The Slatest

Today’s Trump Apocalypse Watch: There Will Be Blood

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the Henderson Pavilion on October 5, 2016 in Henderson, Nevada.

Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

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.

The vaunted and eminently trustworthy medical journal WebMD says that there are two major types of trauma-induced internal bleeding. There’s blunt-trauma bleeding, brought about by collisions or blunt force, and penetrating-trauma bleeding, whereby a cut or puncture wound of any kind tears up internal blood vessels. For either type, external wounds might not indicate the full extent of internal damage.

I bring this up in an effort to diagnose what has happened to Donald Trump, the victim of repeated maulings from the Clinton campaign and the press over the past week. According to a report from the New York Times published Wednesday night, internal Democratic and Republican polls show the candidate might actually be doing a lot worse than the public polls we’ve been poring over suggest:

Mr. Trump has already slipped perceptibly in public polls, trailing widely this week in Pennsylvania and by smaller margins in Florida and North Carolina — three states he cannot afford to lose. But private polling by both parties shows an even more precipitous drop, especially among independent voters, moderate Republicans and women, according to a dozen strategists from both parties who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the data was confidential.

Liesl Hickey, a Republican strategist involved in several House races in swing states, said she was dismayed by a sudden exodus of independent voters in more diverse parts of the country.

“They are really starting to pull away from Trump,” said Ms. Hickey, describing his soaring unpopularity with independents as entering “uncharted territory.”

More damning that that? He was hit by both The Atlantic and U2 within 24 hours. You know the saying: As David Frum and The Edge go, so goes the nation.