True that it's the name she chooses to use - but from what I had understood, though I could be wrong, having originally taken Clinton's name to begin with was more a question of bowing to public prejudice than of personal preference. Anyway, it's a pet peeve of mine, women adopting their husband's last name (even when they merely do it socially - never mind a legal name change).

Can't really comment on Nixon as that was before my time. Bush is a fair comparison, but at least the man was president and had actually done something before becoming so hated. Hillary Clinton seems to be hated with a passion in a way no other Democratic politician is except possibly Obama. Certainly not Bill, who actually was president.

When I say pathological I'm talking about the intensity of the hatred, not about which particular reason inspired it. To take one obvious example, I don't really have a view one way or the other on whether Benghazi was really a serious error or just plain bad luck. I have no issue with people deciding to vote against her for Benghazi, or for her emails, her views on free trade, whatever. I do have an issue with people fantasizing about imprisoning or shooting her, or depicting her as some kind of anti-Christ. Indeed like some on the left have done towards Bush (and Blair - the publication of the Chilcot report in Britain a few weeks ago brought back some of that, and it most certainly was pathological there as well, though Blair isn't even right-wing).

Has it though? I just checked the election results of 1984, Reagan's landslide victory with huge numbers of Democrats voting for him. At the same time, the Democrats actually won two seats in the Senate election - a Democrat in Oklahoma retained his Senate seat with 75 percent of the vote on the same day that Reagan thrashed Mondale 69 percent to 31 in that same state. That seems like an extreme case of split ticket voting by the standards of any time, but my point is it happens much less today than it did then.

As for your point about swing voters or not - definitely that group has decreased, at this point I think it's mostly the really apolitical people who are genuinely independent and genuine swing voters without a strong tendency for one side or the other. And for the most part they don't vote so won't decide elections either.

If the only votes he loses are those turned off by his populism - in other words, if Cruz' group of conservatives ends up coming back to him instead of staying home or voting Johnson - and at the same time he gains a good share of those apolitical voters in the middle, then I agree he may very well win, unless Clinton really aces her turn-out in the states where it matters.