Even if Sec. Clinton wins, which I don't for a minute doubt, I'm really sad that our public discourse has been badly damaged. His candidacy alone has set back progressive goals for years. Children, for instance, are asking their parents what it means to "grab her by the pussy."

I think back to 2015, when I was writing press releases about how awful it was that he compared Mexican immigrants to rapists and killers, or how he proposed a total and complete shutdown of Muslim immigration (!) "until we can figure out what the hell is going on." How naive we were! How certain that it was all a joke, that surely he couldn't become a major party candidate. They couldn't be so reckless.

I know the 538 map has her at 82% and thankfully it seems her victory is likely (if we all vote!) but I look at those deep red states on that map as an enigma.

I'm sad that we're all going to have to deal with the stark aftermath of November, even after Sec. Clinton's win (for which I dearly hope.) I worry that the 2020 election will be an even more grotesque pantomime of this one, which I think you can all agree has exceeded the bounds of what any of us would have considered possible even 2 years ago.

I worry about the normalization of hate crimes and the mainstreaming of the alt-right. Mr. Trump has at least 40% of the vote, conservatively. These people must know whom they're voting for. You cannot explain away that audio. Do they truly think so low of our national institutions? To place a wild gamble on an unpredictable person?

I don't want to speculate what the cratered Republican party thinks about what their aftermath is going to look like. Funnily, they're probably as dismal as I am. But we're all going to have to pay the price for allowing this gentlemen to come within a hair's breadth of the office.