Trump, Clinton and the final conservative pundit tracker.

The Election Is Almost, Finally Over. Here’s Where Our 25 Conflicted Conservative Pundits Landed.

The Election Is Almost, Finally Over. Here’s Where Our 25 Conflicted Conservative Pundits Landed.

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Nov. 5 2016 8:39 AM

This Week’s Conservative Pundit Tracker: Final Edition

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What's not to love?

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Since May, we’ve published a new chart showing where our group of 25 right-wing pundits stand on the question of Trump. This week, we publish the last installment of the pundit tracker. As always, our categories are “Voting Trump,” “Voting Clinton,” “Not Voting,” “Someone Else,” and “Inscrutable.” Someone else means either a third party candidate or a write-in. Inscrutable includes pundits who have voiced opposition to both Trump and Clinton, but are otherwise undecided, and those who are sharply critical of Trump but haven’t stated a preferred alternative. Click on a pundit’s head to see what he or she has said about the election this week, and look back on past weeks to see how minds have changed. (If someone doesn’t write or speak or tweet—crazy, but possible—in a given week, we assume they are “thinking…” Also: We are scouring the internet obsessively, but it’s a big place and it’s possible someone will say something that we miss. We are confident you’ll let us know in comments if so!)

When the longtime-loser Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians made the World Series, more than few jokey predictions surfaced about the apocalypse being nigh. Most noticeably this now-famous tweet from 2014:

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Freakishly, much of that scenario played out. The Cubs and Indians went to Game 7, and then extra innings. Alas, the Indians bullpen finally gave out, the Cubs won the Series, and we were not saved by Sweet Metor o’ Death, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, or any other world-ending event. Which means that on Tuesday, we will elect either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump to be our next president.

Our conservative pundits, after all these months, remain largely unhappy about that scenario. When we started this tracker, we assumed that most of the pundits would have declared a preference by now. My editor thought we would watch them all eventually line up behind Trump. (I had a little more faith.) But outside of the handful who are supporting Trump or Clinton, we know only that Ben Domenech wrote in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Erick Erickson is supporting Evan McMullin, and Charles Krauthammer is writing in Paul Ryan or Ben Sasse. Plenty of pundits, including Ben Shapiro and S.E. Cupp, have said they are voting third party or writing in, but have not been specific.

What most have been specific about all along is their high level of dissatisfaction with both major-party candidates. And that’s what they are still expressing this week.

Here’s Rich Lowry at National Review:

Trump may be a deeply flawed candidate, but he caught a wave of popular fervor; Hillary, with her astonishing vulnerabilities, is a production of the Democratic elites who did everything to get her over the finish line.
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S.E. Cupp, writing at the New York Daily News, echoes Lowry:

To be clear, Donald Trump should not be President. But if he is elected, Democrats who either naively or willfully believed that Hillary Clinton was their best option will shoulder a good deal of the blame.
Each political party has picked a loser this year. Unfortunately, one of them is going to win, and then the whole country can lose, big time.

After Trump told a crowd of veterans that he, too, was “brave,” Commentary’s John Podhoretz just about lost it:

Happy Election Day. On to the final tracker.

Rachael Larimore is the online managing editor of the Weekly Standard and a former Slate senior editor.

Suzanne Monyak is a Slate intern.

Andrew Kahn is Slate’s assistant interactives editor. Follow him on Twitter.

Holly Allen is a Slate web designer.