"I'm the worst part of your day," George Will told more than 500 attendees yesterday at the seventh annual Inside Alternatives conference in Denver. "I'm going to explain your presidential election choices."

When Barack Obama leaves offices at noon on January 20, he will be only the second two-term president to serve after two other consecutive two-term presidents since James Monroe in 1824. People are, and should be, very hungry for change. Since the economic recovery began in late 2009, the U.S. economy hasn't experienced a single year of 3.0% GDP growth.

That, according to Will, is Hillary Clinton's basic problem. The American public wants to change parties. Indeed, of the six last two-term presidents, only one, Ronald Reagan, was succeeded by a member of his own party, George H.W. Bush.

Donald Trump's biggest problem is the blue wall of 18 states in the electoral college that have voted Democrat since 1992. After that, Clinton needs less than 30 more electoral votes to win.

Many Americans, myself included, think their biggest problem is that they are both deplorable individuals, but Will was trying to stick to facts, not emotions—with difficulty. "We've never elected a candidate [the American public] considered dishonest and untrustworthy," he said. "This year we've elected two."

How did we get to this point? One reason the Democrats got stuck with Clinton is that, despite Obama's easy victories in 2008 and 2012, his party got "clobbered" in both the 2010 and 2014 mid-term elections. That decimated their ranks of up-and-coming senators and governors, as well as future ones down the political totempole.

Another reason is that while the electoral college tilts in the favor of Democrats, the congressional map favors Republicans, who are distributed more efficiently on ageographic basis. Obama won 27 congressional districts by 80 percent or more, Will noted. In 2012, Democrats got two million more House votes and lost by 35 seats.

A third development is the end of ticket splitting. In 1984, 45 percent of voters nationwide split their tickets, voting for candidates in both parites. In 2012, that number was 5.7 percent. The battle lines have been drawn.

Outside of Washington, D.C., Republicans are doing very well, controlling most governors' offices and state legislatures. There are 913 fewer Democratic state legislators today than when Obama was elected.

The big irony, Will said, is that Obama isn't unpopular. He has a 51-52% approval rating, which in normal times should be sufficient to carry Hillary Clinton to victory. But as Democrats learned the hard way in the mid-terms, Obama doesn't have coattails when he isn't on the ballot.

The Democratic Party may be the world's oldest, but only three of their presidents—Andrew Jackson, FDR and LBJ—have ever won with more than 53 percent of the vote. In contrast, Reagan, Nixon, Eisenhower and many Republican presidents before the Great Depression topped that level.

In a normal year, we "are a 47 to 47 percent country," with 6 percent of the vote undecided, Will said. Clearly, this is no normal year.

Despite their success in the states, the Republican Party faces some serious problems at the national level. They've lost the popular vote in five of the last six elections. Their strategy has been to carry Texas, all of the Deep South, the Central Plains and Rocky Mountain states, parts of the Midwest, and then spend almost "the GDP of Brazil" to carry Ohio.

At the political level, Obama's big achievement has been the expansion of the electoral map for his party. He won Indiana and North Carolina  once, and Virginia, Colorado, Florida and Ohio twice. George W. Bush won all six of these states twice.

One-third of Americans live in California, Texas, Florida and New York. Florida is the only true swing state, though Texas, where Clinton is polling far better than Obama, is becoming tighter, in Will's view. In 2020 and 2024, Georgia and Arizona will become true swing states.

Some say demography is destiny. Whether that's true or not, it is not working for Republicans. Forty percent of the people in New York City and 55 percent of the citizens of Miami were born in other nations.

Will told attendees that every four years the white percentage of the electorate declines by 2.6 percent. The Monday before he spoke at Inside Alternatives, Will spent some time with Rep. Mike Coffman, representing Arapahoe County outside of Denver. They visited a Hispanic charter school as well as Korean and Ethiopian neighborhoods. Coffman has 30,000 Ethiopian-Americans in his district.

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