as North Carolina, Colorado, or Nevada. In other words, will watching the spiraling Clinton criminality and shamelessness finally drive some anti-Trump conservatives to hold their nose and vote Trump? Will enough conclude that a conservative in a swing state sitting out or voting for a symbolic candidate is a de facto sanction of an agenda that they have spent most of their lives opposing?

Trump and Pence both have recently given impressive issues-orientated speeches. In contrast, an exasperated Hillary Clinton keeps resorting to Jimmy Carter’s 1980 tactic of demonizing the Republican nominee as dangerous, ill-tempered, and existentially reckless — without much interest in reminding supporters of the supposed benefits of her own progressive agenda. Her campaign is being reduced to unimaginative but familiar Clinton boilerplate: Trump is a bad guy, and the formerly sterling FBI director, James Comey, is now a corrupt Trump partisan. At the end, who thought that Trump would be subdued and campaigning on the issues, and the supposedly cool professional politico Clinton reduced to frenetic smears and conspiracies? Otherwise, Clinton apparently believes that, after her motor blew up this past weekend, the Democratic campaign boat can still coast to shore just ahead of a rapidly closing Trump. She could be right.

...It is said that the election poses risks. In fact, in the sense of uncertainty, it does not, at least in the case of Hillary Clinton: There is no mystery at all. Her long record, campaign, published platform, and solidarity with Barack Obama would ensure a twelve-year era of continuing left-wing court appointees, as well as a likely single-payer rescue for the failed Obamacare, more debt incurred for entitlements, a shrinking and more politicized military, more efforts to prune the Second Amendment, no to school choice, expansion of abortion opportunities, more hidden higher taxes on the middle classes and more overt higher taxes on the upper-middle classes, more regulations on small business, more tribal divisiveness, open borders, sanctuary cities and amnesties, crony-green capitalism, and a continued war on fossil fuels. And, of course, there will be endless investigations, more ruined lives of obsequious subordinates, more attacks on prosecutors and the FBI, plea bargains, and scandals as leaks just keep leaking — and always more white lies like her recent false assertion that James Comey wrote his reinvestigation letter only to Republicans.

The election could depend on how many center-right Republican moderates and independents decide that Hillary’s left-wing visions of a 21st-century America and her innate criminality finally become too much to endure, and how many at last demand her retirement from politics. If 300,000 to 400,00 apostates in three or four swing states feel that way over the weekend, and come home, she would be finished.

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