The Trump Apocalypse Watch is a subjective daily estimate, using a scale of one to four horsemen, of how likely it is that Donald Trump will be elected president, thus triggering an apocalypse in which we all die.
On Wednesday, my Slate colleague and fellow Trump Apocalypse Watchman Josh Voorhees had a bit of a freakout. “[To] be a watchman means leaving your objectivity on the ground; up here the air is thin, and we’re prone to hyperventilating,” Voorhees wrote. “And so today I’m holding my brown paper bag with one hand and sounding the alarm with the other.” Based mainly on Trump’s steadily improved polling, Voorhees thus raised the TAW two full horsemen to an all-time high of three and a half horsemen.
I consider myself to be the most sober of all the watchmen. I never carry a flask when on duty. I have yet to break into celebratory dance at word of a Trump gaffe. And as I wrote in my first TAW, “[if] I could give Trump one hoof of one horse every day of Trump Apocalypse Watch, I would, that is how little chance he has of becoming president in my subjective eyes.”
The ups and downs of the campaign cycle have certainly been more up than down for Trump these past couple of weeks, which might make that March assessment appear shortsighted. But I don’t think Clinton’s polling dip changes the overall dynamics of a race that still favors her demographically, nationally, and especially in the electoral college. For what it’s worth, neither do the eggheads at the New York Times’ Upshot, the Princeton Election Consortium, and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, which—as Voorhees noted on Thursday—respectively are giving Trump a 25 percent, 11 percent, and 39 percent chance of victory. That averages to exactly a 25 percent chance of Trumpocalypse. Which also equates to exactly one horseman. And that’s where I’m taking this sucker. Stay tuned tomorrow to see if our completely scientific process brings us another wild swing.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
