We are now in the post-convention portion of our program. Donald Trump received a mild convention bounce, during which Ted Cruz inadvertently brought some fence-sitters in on the Donald’s side by acting like a jerk on principle. This failed miserably, because he has no principles. Rather than fomenting a convention rebellion, permanently crippling the Trump campaign and cementing his status as a front-runner for 2020, Cruz merely proved that the only thing less popular among Republicans than a soulless, blatantly self-promoting demagogue is a soulless, blatantly self-promoting ideologue.

Schrödinger’s Candidate

I once had an astronomy teacher who disliked cats intensely – dead, dying, or imperiled cats often figured in his classroom badinage; his explanation for centripetal / centrifugal force began thus: “Let’s say I’m swinging a dead cat around my head by its tail…” I can only assume he or someone like him invented the term “dead cat bounce.” Usually said of stock trends, it is the term used for a brief, upward blip in a graph that is headed inexorably for the basement. The concept stems from the notion that even a dead cat will bounce if dropped from a great enough height (say, Trump Tower.)

Not only was Trump’s bounce a dead cat bounce, Trump actually threw the cat off the roof. While the Democratic National Convention was winning liberal fence-sitters with a brilliantly conceived and executed program that also reached out to centrists and even (gasp!) Republicans, Comrade Trumpski kept cozying up to Putin, and continued to do so in the wake of the convention, while simultaneously losing a running gun battle with the Khans, a sympathetic Muslim-American Gold Star family, the face of American Melting Pot Exceptionalism.

Trump’s numbers aren’t just headed for the basement. There’s Nine entire Circles of Hell preparing for a dead cat onslaught.

Despite the firming up of his support among the base, Trump is now in as deep a hole as he was pre-convention, and it only appears to be getting deeper, as the man is constitutionally unable (pun intended? Yes, I think so.) to Just. Stop. Digging. So what does this mean to the race?

What race?

Trump is already claiming the results will be illegitimate in November if he loses. He is already trying to get out of at least two debates, perhaps hoping he can bluster, brag and bullshit his way through the one closest to Election Day. He still has yet to build up his air game – his campaign has run virtually no ads – or his ground game – his campaign is relying on the Republican Party. He is getting caught in lie after lie, and they are STUPID lies, I mean, real stinkers that are false on their face and/or easily debunked by videotape of the candidate himself, saying the exact opposite. Or by his running mate, whose job seems to be to walk behind this circus elephant/clown hybrid, shoveling up steaming piles of dung while intoning “What Donald REALLY meant was…”

So, clearly, both Trump and Pence know that Trump/Pence is losing and is likely to keep losing. Trump’s “Mourning in America” convention speech actually lost him votes. Meanwhile, Clinton’s favorability rose and her negatives fell. Her lead is back up around 5 points nationally. The state polling data has yet to catch up with the national polling data, but even that will not be a true measure of how badly Trump is losing.

See, Trump may be polling at a 5-point lead in someplace like Utah, but there is still no way to account for how likely a Trump supporter on the phone is to 1) continue to stick by Trump over the next 3 months 2) continue to stick by Republicans, but vote Johnson come November 8, or 3) just simply stay home out of disgust.

Without a strong GOTV effort in ANY state, the Trump “Campaign” (and I use that word VERY loosely) has no way of solidifying weak support and moving folks to the polls. If he continues to be a complete idiot – very likely, no? – and continues to plumb new depths of whiny, (dead) catty, thin-skinned bullying, traditional Republicans who dislike Hillary and/or Democrats in general are likely to just stay home, or indeed switch to Johnson, putting many more states into play to turn blue on a one-time-only, special circumstances basis.

Democrats could have fielded an actual dead cat, this year, and still won in a landslide.