So, folks, is this what you expected?
So many pundits and politicos thought Hillary Clinton had this in the bag, just based on polling alone in the last few days, I still couldn’t see anything but a nailbiter. So many races were within the margin of error. And in the end…she garnered the popular vote (as of noon on Nov. 9), but it was a decisive electoral map win for Trump. Clinton serious under-performance in counties Obama handily won in a number of states is an impressive fail.
The Democrat Party is going to need a postmortem of epic proportions. It clearly misjudged Clinton’s baggage in the eyes of the public, and there was Clinton fatigue plus those third-party voters who had no plans to rally around the former Secretary of State under any circumstances.
Blame assignment is under way, but it’s almost irrelevant. We are going to have a new president who ran a campaign being completely transparent about his agenda from Day 1, so it didn’t have to be this way.
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He didn’t create the hate and resentment that was elevated to legitimacy, it was already there. This is what “Making America Great Again” means in this moment.
Donald J. Trump achieved his goal. Without spending as much money as his rival, he drew huge rallies without big celebrities or endorsements by any of the living ex-Presidents; he succeeded without a single endorsement by a major newspaper by breaking every social norm. He won.
It is an electoral rebuke by the American people of multiculturalism, the rapid browning of America. But it is also about fears we are unable to explore with one another.
He won more of the Hispanic vote than Mitt Romney. Let that sink in a bit.
MSNBC reports that 60% of Americans decided who they would vote for long before all the October surprises about emails, Trump sexual abuse victims, all of that hot mess.
How is the impact of the third party vote total feeling right now? The vote gap between Clinton and Trump in most states is what Gary Johnson or Jill Stein siphoned away.
And then there was the misogyny (surely anticipated) and the right-wing media industrial complex (also surely factored in). Having the FBI parachute into the election was, of course, an atrocity; no one expected that mess.
The most overlooked thing was how many of our fellow Americans — those new voters that Trump spoke to that turned out and cast a ballot for the first time or the first in a long time — turned out despite an underfunded GOTV effort. Turnout of this group of voters, many white voters — across all class and education boundaries — has sent a message that is loud and clear it’s not just about “draining the swamp.”
