You did it, Bob Shrum! Your perfect track record now extends to 0 for 9 in presidential candidate victories due to your powerful "Shrum Curse."
Your humble correspondent was the first to note how the Shrum Curse doomed Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign the moment he declared certain victory for her on September 2. Here is a gloating Shrum spiking the football and declaring the election basically over that day on With All Due Respect in a video posted by Bloomberg Politics titled "Bob Shrum Says Labor Day Is the End of the Election":
JOHN HEILEMANN: Traditionally in politics, Labor Day is the start of the general election. This summer has felt like the general election started a long time ago. So does Labor Day now mean anything?
BOB SHRUM: Yeah, I think it is the end of the election. I think we are going to look back and say that this period from the Republican convention, Democratic convention, the aftermath, the Trump tweets, the attacks, his ridiculous performance this week on immigration first in Mexico and then in Phoenix. I think we are going to look back on it and say that is when the election was decided. He didn't have much of a chance to begin with I don't think but this was a really fateful period.
HEILEMANN: Do you think the election is over basically?
SHRUM: I do.
In order to ensure that his Shrum Curse would be extra effective in ultimately undermining Hillary's campaign, he returned to WADR on October 11 to perform yet another end zone victory dance as you can see at the 1:40 mark:
JOHN HEILEMANN: Bob Shrum, I know what you're going to say but I'm going to ask you anyway. Is the race over, Bob? Should we stick a fork in it?
BOB SHRUM: I thought it was over on Labor Day. Said it on your show. Thought Trump was in a demographic cul-de-sac he couldn't get out of. He's made it worse and worse since then. None of his message about the industrial base is coming true at all. And in any event if you look at a state like Pennsylvania the latest poll shows him losing that state by 12 percent. In fact if you go state by state in the battlegrounds, she's ahead in virtually every one of them. I don't see what he's going to do to recover. I think what he did in the debate was get himself a few more Republicans who really dislike the Clintons but he's stuck at about 39 or 40 percent. He can't win the election with that 39 or 40 percent.
HEILMANN: All right. So Bob Shrum predictably saying the race is over. It's true. You did say the race is over Labor Day. You told me that.
Shrum took his certainity of a Hillary victory into the realm of Trump shaming when he Trump shamed a member of Trump's economic policy council, Anthony Scaramucci, by calling him "idiotic" for the high crime of questioning the accuracy of the polls. You can see Shrum in full Trump shaming mode on WADR starting at 3:50 in the following video:
So now that Shrum Curse number nine has been realized with Hillary's defeat last night, do you think Shrum would be boasting about his remarkable power? As you can see in this interview today with the Daily Trojan student newspaper, Shrum was much too modest to brag:
There was a tense flip-flop between Trump and Clinton up until the last electoral votes came in. Bob Shrum, a political science professor at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and longtime political consultant, explained his concerns when Donald Trump gripped 244 electoral votes.
“At the beginning of the day, they said it would take a miracle for Donald Trump to win,” Shrum said. “At this point it would take a miracle for Hillary Clinton to win. She is losing states Democrats almost always carry.”
It was a miracle that never came.
The biggest miracle of all is the Shrum Curse. So miraculous that it just can't be anything less than supernatural. There will be many books and documentaries about the most incredible political campaign in American history but none of them would be complete without citing the infallible Shrum Curse that doomed Hillary.
Oh, and Bob, don't you think you owe Mr. Scaramucci an apology? Just please be sure not to predict good fortune for him. We don't want the Shrum Curse to cause him any harm.
