There are a lot of people who get paid to make their predictions about the future. The nature of the future makes this very imprecise and even the best of 'em don't have a great degree of accuracy. Even with a good historical perspective (which is always repeating), there's just too much to know to make a good prediction and the future will always be a little bit different.
Let me try my hand at some political analysis.
There are many possibilities of how this election is going to turn out. Here are my predictions:
1) First, let's follow a train of logic on what will happen if Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic Party's nomination. If she does, I think she will win the presidency; I don't think the Don can win a general election against anyone. (But who knows? Conservatives know how to participate.) So let's assume she wins the white house.
2) This will do a few things. First, it will continue to splinter an already dying party. Under half of the progressives still paying any attention to politics (a good portion have already dropped out due to low representation), won't vote for her. Most because they wont vote at all. The smallest number -- the best of them -- will do what we all should be doing and will vote with conviction and integrity for a third party. Knowing that if just a few more people decided to vote at all, and if a few more people voted with their actual beliefs, both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party would lose: no one likes them anyway. Some will vote Green, some Libertarian, some with conviction will even vote Democrat and Republican.
3) Most progressives will still vote for Hillary as a fear vote, and will be falsely mollified by their "victory", thus setting the chance for the progressive movement to make real systematic change back another decade or more. Both the Democrats and the Republicans will have the real victory: they are all 1%ers and not truly interested in the struggles of the average citizen as much as the profits of businesses. It is just not their world. They are too far removed from it to really understand. You can't hardly blame them, but you
must understand that: they aren't us.
4) After her victory, the conservatives will rally. It's what losers do and Hillary has more enemies than friends. Never forget, however, that they aren't really losers: they already own all the lower offices, so that trend will continue. Here is Colorado, Bennet and Hickenlooper will probably lose their office, and the same story will be repeated across the nation.
5) Now depending on who the Republicans can find to run in 4 years, they may beat Hillary. If they can sustain their rally, and if the liberals, who are really bad at defending or even noticing the lost of lower offices, fail to rally on our losses--which I predict we will. She may or may not get her second term, I'm not as sure on this point. Should she lose, we will have a really interesting situation: Republican president, both houses, and every state government.
5.1) Should this happen I will predict the imminent collapse of the American government. This is based on my interpretation that most Republican policy decisions are flat wrong for the majority of people. We may get a violent revolution, we may just turn into a poor society governed by monarchs. I don't know at this point. They may not get this, the Republican Party is collapsing in a different way than the Democratic Party.
6) If Hillary loses, we will get the Don, who will mostly be ineffectual, make some horrible decisions, maybe lead us into war, certainly cost us all our remaining international allies and respect, and lead us down path 5.1 above, but sooner rather than later and with a lot less support. So it might not be so bad. For prediction 6.1) I wouldn't be surprised if Trump doesn't serve a full term. He might just pull a Nixon after he sells Mississippi to Mexico and fly away. Don't quote me on that, though. I'm not sure how that end-game will play out.
7) If Trump wins, the progressives will rally. We will have a chance to take back the Democratic Party, run strong and moral candidates like Sanders, start winning smaller elections around the nation and start making headway against catastrophe. I know there are a lot of people who don't think Trump or Hillary is a catastrophe, but I tend to think they aren't paying attention. Both of these people would be cast as a villain in a comic book. In reality, politics isn't an "opinion", it is a theory. Someone is right and someone is wrong. Racism is wrong, we should know that by now, and so is classism and environmental destruction for short-term gain. We need to be playing a long-game here, people.
8) Or we can have our Great Turning now. Realize that profits are not the only thing that is good in the world, there are things that need to be done that don't make money, that we are close to collapse on several fronts, and elect Bernie Sanders to president, continue that momentum to put some strong and moral people in state offices around the country, and join much of the rest of the world and start making decisions that are good for the majority and the future of our planet. Colorado will pass Colorado Cares. Progressives will start showing up for elections again because that is what Sanders will ask for. Bennet and Hick might keep their office.
Of all of these, I like Hillary's candidacy the least.... I think it will unravel the Democratic Party. That is, perhaps, what it deserves. I can only hope that the Republicans have a concurrent collapse.
9) We also have a chance, should Hillary win the nomination, to rally a 4th candidate. Look at the other side of the board: the Republican party is as unhappy about Trump as any other sane person should be. And they have deck to play with: the first 2 years of any Democratic candidate's presidency will mean nothing: they will block everything anyway. That's their game and it isn't actually costing them points with their constituency: we all just hate each other anyway. There is no reason for the Republican's not to run a 3rd candidate. Which means we can run a 4th. We can have 4 viable candidates to chose from in one election, which is how it should be, anyway. Maybe we can even get a 5th! There's a real democracy. This opportunity will require people to actually think for themselves, so it is very remote.
Elect Bernie Sanders, because he will 10) have more capability of reaching across the aisle than we give him credit for: he isn't a Democrat, he doesn't have that label stigma.
Republicans like him more than Hillary,
Libertarians have joined his movement, he is a natural Green, if they weren't so debilitatingly idealistic, and real
Democrats will agree with him 90% of the time.
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