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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.
Things aren’t going well for Donald Trump. His running mate, Mike Pence, looked sharp in last night’s vice presidential debate, but now everyone’s pointing out that a big part of the reason Pence looked so polished was because he lied about Trump’s positions instead of actually defending them. Trump, meanwhile, is making passive-aggressive comments because he’s apparently jealous of the praise Pence received for his demeanor. The VP debate seems unlikely to ultimately help Trump’s chances of winning the election, which sit at about 3 to 1 in FiveThirtyEight’s projections and 4 to 1 in the Upshot’s.
Those odds are bad. But they’re not that bad! On Sunday, for example, the Los Angeles Rams were roughly 4-to-1 underdogs against the Arizona Cardinals. But the Cardinals lost. They performed better overall (gained more total yards) than the Rams, but made a few key mistakes (turned the ball over five times) and were probably victimized by some plain old bad luck. The Rams won 17–13. And this was not that big an upset. Upsets like it happen all the time, in football. All … the … time. I am subjectively raising our danger level to reflect the level of panic induced by this realization.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
