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Start here: Eighteen states plus the District of Columbia have voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election between 1992 and 2012. Add them up, and you get 242 electoral votes.

What that means in practical terms is that if Clinton wins the 19 states that every Democratic nominee dating to her husband has won and she wins Florida (29 electoral votes), she wins the White House. It’s that simple.

But to do so ignores recent history. Barack Obama won 365 electoral votes in 2008 and 332 in 2012.

“He is in charge of our country,” Popovich said in a lengthy and impassioned press conference speech before Friday’s 96-86 win over the Pistons. “That’s disgusting.”

Popovich spoke for several minutes, even telling a reporter who tried to interrupt at one point that he wasn’t finished.

He said: “I’m a rich white guy and I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it,” said Popovich, a graduate of the US air force academy and the next coach of the US Olympic men’s basketball team. “I can’t imagine being a Muslim right now or a woman or an African-American, Hispanic, a handicapped person. How disenfranchised they might feel. For anyone in those groups that voted for him, it’s just beyond my comprehension how they ignore all that.”

Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.

He needs to flip blue-leaning states to his column, soften his public image -- particularly as he targets independents, women and minority voters -- and drive up Hillary Clinton's already high negatives even further.

Trump must win every state Mitt Romney did in 2012 -- plus an additional 64 electoral votes.

"If you add up African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics in Virginia, which are all growing constituencies, that's about one third of the electorate," said Tucker Martin, a Virginia consultant and former aide to ex-Gov. Bob McDonnell. "And then you combine the fact that we're a well-educated state -- it's a very bad match for him."

The Day the Republican Party Died

Where were you the night Donald Trump killed the Republican Party as we knew it? Trump was right where he belonged: in the gilt-draped skyscraper with his name on it, Trump Tower in Manhattan, basking in the glory of his final, definitive victory.

To his left, stopped for the night, was the golden escalator he’d ridden down when he announced his campaign last June with a rambling, unscripted address that invoked the “rapists” he said were pouring over the Mexican border, beginning what would be an uninterrupted series of shocks to the political system.

In 2004, the influential political scientist Samuel Huntington published Who Are We?, his manifesto on the tumultuous future of the American identity. The growth of black and Hispanic minorities, he predicted, would provoke a backlash among whites: The various forces challenging the core American culture and creed could generate a move by native white Americans to revive the discarded and discredited racial and ethnic concepts of American identity and to create an America that would exclude, expel, or suppress people of other racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. Historical and contemporary experience suggest that this is a highly probable reaction from a once dominant ethnic-racial group that feels threatened by the rise of other groups. It could produce a racially intolerant country with high levels of intergroup conflict.

in the last half-century, several events have pushed conservative white American middle-class men to conflate their majoritarian, economic, and cultural decline

Economic anxiety and racial resentment are not entirely separate things, but rather like buttresses in an arch, supporting each other in the creation of something larger—Donald Trump.

The larger number of white working-class voters implies that Democrats are far more dependent on winning white working-class voters, and therefore more vulnerable to a populist candidate like Mr. Trump.

Over all, 34 percent of Mr. Obama’s supporters were white voters without a college degree, compared with 25 percent in the exit polls, according to an Upshot statistical model that integrated census data

the Upshot analysis shows that all of Mr. Obama’s weaknesses were in the South — defined as the former Confederacy plus Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky and West Virginia — where he won just 26 percent.

Horizontal inequality is the term of art for inequality measured, not between individuals, but between racially or culturally defined groups.

like it or not, horizontal inequality, racial inequality above all, will define the general election.

Defining oneself at least in part by membership in a group is part of human nature. Even if you try to step away from such definitions, other people won’t.

The real threat is from the man who has done most to stoke national rage, and who will, in Cleveland, accept the Republican Party’s nomination to run for president. Win or lose in November, Donald Trump has the power to reshape America so that it becomes more like the dysfunctional and declining place he claims it to be

The dissonance between gloomy rhetoric and recent performance is greatest on the economy. America’s recovery is now the fourth-longest on record, the stockmarket is at an all-time high, unemployment is below 5% and real median wages are at last starting to rise. There are genuine problems, particularly high inequality and the plight of low-skilled workers left behind by globalisation. But these have festered for years. They cannot explain the sudden fury in American politics

On race relations there has, in fact, been huge progress. As recently as 1995, only half of Americans told pollsters that they approved of mixed-race marriages. Now the figure is nearly 90%. More than one in ten of all marriages are between people who belong to different ethnic groups. The movement of non-whites to the suburbs has thrown white, black, Hispanic and Asian-Americans together, and they get along just fine

Nearly four-fifths of white evangelical voters plan to cast their ballots for Donald J. Trump despite his multiple marriages, lack of piety and inconsistency on the issues they care about most, a new poll has found.

Support for Mr. Trump among white evangelicals is even stronger than it was four years ago for Mitt Romney

Some influential evangelical leaders have joined the “Never Trump” camp, while others have pledged support for Mr. Trump. More came on board after he wooed about 1,000 of them in a closed-door meeting in New York.

Houston floods: Disaster zone declared after 'historic' rainfall

Flash flooding and more rain is possible in Houston, a day after record rainfall killed five people.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has declared a state of emergency in Houston, where 70,000 people were left without power.

In 1850, like the Democrats and their allies in 2016, the abolitionists took a terrible hit. They had worked for 20 years to bring down the worst institution in American history, chattel slavery. And they thought they might have been on the verge of a breakthrough, with a proposal to ban slavery in all the territories taken in the Mexican War. But in the Compromise of 1850, Congress basically handed those territories to the pro-slavery forces, and, with an updated Fugitive Slave Act, it conscripted every Northern citizen into an army of slave catchers, obliged to aid in sending black people back to the slaveholding South.

And yet, a little over a decade later, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The abolitionists’ comeback was impressive. And it offers a road map away from the election of 2016.

What would the abolitionists do? They would gather in huge numbers every time federal agents came for a Hispanic honors student. They would compel those agents to use force if they wanted to proceed. They would document every moment. And they would use the media — back then it was the penny press, the Twitter of its time — to spread the images everywhere.

About 650 of the nearly 1,700 schools in the system have populations that are 70 percent a single race, a New York Times analysis of schools data for the 2009-10 school year found; more than half the city’s schools are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic.

He has spoken to white parents trying to comprehend why the local schools aren’t more integrated, even as white people move in. “They say things like they don’t want to be guinea pigs,” he said. “The other day, one said, ‘I don’t want to be the only drop of cream in the coffee.’ ”

“The preponderance of evidence shows that attending schools that are diverse has positive effects on children throughout the grades, and it grows over time,” said Roslyn Mickelson, a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who has reviewed hundreds of studies of integrated schooling. “To put it another way, the problems of segregation are accentuated over time,” she said.

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

there has been a significant shift in the role of the working class. You see it across all advanced industrial countries,” Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said in an interview.In the United States, Teixeira noted, “the Republican Party has become the party of the white working class,” while in Europe, many working-class voters who had been the core of Social Democratic parties have moved over to far right parties, especially those with anti-immigration platforms.

Acxiom. But analysts say it has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers — and that it wants to know much, much more. Its servers process more than 50 trillion data “transactions” a year. Company executives have said its database contains information about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States.

But privacy advocates say they are more troubled by data brokers’ ranking systems, which classify some people as high-value prospects, to be offered marketing deals and discounts regularly, while dismissing others as low-value — known in industry slang as “waste.”

Julie Brill, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, says she would like data brokers in general to tell the public about the data they collect, how they collect it, whom they share it with and how it is used. “If someone is listed as diabetic or pregnant, what is happening with this information? Where is the information

Before Asians, Hispanics and all the other groups can be won with economic plans, they need to feel respected and understood by the G.O.P. They need to feel that Republicans respect their ethnic and cultural identity. If Republicans reject immigration reform, that will be a giant sign of disrespect, and nothing else Republicans say will even be heard.

This is what so many on the right just don’t understand. Their very arguments against universal healthcare and gay marriage and immigration reform are all made as if the working poor, gays, and illegal Latino immigrants were not in the room.

we are not dealing with actual conservatives, prepared to negotiate or reform the bill for the better. We are dealing with what Richard Hofstadter called “pseudoconservatives” – alienated, paranoid, visceral loathers of any concession to the party that just won popular vote majorities for House, Senate and the presidency.

three years, one long and bitterly contested GOP primary, and a running-mate-selection process away, but it's fun to speculate. Plus there's already some evidence of their chemistry between Chris Christie and Susana Martinez.

“I love his authenticity, I love who he is,” she told the New York Times. “I will support Governor Christie in anything he decides to do in life.”

Christie spent the final weeks of the race trying to run up his margin of victory in order to reinforce his case for a 2016 presidential run. Martinez's job was to show up in heavily Hispanic areas like Union City and help turn out the Latino vote.