For the past week, there’s been story after story in the press about how Democrats just didn’t turn out. Frankly, I believed them. But remember that votes are still being counted and we won’t know the final numbers for some time. And if Democrats didn’t turn out, how is it that projections for Clinton are that she could win by more that 1 ½ million votes?
When it comes to vote counting, Michael McDonald from the University of Florida is one of the best. Here’s what he’s saying:
And there’s this from The Atlantic :
The numbers that came out on Election Night were enough to secure Trump the presidency, but they weren’t complete. State officials are still counting millions of provisional and absentee ballots, and within two weeks, Clinton will likely have another few million votes in the bank.
Most were cast in the Clinton-leaning states of California, Washington, and New York—not swing states—so they won’t change the Electoral College. But there’s a sufficient amount to put her within striking distance of Obama’s 2012 turnout, and help put an end to the argument that she simply didn’t work hard enough.
“We probably have about 7 million votes left to count,” said David Wasserman, an editor at Cook Political Report who is tracking turnout. “A majority of them are on the coasts, in New York, California, and Washington. She should be able to win those votes, probably 2-1.” By mid-December, when the Electoral College officially casts its ballots, Wasserman estimates that Clinton could be ahead by 2 percentage points in the popular vote.
…
However, these ballots will knock the legs out beneath the argument that Clinton failed to mobilize Democrats. Yes, she’s no Obama in 2008. (Neither was Obama in 2012.) But county-by-county results indicate Democratic voters flipped for Trump, not that they stayed home. “We just saw massive shifts in the industrial midwest from ’12 to ’16, and those are the same voters,” Wasserman said.
Now this is a horse of a different color. I was mad as hell that Democrats didn’t turn out, just like they didn’t in 2010 or 2014. But if they did turn out, it really changes the reasoning as to why we lost. I guess before we start planning the next election, we better properly analyze the last.
I still don’t like the argument of the disgruntled middle class white guys looking for someone to guide them to the economic promise land. What scares me the most is, maybe in the past they were actually looking for an economic savior, and it was the Democrats, but for the first time in history they didn’t just have a choice between Republican and Democratic economic policies, they had a choice between an authoritarian racist and Democratic economic policies, and racism Trumped economics.