Quoth Nate Silver:

Clearer signs now of a tighter race, as Trump has inched up to 21% in our polls-plus forecast (19% in polls-only) http://53eig.ht/2934XS8. All of Trump’s gains have come from Johnson — who’s down to an all-time low in our forecast — and undecided. http://53eig.ht/29vlkLI.

Now here’s the interesting thing. From a Clinton-affiliated SuperPAC to Bernie Sanders to Al Gore to Barack Obama to Tim Kaine to Hollywood types (though, as far as I can tell, never Clinton herself), Democrats have engaged in a two-month long “a vote for Johnson is a vote for Trump” scare campaign, all premised on the equation “Johnson does well among Millennials, and the natural state of affairs is that young voters should all support the Democrat, and Johnson supports marijuana legalization like young people and unlike Clinton, so we have a problem of Millennial Bernie supports flocking to Johnson and we’ve got to raise Johnson’s negatives.” On social media and in mainstream media outlets from 538 to Politico to Slate, it was the same story.

But the Republicans mostly haven’t been engaged in any anti-Johnson campaign. Compare:
“A vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Trump: 8420 results
“A vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Clinton: 8 results.

(The results aren’t quite as dramatic for other ways of defining the search, but it’s always at least 2-1– and the “vote for Trump” results start with news stories featuring people like Obama or celebrities saying it, while I’m not seeing any results for Trump surrogates saying it.)

So: Democrats did, and Republicans didn’t, campaign against Johnson to try to shake those voters loose. Some of this was ideological, but some was just ordinary “run up the negatives” negative campaigning, mainly focusing on the idea that Johnson’s a dummy.

But it seems to turn out that in a race between the most orthodox establishment of Democrats and a an anti-trade crazy person only loosely associated with the Republican Party who is at constant war with other Republicans, the two-former-Republican-governors ticket had more Republican than Democratic voters parking their votes there for a while. And when one spends long enough telling people who are basically Republicans that it’s just like they’re voting for Trump, some of them finally shrug and say, OK, then, I’ll vote for Trump.” Consolidation of partisans is the normal equilibrium anyway, and departures from it are fragile. This departure seems to have been fragile enough not to last until November. So, as Silver notes, Johnson’s decline has resulted in a couple of points increase for Trump.

This of course was utterly unforeseeable and impossible to predict. Who could have known?

Yes, I’m irritated. So sue me. Come November 9, posts about intellectual substance will resume, I promise.