Sensible people everywhere spent the last week freaking out about the election. Donald Trump was closing the gap to Hillary Clinton in the polls—inching closer! pulling even! within the margin of terror!—and for a suddenly we were within one half of one horsemen of the Apocalypse. But the latest poll numbers show Clinton maintaining a solid lead among likely voters, and Slate's Trump Apocalypse Watch is back down to a less-terrifying-but-nevertheless-terrifying two horsemen.

NBC:

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump by six points among likely voters heading into the first presidential debate on Monday, according to a brand-new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The survey - which was conducted after Clinton's return to the campaign trail following her bout with pneumonia - shows a bigger advantage for the secretary of state than did polls taken during the heightened scrutiny of her health. It also finds that Clinton is running nearly even with Trump when it comes to voter enthusiasm. "Despite arguably the worst few weeks of her candidacy, the fundamentals still point toward a Hillary Clinton victory," says Democratic pollster Fred Yang of Hart Research Associates, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies.

But please, please, PLEASE don't stop shitting your pants: we can't afford to be complacent. We don't know if Trump's poll numbers are depressed because some people are embarrassed to admit they're voting for him (and they should be embarrassed), we've got three debates to get through and millions of petulant Millennials to pound sense into.

Oh, and Trump is polling well enough in some swing states that there's a chance he could lose the popular vote and win the White House. Because, you see, our founding/slave-owning fathers saddled us with an anti-democratic Electoral College because it looked so nice up there on the mantle with that anti-Democratic U.S. Senate they got us. (Although the U.S. Senate does look like the more Democratic institution today, because states can't be gerrymandered. Sad!)

But speaking of the electoral college: Hey, urbanists, progressives, blue-state voters, and city dwellers! Want politicians to pay more attention to the concerns of cities and the people who live and vote in them, aka 63% of the American people? Get behind the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact:

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among several U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their respective electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who wins the most popular votes is elected president, and it will come into effect only when it will guarantee that outcome. As of 2016, it has been joined by ten states and the District of Columbia; their 165 combined electoral votes amount to 30.7% of the total Electoral College vote, and 61.1% of the 270 votes needed for it to have legal force.

George W. Bush won/stole the White House in 2000 despite losing the popular vote, and Bush would've lost the vote in the Electoral College if a partisan Supreme Court hadn't intervened to stop the vote counting. (Damn you, Bush v. Gore.) The NPVIC wasn't rolled out until 2007 but every blue state in the country should've instantly signed on to the NPVIC in the wake of George W. Bush's disastrous and un-small-D-democratic presidency. But so far only ten states and the District of Columbia have signed on. Washington state signed on in 2009 and California signed on in 2011. But no state has signed on since 2014. Shockingly absent from the list of states that have signed on to the NPVIC, the mechanism that would've prevented George W. Bush's election and could've spared us from having to worry about Donald J. Trump losing the popular vote but winning the White House: Oregon! The lucky pierre of blue states!

Wait. Did I say "blue state"? Whoops. I misspoke. Because as we pointed out way back in 2004—when George W. Bush won both the popular vote and the vote in the Electoral College—there's no such thing as a blue state:

The red-state/blue-state map [on the left] shows the results of 2004's presidential election—red states won by George W. Bush, blue states won by John F. Kerry. But the red-state/blue-state map is misleading. If a Republican presidential candidate takes 50 percent of the vote plus 1 in any given state, the whole state is colored red (even worse, a mere plurality of voters can turn a state red when third parties are involved). The same goes for the Democratic candidate—win the most or a plurality of votes, and the whole state is colored blue. But painting an entire state one color or the other creates a false impression, an impression that we believe is hampering the Democratic Party's efforts to pull itself out of its tailspin.

Take a look at the [map on the right]. This map shows a county-by-county red/blue breakdown, and it provides a clearer picture of the bind the Democrats finds themselves in. The majority of the blue states—Washington, Oregon, California, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware—are, geographically speaking, not blue states. They are blue cities. Look at our famously blue West Coast. But for the cities—Seattle/King County, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego—the West Coast would be a deep, dark red. The same is true for other nominally blue states. Illinois is almost entirely red—Chicago turns the state blue. Michigan is almost entirely red—Detroit, Lansing, Kalamazoo turn it blue. And on and on. What tips these states into the blue column? Their urban areas do, their big, populous counties.

It's time for the Democrats to face reality: They are the party of urban America. If the cities elected our president, if urban voters determined the outcome, John F. Kerry would have won by a landslide. Urban voters are the Democratic base.

The Wall Street Journal condemns the NPVIC as "an urban power grab" that would result in "election efforts [that were] largely urban" and could even bring about "a multi-candidate, multiparty system instead of the two-party system we have."

Sign me up.

Instead of national campaigns focused exclusively on voters in a handful of swing states), and instead of national politicians focusing on an Electoral College with a rural bias, the adoption of the NPVIC would force national campaigns to focus on voters in every state. It would also force Republican politicians seeking national office to stop campaigning (and legislating!) against cities and stop insulting people who live in them—"San Francisco values," "the Chicago way," "New York values," "tax-hiking, government-expanding, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving freak show," "places like Afghanistan are safer than some of our inner cities"—while at the same time forcing Democrats to stop taking cities and urban voters for granted. Democrats would have to win as many votes as possible in urban areas—which would mean coming up with proactive/pro-urban policy proposals that would motivate urban voters to go to the polls—because winning a "safe" state by ten points instead of seven points could determine the outcome of a national election.

Signing on to the NPVIC is a blue state no-brainer. What's taking you so long, Oregon?