Courtesy of Nate Silver: a reality check for lefties telling themselves they can "safely" vote for Jill "Harambe" Stein because Clinton has this in the bag...

Clinton’s ahead, by a margin of about 3 percentage points in an average of national polls, or 4 points in our popular vote composite, which is based on both national polls and state polls. While the race has tightened, be wary of claims that the election is too close to call—that isn’t where the preponderance of the evidence lies, at least for the moment. If one candidate is ahead by 3 or 4 percentage points, there will be occasional polls showing a tied race or her opponent narrowly ahead, along with others showing the candidate with a mid- to high single-digit lead. We’ve seen multiple examples of both of those recently.... [But] Clinton’s lead peaked at about 8.5 percentage points in early August, according to our models, and Trump has since sliced that figure roughly in half. Of Trump’s roughly 4-point gain since then, about 2 points come from Trump’s having gained ground, while the other 2 points come from Clinton’s having lost ground—possibly a sign that her lofty numbers in early August were inflated by a convention bounce.

Clinton is still in the lead: Silver is "only" giving Trump a 31.8% chance of winning the election. But Silver only gave Trump a 5% chance of winning the GOP nomination.

And yesterday on The Gist—one of my favorite podcasts—Mike Pesca's guest delivered a reality check for righties and lefties. Kori Schake is a former national security advisor to George W. Bush and a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy. She's a Republican—duh—who isn't a big fan of Hillary Clinton (she offers a pretty thoughtful critique) but thinks Trump's election would endanger the country. She thought about voting third party, or writing someone in, but she thinks the stakes are too high and the risk is too great:

Kori Schake: For both my sister and me, persuading our mother is actually the standard of 'can you deliver the American people,' because our mom is contrary and she is not easily persuaded, even by two women that she loves.

Mike Pesca: Yeah, and we have to say that your sister is Kristina Schake, who is deputy communications director for Hillary Clinton. And so it's kind of nice that you'll be voting for the same candidate—or will you be voting for Clinton or just not Trump?

Kori Schake: I am with great misgivings, going to vote for Clinton. So for the first time in our lives my sister and I are going to vote for the same candidate. I think most conservatives are in the decision space of opposing Trump, certainly the national security conservatives, [they're] opposing Trump but finding Clinton so distasteful that they're going to write in an alternative candidate. And I was luxuriating in doing that same thing until I watched the polling on the British EU referendum. The polls were off by twelve points, in many cases, in the referendum and it made me worry that this may be such an unusual election cycle that polls will be quite substantially inaccurate and that people who think they can cast a safe vote in opposition and not bear any responsibility for Trump's election. I think those people may be mistaken. I think it could well be this is an election where every vote really counts.

Lefties currently luxuriating in the thought of voting for Jill "Wrong Way" Stein or Garry "Guns Blazing" Johnson—or the thought of writing in the name of some other paragon of perfectly purity—need to a look a long, hard, sober look the polls. With polls showing Trump tied or ahead in reliably blue states like Iowa and Michigan and Clinton close or tied in reliably red states like Texas and Mississippi, we can't safely say this state is red, this state is blue, this state is safe, this state is not. We're all living in unsafe states now.

This is an election where every vote is going to count—even in Washington state, which Clinton is expected to win handily. The popular vote matters too.