Election Day is over and we have a new president. His name is Donald Trump and we didn’t see that coming. Nate Silver’s uncertainty was correct, and the polls were wrong both for the nationla majority and for key states. The popular vote was close (48-48 as of this writing, leaning Trump), but not the electoral vote.
The American people have rejected the person they thought was qualified in favor of the one they thought was not (that’s not hyperbole, it’s exit poll results. Clinton was yes 52%, Trump was no 60%).
Michael Moore was right about Michigan, which decided the election. Flint was failed by those in power, rural America feels the same way, Black Lives Matters and Occupy agree, and this is the reckoning.
Was it James Comey? Most decided early and went for Clinton 51-46, but 26% decided in the last month and went for Trump 49-39.
Was it a revolt of rural against urban America? Absolutely (see stories below). A backlash against immigration? Nope. 70% of exit poll voters think immigrants should be afforded legal status and 54% oppose a wall on the Mexican border.
Rejection of Hillary Clinton? Assuredly, even though the vote total was essentially tied. Desire for change, any kind of change, even if it meant Donald Trump? I guess so. It was the only issued that mattered for many. We won or held our own on the issues, they won the election.
How about media normalizing Trump, sexism, and anti-Semitism? Don’t get me started. There are volumes to be written abut that.
But there’s no sugar coating what was a total disaster for Democrats and progressives last night. We not only lost the White House, we lost the Supreme Court. And with it, we are going to lose Obama’s legacy.
Even worse, there are now no checks and balances. We lost that, too.
Secretary of State Gingrich? Secretary of Defense Flynn? Giuliani as AG? Hard to imagine it could be worse. Well, Putin could be Secretary of State, and for all practical purposes, what difference does it make?
We’re stuck with it and we will have to figure out how to survive and how to retool. It means the Democratic Party is done with Clintonism forever. There needs to be a different way.
But first, we’ll have to figure out how to survive, starting with today’s stock market.
More stories about all of this in the next few days.
Jeff Guo/WaPo:
There’s been great thirst this election cycle for insight into the psychology of Trump voters. J.D. Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” offers a narrative about broken families and social decay. “There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself,” he writes. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild tells a tale of perceived betrayal. According to her research, white voters feel the American Dream is drifting out of reach for them, and they are angry because they believe minorities and immigrants have butted in line.
Cramer’s recent book, “The Politics of Resentment,” offers a third perspective. Through her repeated interviews with the people of rural Wisconsin, she shows how politics have increasingly become a matter of personal identity. Just about all of her subjects felt a deep sense of bitterness toward elites and city dwellers; just about all of them felt tread on, disrespected and cheated out of what they felt they deserved.
Cramer argues that this “rural consciousness” is key to understanding which political arguments ring true to her subjects. For instance, she says, most rural Wisconsinites supported the tea party's quest to shrink government not out of any belief in the virtues of small government but because they did not trust the government to help “people like them.”
“Support for less government among lower-income people is often derided as the opinions of people who have been duped,” she writes. However, she continues: “Listening in on these conversations, it is hard to conclude that the people I studied believe what they do because they have been hoodwinked. Their views are rooted in identities and values, as well as in economic perceptions; and these things are all intertwined.”
This is a very good read, and interestingly matches the more — colorful — version I posted Mid October:
Cracked has a great, long sympathetic piece on rural America’s view of the elite and city folk, well worth a read if you want to understand Trump voters feeling left behind:
How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
As a kid, visiting Chicago was like, well, Katniss visiting the capital. Or like Zoey visiting the city of the future in this ridiculous book. "Their ways are strange."
And the whole goddamned world revolves around them.
Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes -- either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.
I wrote at the time “this matters after the election.” Turns out it mattered before, as well.
Clinton hatred in some places was strong, this Michelle Goldberg piece back from July:
Some who loathe Clinton see her as the living embodiment of avarice and deception. These Clinton haters take at face value every charge Republicans have ever hurled at her, as well as dark accusations that circulate online. They have the most invidious possible explanation for Whitewater, the dubious real estate deal that served as a pretext for endless Republican investigations of the Clintons in the 1990s. (Clinton was never found guilty of any wrongdoing, though one of her business partners, James McDougal, went to prison for fraud in a related case.) Sometimes they believe that Clinton murdered her former law partner, Vince Foster, who committed suicide in 1993. They hold her responsible for the deadly attack on the American outpost in Benghazi, Libya. Peter Schweizer’s new book Clinton Cash has convinced them that there was a corrupt nexus between Clinton’s State Department, various foreign governments, and the Clinton family’s foundation. Most of Schweizer’s allegations have either been disproven or shown to be unsubstantiated, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from invoking them repeatedly. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, he accused Clinton of raking in “millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests and foreign powers.”
It turns out that Clinton Cash was the blueprint for the Trump campaign, and arguably it worked as intended.
NPR looks at the exit polls, and they were no prettier than the results:
Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States.
That's remarkable for all sorts of reasons: He has no governmental experience, for example. And many times during his campaign, he said things that inflamed large swaths of Americans, whether it was talking about grabbing women's genitals or calling Mexicans "rapists" and "murderers."
But right now, it's also remarkable because almost no one saw it coming. All major forecasters predicted a Hillary Clinton win, whether moderately or by a landslide.
So what happened?
Conservatives don't seem married to traditional conservatism
Right now, the numbers for conservatives are looking about the same this year as they did in 2012 — that is, around 80 percent of them went for the Republican candidate in both elections. And in both, they made up just over one-third of the electorate.
But, then, Trump is not at all the kind of conservative that Romney was; indeed, he's not at all a traditional conservative. Trump has rejected free trade agreements, called for up to $1 trillion in government spending on infrastructure, and introduced a tax plan that could balloon the debt by $7.2 trillion in one decade, by one estimate.
That makes it pretty clear that Trump voters weren't driven by far-right ideology (unless many self-proclaimed conservatives had big changes of heart since 2012). Trump's populist, overtly masculine, anti-PC appeal helped him vault past Clinton.
With the GOP controlling both the Senate and House, the question now is how Trump will square his brand of conservatism with that of his congressional counterparts
This is a Storify piece I collected a while ago from Chris Arnade, looking at being poor, without mobility, without hope. It’s part of the picture of why people voted the way they did yesterday. As of this morning, there is reason to look at it.
If you were annoyed at the different forecast modelers, remember they weren’t that different. Andrew Gellman:
So, argue about these different forecasts all you want, but from the standpoint of evidence they’re not nearly as different as they look on the probability scale.
To put it another way: suppose the election happens and Hillary Clinton receives 52% of the two-party vote. Or 51%. Or 53%. It’s not like then we’ll be able to adjudicate between the different forecasts and say, Nate was right or Drew was right or whatever. And we can’t get much out of using the 50 state outcomes as a calibration exercise. They’re just too damn correlated.
P.S. All these poll aggregators are have been jumping around because of differential nonresponse. If you polls’ reported summaries as your input, as all these methods do, you can’t avoid this problem. The way to smooth out these jumps is to adjust for the partisan composition of the surveys.
NY Times:
At one point she and a few other workers were suspended for wearing union buttons, but this concerted union activity is federally protected. After the Culinary Union filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, she was quickly reinstated with back pay, her buttons intact.
It has not been easy. Downsizing after her husband’s deportation, selling her bedroom set, moving in with her daughter and her family. Publicly agitating for the union — and for the Democratic nominee for president — and then fretting that there might be retaliation at her nonunion, pro-Republican workplace. And working, constantly working.
“I tell my children, we have to work,” Ms. Vargas says. “It’s not for government to support me. We work work work.”…
Soon she is heading for the same door, one more guest room attendant who wears a back brace while cleaning rooms for a presidential candidate whose name is on the bathrobes she stocks, on the empty wine bottles she collects, on her name tag.
He will receive her labor, but not her vote.
Daniel Dale/Toronto Star:
When you’re a Canadian reporter in America, you’re not ferried around on a campaign plane and deposited in a media pen. Instead, you — I — crank up the Blue Rodeo, guzzle a gas station Slurpee for the late-night sugar, and drive. Which means you have less access to insiders but more access to outsiders.
In New Hampshire, I watched the primary results from a couch in a 226-year-old farmhouse: “Breakwind Farm,” owned a couple of Rand Paul fans who made a product called “Fartootempting Baked Beans.” In rural North Carolina, I ate curry at a Thai restaurant beside a Christian who believes that devout failed NFL quarterback Tim Tebow is both persecuted and the next big baseball star. When my car somehow sunk into a ditch in a muddy parking lot in Virginia, three Trump supporters volunteered to push me out.
America is still pretty great.
Whenever I tweeted I was at a Trump event, I received condolences in response. Truth be told, I was having a blast. Trump was unpredictable and entertaining, pure newspaper gold. And most of his supporters were friendly and respectful, even if they believed objectionable things, even if they professed to hate The Media.
At least to a white guy.
Brian Beutler/New Republic:
Donald Trump’s Lasting Damage to Our Communities
A final liberal plea to conservatives: If you care about saving our civic bonds of trust, don't vote for the man who's destroying them.
Dana Milbank/WaPo:
In the final hours, the mask came off.
Donald Trump and his surrogates have been playing footsie with American neo-Nazis for months: tweeting their memes, retweeting their messages, appearing on their radio shows. After an Oct. 13 speech in which Trump warned that Hillary Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty” and that “a global power structure” is conspiring against ordinary Americans, the Anti-Defamation League urged Trump to “avoid rhetoric and tropes that historically have been used against Jews.”
Well, Trump just gave his reply. On Friday, he released a closing ad for his campaign repeating offending lines from that speech, this time illustrated with images of prominent Jews: financier George Soros (accompanying the words “those who control the levers of power”), Fed Chair Janet Yellen (with the words “global special interests”) and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (following the “global power structure” quote). The ad shows Hillary Clinton and says she partners “with these people who don’t have your good in mind.”
Anti-Semitism is no longer an undertone of Trump’s campaign. It’s the melody.