Three days ago Nate Silver published an analysis that broke up the polling along gender lines.

If only the men voted Trump would win 350 votes to 188. But if only women voted Clinton would win an astonishing 458 votes to 80.

That was before the second debate and the 2005 videotape had any impact. Clinton trailed Trump by 11 percentage points among men but led him by 33 points among women.

Silver doesn’t mention it, but his analysis started a Twitter campaign to revoke the voting rights of women. Hashtag #repealthe19th referred to the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote in 1920.

The post-election update showed Trump remained in the “still getting worse” bucket:

Trump’s chances are down to 14 percent in our polls-only forecast (against an 86 percent chance for Hillary Clinton) and to 17 percent, a record low for Trump, in our polls-plus forecast.

That looks dire and irretrievable. Silver suggests that Trump needs more votes from women, college-educated white men or people of color to win the election. Seems unlikely.

There is a theory that Trump is trying to piss these people off with politics so much that they’ll stay home. However, it’s a dangerous strategy because he’s also shedding voters on his own side and making himself increasingly unelectable, to the point where influential people are urging the Republican Party to walk away from him.

I think at least four women have now come forward, saying they have received Trump’s unwanted attention, to put it mildly.

Trump said it’s all lies and has demanded a retraction from the New York Times. Their vice-president and assistant general counsel Mr McCraw refused.

“You’ve asked that we ‘remove it from [our] website, and issue a full and immediate retraction and apology.’ We decline to do so,” Mr McCraw wrote.

“Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.

“Our reporters diligently worked to confirm the women’s accounts. They provided readers with Mr Trump’s response, including his forceful denial of the women’s reports.”

You can read about it, and how he’s upset Michelle Obama at your ABC.

If Trump says these people are lying, he should have thought about that possibility before he took the low road.

Clinton needs to win big

Thomas Friedman says Clinton needs to win big. If she doesn’t at least take the Senate, she’ll be driven to the left, and will get nothing done, as the ratbag right of the GOP hold sway:

We have known that ever since the G.O.P. speaker of the House John Boehner quit, not because he couldn’t work with President Obama but because roughly a quarter of House Republicans, the so-called Freedom Caucus, were simply not interested in governing and had made his job impossible.

For the sake of the country, this version of the Republican Party has to be fractured, with the extreme far right going off with the likes of Donald Trump, the Tea Party, Ted Cruz — along with all the right-wing TV and radio gasbags who thrive on chaos — leaving behind a moderate center-right bloc, which, one hopes, one day would become the new G.O.P. But it will need to nurture a new base, one inspired by a Jack Kemp spirit of conservative innovation, not by Trump dog whistles of anger, xenophobia and racial enmity.

Toward that end it is particularly important that Trump be crushed at the polls to send the message inside the G.O.P. and out that someone of his poisonous ilk can never win in America, and to strip him and his loyalists of any argument that the election was rigged. (Emphasis added)

Russians hacking US elections

If you google the above phrase you’ll find plenty to send a shiver up your spine.

Richard Forno, Senior Lecturer in Cybersecurity and Internet Researcher at the University of Maryland, says it is quite possible. A 2015 report found that electronic voting machines in 43 of 50 US states are at least 10 years old, and that state election officials are unsure where the funding will come from to replace them.

In 2006, Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten demonstrated how to install a self-propagating piece of vote-changing malware on Diebold e-voting systems in less than a minute. In 2011, technicians at the Argonne National Laboratory showed how to hack e-voting machines remotely and change voting data.

Tim Stevens, lecturer in global security at Kings College, London, says the Russians have already infiltrated the electoral registries in Arizona and Illinois.

He says it’s “vanishingly unlikely that such interference could directly engineer an election result” but he thinks they are bold enough to have a go, and the entire election could end up in the Supreme Court.

It’s quite probable that hacking will be successful enough to make the count a farce. That would no doubt please Putin.

What should Hillary say about Bill?

Certainly Hillary Clinton started it with goading Trump for his attitude to women, and calling a former Miss Universe “Miss Piggy”.

There’s a theory that Trump took the bait to energise his white male base, who in fact tend to stay home on election day. By talking about Bill.

Virginia Heffernan has said what she would like Hillary to say when Trump asks about her cheating husband?

This photo appears in the article:

Heffernan makes judgements about the history, Hillary’s reactions and attaches labels, and suggests a statement that shows Hillary’s grit, resilience, perseverance, but also puts her in the position of a victim.

It was 17 years ago. My definite impression is that they’ve long resolved the issues. I can understand that Hillary doesn’t want to open all that up again, as doing so would change everything once again.

If you want to touch these things, be gentle, respectful and forward-looking.

And what of Trump?

Hillary supported her husband at the time, was betrayed, but the relationship endured, and it appears evident that trust has been rebuilt. No-one is pretending that what Bill did was OK.

Trump insists that what was said back then was mere locker room banter and as such was OK. It’s a question of character. Now. As Americans decide who will be president.

The latest is that Trump is saying Hillary took performance enhancing drugs before the debate:

“I think she’s actually getting pumped up. You wanna know the truth. She’s getting pumped up. You understand.”

At the head of this post is an image of half a recent Time Magazine cover of August 22. Now they’ve returned to the theme for the issue due on October 24:

Nate Silver currently gives Clinton an 82.5% chance of winning.