Win your division, check; win your league, check; win the World Series, check.

For the Chicago Cubs, that was the early prediction by Nate Silver with his number-grinding website that offers statistical insight in sports, politics and economics. The Cubs then proved Silver accurate.

Despite the iffy drama of the Cubs’ 8 to 7 victory over the Cleveland Indians in the final game of the World Series, the Cubs had been picked all year to win and Nate Silver’s crew was mostly getting it right all along.

As former Gov. John Waihee used to say, “You have to appreciate baseball to understand politics.”

Home runs, brush-back pitches, throwing a curveball — it is the same vocabulary in politics and baseball.

Silver’s web page is now training his same predictive powers used in baseball on the presidential race. The thinking shows why it is important to pay attention to the big picture and also the dominant subscript.

While sports columnists are already calling Game 7 of the 2016 World Series the best baseball game ever played, political scribes are condemning this year’s presidential race as the ugliest, most vicious house of horrors in modern American political history.

It is clear that the GOP candidate has unleashed demons unseen and certainly unspoken in past campaigns.

From bragging about his genitals, to threatening women, raising walls between nationalities and religions, the nominee has lowered the national Republican Party to what may be unsurvivable depths.

A piece titled “The End Of A Republican Party”written by Clare Malone, a senior political writer for FiveThirtyEight, provides the background for how the GOP was already crashing before it nominated Donald Trump as its standard bearer.

As Malone says of the GOP: “Most prominently, as has been said time and again, it is a party of breathtaking whiteness.

“Over the past few decades, the GOP has remained largely white, less educated and older while the numbers of minorities in the country soared, college attainment rose and the millennial generation came of age politically.”

That was the situation at the beginning of the campaign season: The GOP is the home of older, high-school educated white voters — three groups that are shrinking in comparison to millennial-aged, new voters who are black, Hispanic and Asian.

To put some reality to those statistics, Politico reported this week: “Clinton’s 30-point lead in Florida Hispanic poll is ‘terrifying’ to GOP nationwide.”

Besides the looming demographic disaster, Republicans are warming up their own version of the culture wars, but this features two groups of “Never-Trump” Republicans fighting each other for control of the party. First there are the “Never-Trumps” who don’t think Trump is conservative enough for GOP politics.

They, according to Malone, are battling the GOP that believes the party after its 2012 beating must grow and expand. Specifically it must court Hispanic voters. Clearly that is not happening.

“The prospect that the GOP leaders wouldn’t even be able to agree on why Trump — arguably the worst crisis the modern party has experienced — was even a crisis to begin with, seemed to say it all,” concludes Malone.

All of this increases the chances that Trump will not be president — and does nothing to take away from the fact that this is the year the Chicago Cubs went all the way.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.