"Taunting Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton Pushes Into Red States"

HA-HA! Been doing some of that my ownself. "Never kick a man when he's down. Unless you can get him in the balls," as my (second ex-) father-in-law used to say.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is planning its most ambitious push yet into traditionally right-leaning states, a new offensive aimed at extending her growing advantage over Donald J. Trump while bolstering down-ballot Democrats in what party leaders increasingly view as a possible wave election. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/us/politics/hillary-clinton-campaign.html

Wait. What? A "wave election"? Perhaps I used the wrong metaphorical image.

Is that Trump Tower?

Ha-ha. But I digress. When did "wave election" replace "landslide"? Why change? Just to be all Quasi and twee?

I wrote one draft of a "Landslide?" post about a week ago but never published it. One reason was I looked up what a landslide election was in the Wikipedia and there was no firm definition, just a squishy "overwhelming electoral college win." Don't think Mrs. Clinton is going to get that.

But screw the electoral college, what about popular vote margin. No Wiki-consensus on that. I thought, "Double digits?" That seems a pittance by world standards but in America how many were there? Not many! as I recall from Wikipedia. I think Reagan's 18-point slaughter of Mondale is the record. Double digit wins really are unusual.

So wtf is a "wave election. According to the aforementioned,

"A pick-up of 20 seats in the House has been used as a cut-off point by analysts such as Stuart Rothenberg.^[6][7][8] 

According to Stuart Rothenberg in the afore-mentioned.

However, political scientist Dan Hopkins has argued that the term has little utility in understanding elections and that there is no clear cut-off point between a wave election and other elections.^[9]

Okay, you guys go have happy time in your academic circle jerk. Thank you very not much.

So I turned to FiveThirtyEight and there, bless his statistical heart, was Nate Silver making an executive decision that double-digits was a "landslide."

Sold! With two of the last three most recent polls showing Clinton beating the Crazies by ten or more, I'm now merrily thinking landslide. I'm not doin' the wave.