Realville, as Rush often says, is where he lives.  That’s a place without blinkers or rose-colored glasses.  That’s actually where we all live, though some of us prefer to deny it.  That is, until reality bites.  Then our wishful thinking or willful ignorance dashes upon the hard rock of unforgiving reality.  The crackup always smarts.

Thus is the case with the 2016 presidential election.  There’s Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.  In other words, there’s Column A and Column B.  That’s the choice.  Column C is fairyland. 

Come November, tens of millions of voters will flock to the polls to choose between The Donald and Hillary.  There may or may not be a David French wannabe on ballots.  That’s a Bill Kristol-Rich Lowry prop-up independent for angst-ridden establishment Republicans and conservative purists to write-in.  The hope being that enough votes can be parked in Column C in enough key battleground states to elect Hillary.  No?  It’s just about stopping Dark Donald, say you?  Reality dictates a practical consequence.  Stopping Trump elects Hillary.             

Yet the aforementioned #NeverTrump rump cannot prevail in a Column C ploy.  It’s a conceit invested in a vain hope: to wit, that there are more right and establishment leaning voters who share their disgust for Trump than is actually the case.  Running an independent is essentially masturbatory.

A sideshow won’t succeed in a year when the main event is drawing attention like a supercharged magnet.  Whatever the lament from the GOP’s gray flannel suits, the Trump-Hillary square off is where voters want to be, skin in the game, money down. 

Then there’s The Assumption.  The Donald’s already lost.  Trump’s mouth, his foibles, and contradictions make him a sure loser.  And if they don’t, then the Electoral College is stacked against him.  Hillary’s got a lock on 270 votes.  Game over.

This from John Podhoretz writing for the New York Post:

She [Hillary] simply matches the 2012 result, wins the states President Obama won in the most recent election and becomes president with 332 electoral votes.  This static outcome is supported by two pieces of important data.

Podhoretz then dips into various electoral vote scenarios, most of which favor Hillary.  He assumes that Obama’s 50% popularity (at this instant) transfers to the Wicked Witch of Chappaqua.  He’s far too facile in his estimation. 

That the division of states favors Democrat over Republican is manifest, based on states’ voter compositions and recent presidential election outcomes.  Podhoretz isn’t exactly providing revelation. 

But isn’t this so even if Ted Cruz were the GOP nominee?  What about the establishment’s favorite, Jeb!.  Kasich?  Rubio?  Go through the list.  Well, yeah.

So the Electoral College challenge isn’t a dilemma inherent to Trump; it’s baked-in for any Republican.  There’s an argument to be made that Trump has a better chance of winning key battleground states and cracking the Democrats’ hold on one or two blue states.  Trump now has a track record in nomination contests.  Unlike Ted, he performed quite well and won in blue states (and in Deep South red states, just to say).  In fact, Trump drew more primary votes than other Republican in history.  A harbinger?  Perhaps.

Of course we know in a hypothetical matchup, Jeb! would have cracked the Electoral College code and cleaned Hillary’s clock.  Voters, you see, want an echo not a choice this November… a kinder, gentler Mitt, if that’s conceivable. 

Say finger-wagging Republicans, Trump’s mouth is doing him in.  Speaker Paul Ryan – vanilla in a blue suit – was quick to jump on Trump’s remarks about the Hispanic judge having a bias against The Donald in the Trump University litigation.  Why, PC ethnic politics require we find no fault amongst people of color.  Ryan is all-in on ethnic and race PC.  In what passes for clever in DC, Ryan added that he was still voting for Trump. 

This we know with great certitude: Democrats, the MSM, the intelligentsia, the arts and entertainment crowd, and those enlightened Millenials are going to beat The Donald from pillar to post for racism, misogyny, ageism – you name it. 

Of course we know that Ted or Jeb! wouldn’t have let their mouths run.  Because they aren’t Trump, accusations of racism, misogyny, ageism – you name it – wouldn’t have flown thick and fast.  If they had, there would have been no stick.  Jeb!, at least – like Mitt – would have taken the high road, ignoring the brickbats.  At minimum, Jeb! would have lost with dignity, as classy as Mitt was in defeat in 2012.  The GOP’s standing as the loyal opposition would have been exquisitely preserved.  

As Lincoln said about Grant, Realvillians say about Trump: there’s fight in the man.  Lots of fight.  Republicans are unaccustomed to battling – the real opposition.  Trump is a guy who speaks-from-the-hip and wears brass knuckles to bed.  The Democrats have their playbook, which they’d roll out against any Republican.  Trump’s relentless counterpunching may change the dynamic… may just rock the Democrats and their cohorts back on their heels… may give voters more than a craven silence that’s tantamount to surrender.

Of course there’s Hillary.  Somehow her incompetence and vast corruption (lest we forget Bill’s) won’t amount to squat this election.  It’s not possible that The Clinton Show may have played itself out, even among a sizeable chunk of Democrats, is it?  Not all Bern’s supports are pinkos; a not-small portion has parked its votes with Bern to protest Hillary.  All is not well in the House that Spurns Jefferson and Jackson. 

<This leads us finally to John Judis, a Democrat of a decidedly socialist stripe, and once a senior editor at The New Republic.  Judis is no Trump fan, as you’d imagine.  He, like #NeverTrumpers, believes The Donald is already toast.  Nonetheless, he goes on to enumerate reasons why Democrats should fret about Trump.   As editor of an online journal, TPM, Judis writes under the headline, “Trump's Victory Speech Should Give the Democrats Reason to Worry.”  Pens Judis:   Trump probably did enough the last month to doom his chances. But in his “victory speech” on June 7 in Westchester, which the pundits pronounced as “boring,” Trump took the third path. If he can maintain it, and make people forget Trump #1, he could be formidable. In abbreviation, here’s Judis’ bullets: 1) [Trump] framed the election in classic populist terms; 2) instead of the usual Republican bromides against government spending, he bemoaned crumbling public infrastructure; 3) cited the loss of manufacturing jobs; 4) [highlighted] his opposition to foreign intervention that wasn’t directly linked to America’s security; 5) used the slogan of “America First” to link his opposition to illegal immigration, but on economic rather than cultural rounds; 6) used “America First” to explain his opposition to NAFTA and other trade deals: 7) in his repeated promise to create new jobs, he specifically included African Americans with the highest rate of unemployment; 8) [snip] he honed in on where Clinton is most vulnerable: “The Clintons have turned the politics of personal enrichment into an art form for themselves.”                               

Such makes establishment Republicans and conservative purists blanch, mostly.  It makes Judis alarmed.  In Realville, it may just make Trump a winner.