Hillary Clinton is not only the first female presidential nominee for a major party in U.S. history, she is also the first woman to be presumptive nominee for president. She has been the presumptive nominee since April. And yet the coverage of this fact has been almost totally overshadowed by the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency. But while most of the coverage of the 2016 presidential election thus far has focused on what happens if Clinton wins and what happens if Trump wins, in truth there are two other possibilities. What happens if we get more Clinton and Sanders and both of them lose? Or what happens if we get more Sanders and neither of them wins? Or what happens if both Clinton and Sanders lose? Or what happens if neither of them win? All of these scenarios are possible. Advertisement: I’m not going to try and predict what will happen in any of these scenarios because it’s impossible to do so accurately. As an example, let’s look at a recent poll that was conducted in three “blue states” that Trump needs to win in order to win the general election, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It found Clinton beating Trump in all three states, 49 percent to 40 percent. Now, this poll was conducted by the liberal Public Policy Polling (PPP) firm, and so it’s highly likely that the poll had more liberal-leaning respondents than Trump-leaning respondents. If you look at the political demographics of these three states, though, you can see that they are more favorable to Trump. As a result, the margin between Clinton and Trump in these three states has probably been slightly inflated. One way you can think about the fact that Clinton is more or less the presumptive nominee and yet Clinton hasn’t won is that these polls are actually undersampling Trump voters and oversampling Clinton voters. So although Trump could lose the election if both of them win, Clinton could still lose the election if both of them lose. This seems especially likely since Trump’s performance in the Republican primary has been much better than the polls suggest. If Trump’s support levels held in those three states as well as the ones the rest of the country, Trump would have won. So we could say that if both Clinton and Sanders lose, it’s not only possible that Trump loses the election, it’s likely that he does. Advertisement: So why are these things not getting as much coverage? One reason is that so many of us are so invested in a Clinton victory that it’s difficult to imagine how any scenario other than that one could possibly work out. But if Trump wins, the election is all but over. The damage has already been done. There’s just nothing left for Trump to do to derail Clinton’s path to the presidency. On the other hand, a Sanders loss would be just as devastating to his campaign, especially for the left. We need to think about what would happen in those circumstances as well. And it’s definitely possible that Clinton and Sanders could lose their nomination bids, not only because of the possibility of a third-party candidacy (Bernie is in the most danger of this because the Green Party candidacy has already been launched and it’s unclear if Jill Stein is even a factor in the general election). It’s also possible that Clinton and Sanders will win their nominations, but lose the general election. None of these scenarios are likely, but they are certainly possible. With less than two months until Election Day, we are inundated with media coverage of the hypothetical Clinton and Trump matchup. How many pieces have been devoted to the possibility of a Sanders win and a Trump win? Even less, I would imagine, which makes sense since we’ve already covered this extensively. But it seems almost inconceivable that so many of us have an unshakable belief that Clinton is the nominee and so many others are an unshakable belief that Sanders will not. What we can take away from this is that for all our talk of Sanders being a viable alternative to Clinton, our own beliefs about the two may be even more unrealistic. The way we frame the race right now only ensures that a Clinton victory and a Trump defeat will seem inevitable. Advertisement: If we get Sanders and Clinton and neither of them wins, or Sanders and Clinton and neither of them loses, or if we get more Sanders and no one wins, or if we get more Clinton and no one wins, what will our political beliefs about this election be? What are the lessons that we draw from this? How will we respond to what we see as a loss for us? How will our opponents respond to a win for us? And most importantly, how will Trump respond if he loses? What will happen to his campaign? The way we think about politics right now, many of us will not respond well.