Just one thing still matters in the presidential race. It's not emails, Benghazi, Russia, immigration or anything WikiLeaks might cough up.
A large majority of U.S. women aren't going to vote for Donald Trump, they tell pollsters. He stands no chance unless they change their minds. That joke about "Maybe 19th Amendment people can do something about Trump" is no joke.
Mitt Romney won white college-educated women by 6 percent of the vote in 2012. He still lost. In a recent Monmouth University poll, Trump trails Hillary Clinton by 30 -- that's right, 30 -- percent, 27 percent to 57 percent.
Monmouth released a new poll Tuesday just on Florida. Clinton had a 10-point lead over Trump among white women of any level of education, 49 percent to 39 percent. Romney carried the same group in the same swing state by 17 points.
Numbers like these will ease. Many Republican women will get over their disdain and vote for their party's candidate, for instance. Still, a flip of the scale Trump needs is starting to look impossible.
Clinton stands no chance with middle-aged white men with no college degree. Trump stands no chance with blacks or Hispanics of any gender. Most other groups split, more or less. The group holding this election in its hands is quite specifically white college-educated women. And those hands, for now, tightly grip Mr. Trump's throat.
There's no great untapped reserve of angry conservative voters to counter this. The backlash to President Obama and to establishment Republicans found them all already. Such voters created Trump politically -- and couldn't even give him a majority in a GOP primary.
A Bloomberg's Politics Poll released Sunday asked likely voters how bothered they were by faults of each candidate. Fifty percent were bothered a lot about Clinton's cozy relationship with Wall Street. This -- not emails or Benghazi or such -- was the biggest concern about her. For Trump, a staggering 62 percent are bothered a lot by his history of disparaging remarks about women.
There's much more to women's Trump aversion than disparaging remarks, though. Clinton being a woman matters but isn't decisive either. I know my fair share of college-educated white women whose aversion to Trump exceeds their concerns about Clinton. I wrote a long, flowery passage based on what some of them told me. Then I cut it. If you're a woman like them, reader, you already know. If you're not, it would be simplicity itself to find out. Ask. You're likely to get an earful.
Perhaps some new email leak will end Clinton's chances. Don't bet on it. Clinton became the most scrutinized person on Earth over the last quarter century. She might be the most scrutinized person who's ever lived. Other objects of historic obsession -- Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, Hitler, to cite a few -- never left a trail of audio, video and electronic records that any public figure leaves behind today. All of Clinton's life has been combed through again and again and again. Not even Bill Clinton got this kind of scrutiny. After all, with Bill no one had to look this hard.
If a pot of career-ending gold sat at the end of the Hillary-hating rainbow, somebody would have found it. If she survived such scrutiny all these years and then created something new and shattering for us to find, she would be beyond stupid. Her understandable paranoia is where her private email server came from, and where the deleted emails from it went.
Even if someone finds something, I doubt anyone besides the people already voting against her will care. The private email server scandal broke in March of last year. That same month, this paper published a column of mine that's now poised to become the most prescient thing I ever wrote. Here are the key passages:
"Everything she has or hasn't done since 1991 has been declared a scandal by somebody. People have tuned the critics out ... . Too many people, especially in the media, credit the Clintons' survival to superhuman damage control. The rules just don't apply to the Clintons, we're told. What bull. Smooth operators would avoid embarrassments like the email flap in the first place. The Clintons survive because her harshest critics and the press have discredited themselves. If everything's a scandal, nothing is."
Now it's Hillary Clinton who can, in Trump's chilling phrase, "stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody" and not lose voters. Not when she's running against Trump.
Commentary on 08/20/2016