First things first. I apologize for being wrong about how this election would turn out. I accept responsibility for it. I let you down. If you want to tell me about my failure, that’s your right. If you’re angry with me, I understand.
I make no excuses. All I can say is that I’m sorry.
Trying to figure out where we go from here isn’t something we’re going to be able to do overnight. All I really want to say at the outset is that you can beat me up all you want, but I’d like to discourage you from engaging in widespread recriminations against people who you will now need as your allies. Some of it you might just need to get out of your system. Say it and be done with it.
There’s a lot of places to place blame, but most of the people you’d be blaming are feeling just as upset as you.
Try to have some dignity. And don’t make things worse than they have to be. Maybe look for some new voices who weren’t aggressively wrong all year long. Give others a chance to put their brains to this new set of daunting problems and challenges. Don’t let old habits and animosities blind you to the fact that you have a lot of new people on your team now who are interested in making peace at least long enough to make common cause.
Most of all, be forgiving to each other. Not everyone is going to react well to this and some are going to say things that they’ll regret or that put them at odds with you and your core values. People aren’t at their best when they’re afraid and confused.
It’s hard to even start a list of all the problems we now have. It will take time to triage. Trust me, a new generation of leaders will emerge shortly. Maybe you’ll be one of them.
No blame Martin
You helped keep me sane
Still feel like a horrible nightmare
Yeah, you are right martin, people should shout at another right now, to get it out of their system.
Then they need to find out what connects them, what their common interests are, and what needs to be done.
Thats one side of how i feel, the other side is unspeakably cynical.
I’m not an advocate of “getting it out of your system” because those kinds of expressions of anger typical make things worse. Acting it out can actually lock it in. Far better to just feel the emotions internally. With regard to anger, notice what it’s covering over. Typically there’s fear or hurt underneath, though it can cloak other emotions too. For most of us, there’s lots of fear. For me, there’s fear, disappointment and sadness.
That said, it’s in no way your fault, Martin. We’re all wrong sometimes. In this case, I was wrong too. I ignored HL Menken’s quip, believing the majority of my fellow citizens to be more sensible than this.
I also forgot a few presidential election keys. One, that most every election is about “change.” Recall how often Bill said that word. It was comical at the time. “Change, change, change, change” like a broken record. There’s an occasional exception such as GHW Bush following Reagan, running on “peace and prosperity.” That is not the norm. Second, each candidate will get a solid 40% support. The folks who ultimately decide the outcome are those who don’t really pay attention to details.
And then I learned some new things too. For instance, given how deeply polarized we’ve become that it’s very hard (almost impossible) to peel away from that solid 40% base of support. If pussygate couldn’t do it for more than a few days, nothing could. I think it’s abundantly clear that, at least for the time being, presidential elections are about motivating and turning out one’s base. Unless Trump is such a spectacular lesson that everyone learns a huge lesson, which very likely will happen. But unless it happens, we Democrats need to find a way to make sure that our primary process favors new faces with bold, inspiring ideas. No more competent retreads. Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry and Hillary Clinton were all competent technocrats who were really weak candidates. How many times must we replay this record before we get it?
Agree with southern dem, Martin. There are a lot of people to blame, but you’re not one of them. You made the same mistake a lot of us did (including me): you looked at the data and based your evidence on that. We also thought our fellow citizens could never be this stupid.
Time to think about a way forward.
Thanks, Martin.
I am still in shock and the last thing I feel like doing is rallying around the old flag. I think that a lot of us need time to take it all in and assess the damage, which is enormous.
This country has sustained a major hit and it’s going be a whole new place come January. I hope you’ll continue to stand up and be a voice for us.
A few hundred thousand votes somewhere else and the result would have been different. Yeah, shouldas, couldas and wouldas. I went to bed before they called it, but I knew who won by then. My wife woke me up crying this morning. It is a sad day. Don’t blame yourself BooMan. I can think of a gazillion things to do differently. What strikes me at this hour is the enthusiasm Trump generated. A fella a few miles from where I live plastered his yard with Trump signs, maybe thirty or so. I thought he was nuts. Still do.
I’m not going to borrow Trump’s methods. Blame carries no strength with it. Hatred may bring power, as it did last night, but it’s strength and smarts that we need to figure out a survival plan first and a fight plan 2nd.
Devastating yes. But I want to survive to fight for what we have before he lays waste to it.
It’s a sad fact that Hate is stronger than Love. Hate gives us strength and the will to persevere, to close with our enemy and destroy him. It’s one of the legacies from our reptile brain. The cerebrum can’t understand it.
Which is why we have cultural norms, symbols, narratives, and rituals to control the hardening of anger into hate. And why “doing what comes natcherally” is called impulsive and is one marker of what Western culture at the very least marked as psychological illness in that secular source of cultural norms called psychology.
Erudite as always, Tarheeldem. I’m really interested in your analysis of North Carolina since the results seem strange to me. I understand the Midwest but not the South.
BTW, earlier in the year I picked up a copy of that book young mentioned some years ago about the Levy and the everyleigh Sisters. A good read. Thanks for the tip.
The South is really easy to understand if you understand how “home rule” (planter dominance) was established after the Civil War. Intimidation, suppressive legislation, and monkeying with the practical aspects of voting. It is much easier done in rural counties than in urban counties, but limiting early voting to one site in Greensboro, Fayetteville, Wilmington and two sites in Charlotte succeeded in suppressing the minority votes in those cities that they could not overcome the 60%-70% Trump votes in almost every rural county. The city suppression is known because of lawsuits filed by election protection.
The rural areas might have been more direct threatening of jobs by pro-Trump employers or rumors of intended nightriding.
And then there were the requests for voter IDs even though the federal court vacated that part of the NC Voter ID law. There were precincts that conducted literacy tests on black voters. And there were computer outages that slowed down the pace of voting creating long lines, sometimes as much a 4 hours wait.
Finally there was the distribution of voting stations and handicapped voting areas. More than enough in white precincts; much less than needed in minority neighborhoods.
Finally minorities were more rapidly consigned to provisional ballots, which might turn out to help Roy Cooper maintain his lead as they are now counting those ballots.
In other words, the usual machine politics practices by the Republicans seeking to retain their power in the General Assembly.
I don’t blame anyone except Republicans. Haven’t since 1979, not going to start.
It’s clear that our problem is bigger than Trump or Bernie or Hillary or any other single person. We have a cancer on our society that we need to understand. We can talk all we want about the strengths and flaws of our candidate, but the fact is she ran the correct campaign based on the data everybody had. It’s just that everybody, Democratic and Republican, misread the situation. And anyway, it’s done now. We can analyze the results, but we can’t change them.
I’m reaching out to everybody I know so that we can experience our sorrow together. Whatever friends you have, I hope you’ll find time to reach out to them to let them know you appreciate them.
There is a problem with one thing for sure – the polling system has fallen apart. This was unexpected because the polls were off.
Why were the polls off? They call people and people don’t respond. They can’t accurately locate people for given districts – people’s area codes no longer tell where they live.
My wife and I got many polling calls, so many that we stopped responding.
Polling had an agenda…..for HRC…..LA Times poll had it right…..kudos to them….
Nope, the LA times was one of the furthest off as it came out. It predicted a substantial Trump win in the popular vote but Clinton actually won by a percent or two (we have to wait for CA to finish counting).
I, and many others, don’t respond to my phone much anyway because of all the sales calls. No need for an extra push from polling. Yeah, phone polls have gone the way of the dodo bird. They were quite off in 2012 and 2014 too; we’d just been ignoring it.
The Clinton’s and Dick Durbin’s and Evan Bayh’s and Harry Reid’s and the rest of their Third way that are the cancer.
Repent! Return to your roots! Cleanse yourselves of right wing economics and eschew corporate money.
White supremacy is a huge part of this, for sure.
But perhaps an even bigger part of this outcome is that people have no idea of what they’re voting for. I’m not sure they ever did. But it leads to a lot of freakish outcomes in a democratic system.
You and the entire rest of the country.
I’m glad to have this site to come to this morning, and to read the reactions of all the rest of you.
There are some policies and programs that Trump discussed that seem reasonable. Why are we paying so much of the costs of NATO? Why, 70 years after VJ Day, are we paying the costs of defense of Japan? Why do we spend so much money on foreign bases?
These policies were derided. They actually make a lot of sense.
The status quo wanted just that and by extension HRC….to leave things as they were….yes this actually made a lot sense….instead the MSM focused on groping women….the common folk were not to be blind folded anymore…..
Trump has proposed some decent policies among the nutso ones, and if it weren’t for the threat to democracy from voter suppression, crooked and crazy judges, and a politicized FBI, I’d be content to take my medicine and see what he does. Unfortunately his administration will be eager to use administrative power for political ends (see Christie) and Republicans in general were already eager to suppress and distort voting.
Democrats in Illinois are good at voter suppression also, by keeping opponents of the ballot and thus giving us soviet-style primaries and even general elections.
In fact no one knows what will happen now. As has been stated on this site – this outcome is a big FU to the elite establishment and the neoliberals. Well that was going to happen at some point anyway – neoliberalism has failed the people; the Bernie and Trump supporters agree on that.
This is also a big FU to the Ryan-wing of the GOP. Sure Trump’s stated policies seem in line with much of the GOP agenda but Trump said a lot of things on the campaign trail and as we all know much of it was BS. So how will that play out? You raise some of these off brand message issues in your post. I’d wager there are others.
Sure he’s a racist, sexist pig and he’ll no doubt embarrass us endlessly but there are checks and balances in place that should protect much of our rights.
Of course the big loss is the Supreme Court and McConnell being rewarded for his un-American obstruction.
I am depressed but I am an optimist, maybe it won’t be as bad as we think…
On the other hand maybe it will be so bad that there will be a huge backlash during the midterms.
The pendulum never stops swinging.
Sure they make sense. The problem is that Trump himself doesn’t make sense. And I tend not to believe people I know are con artists.
Woke up this morning and the world has changed…….this result was a vote for change as much as a vote against HRC…..
The chains are off Obama. He will now do one thing that we can all get behind – increase the speed of pardoning drug offenders. At least I hope he will do that. There are thousands of prisoners who did nothing more than sell drugs and got harsh sentences. These should be released. Obama can make a legacy of forgiveness of such persons.
More likely one more push for TPP to get his thirty pieces of silver. Screwing seniors more would be likely too. Four years from now, people’s memories will be fuzzy and they’ll think the Trump did it.
TPP had better be dead, and we need to kill it. Trump’s message of anti-globalism will resonate for the Rs. It is true that farm state Rs think that it will expand farm exports. We need to hammer them.
As Gandalf said, “You will not pass”.
Senator Obama has not screwed the Seniors. In fact the ACA has closed the Medicare part D donut hole for many of them so I am not sure what you mean by screwing seniors more.
I don’t see any reason to beat you up. We were all going by the polling, which was obviously wrong, but that was the only objective data we had to go on. I agree we have to learn to deal with people different from us as in order to get Trump out in 4 years we’re going to need to work with #NeverTrumper and #WishTheyHadntTrumpers, and they’re still going to be conservative. Getting fascists out of power almost always requires alliances between political opponents. Remember Trump controls a politicized FBI, so whoever his opponent is, they’ll find “scandals” and pump them to 1000 via Congressional investigations and the media.
Given the impending complete implosion of everything that has been accomplished in the past 8 years, and maybe the last 80 years, the last thing on my mind is crawling up the ass of those who got it wrong.
From the beginning, something about this entire campaign left me with a sense of unease and dread. That unease is what made me vote for Bernie in the primary. But looking at what happened last night, I don’t think even Bernie would have pulled this one out. Every time I would hear someone like the President say, “This is not who we are” or “We’re better than this”, I would say to myself, and sometimes say it out loud, “You know, maybe we’re not”. And as it turns out, we are not better than this. As a country, this IS who we are. Not everyone, mind you, but enough to wrangle away the levers of power and to begin to dismantle many of the things that people have fought hard to bring into reality to help further the common good and well being of all Americans.
We are preparing to enter a very dark and ugly period. One which might well last for the rest of my life. I cannot tell you how this thought sickens me. But I’m an upper middle class white guy. Chances are, I will probably be fine. But it is those people who don’t have the good fortune of my white privilege for whom I am weeping and feeling sickened. On the drive into work this morning, I listened to a caller on Sirius Progress channel. He was a gay black man living in Texas. He was sobbing. Sobbing at what he is likely to lose as a result of this election. The fear in his voice was palpable. He was inconsolable. I found myself blinking back tears as I barreled down the interstate, listening to this man wail, as the host tried to comfort and reassure him that he was not alone. That circumstance is probably being duplicated in every corner of this country today, and for good reason. We have just opened the door and let the demons in. They now have free reign. And I doubt there will any mercy dispensed as they rout out those elements in our country who do not fit into their categories of human worth. There are simply no words. No words at all, to describe how I feel right now.
You still don’t get it. NOTHING has been accomplished in the last eight years. That’s why the voters are pissed off.
Well, there has indeed been NOTHING accomplished in the past 6 years, since the Radical Repubs took control of the Congress. The voters just don’t know who to be pissed at.
But they will indeed see something “accomplished” now….
“I’m an upper middle class white guy.” If you were a blue collar white guy you would understand. But then you be a “lower” and unclean, right?
Quite a fucking stretch there to somehow presume that you know me.
You literally took a statement of empathy and used it to bash someone with it.
It’s what they do.
.
No blame from here.
I was doing some work in the Big Bend about 6 weeks ago. All I saw were Trump signs, not a surprise considering where I was but all the same, I knew something was up but it didn’t click until Conway made a statement to the effect of “we have a plan for the rural vote” and my stomach turned at that point. I knew then that they indeed had a plan, which we ALL missed, yet it was far too late to even do anything about. I had a hope we could still squeak it out, it was not to be, not this time anyway.
We’re still here, ready to soldier on and do what’s necessary. It won’t be easy and it will be a long road. Hopefully it won’t be underwater by then, but I’m not holding my breath.
The Democrats have given the rural vote to the Rs for the last 30 years. They have gone with Identity politics and open borders shit and pimping for Wall Street. Obamacare started well, but the increases in premiums just in time for the election ended that policy – Obamacare is now dead, and will be repealed. DACA/DAPA and the other policies enacted by fiat of Obama will be repealed and ended. Title IX distortions into prosecutions of men on campuses and transgender stuff will be ended.
Mr. Obama’s cool approach will yield little that stands in 2 years. Too bad.
Honestly what is your issue with title IX? Not only has it opened up sports to our women but it has often been the only mechanism (flawed as it is) to address rape on college campuses. Do you really believe that is not an issue? Because I can damn well tell you it is.
Definition of a change election.
So now we pray that Trump was lying about his most egregious plans? Given that he lies about everything, I suppose it’s possible. Why don’t I find that reassuring?
Unlike Mittens and his ’12 team and in the past few days of this election cycle, not even the blowhard was acting confident of a win. Clinton’s team and her supporters were supremely confident of the six or more ways they had to win and not so long ago were speaking of a landslide.
Not even those that expected a close EC and popular vote outcome, like me, anticipated that Trump could get to 270, much less the almost assured 280 (and possibly more) that he will end up with.
Guess we all should have paid a bit more mind to the Brexit vote or when the frying pan feels to hot to endure for another moment, the fire doesn’t look as hot.
I was flabbergasted myself. I understand why it happened, but not how. It apparently was one of those times that the people rose up in disgust. “I’m not as bad as the other guy” is not a good campaign slogan.
Not to kick you Democrats while you’re down, but you live in an echo chamber no less than the Republicans.
Still I expect you to double down on the racism and misandry and kissing Wall Street ass.
Once, when I was young, Democrats stood for inclusion for being being blind and non-sexist, for being pro-American and a strong Defense. No more, you have become the caricature that the right wingers paint you as.
Hundreds and hundreds of state polls are not usually considered an echo chamber.
Unanimous polls that a prez candidate lost all three debates are not considered an echo chamber.
Exit polls indicating that majorities of the wonderful American people “chose” (we’ll see about the popular vote) the person they saw as unqualified over the one they saw as qualified is not an echo chamber.
This is cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.
“Still I expect you to double down on the racism and misandry and kissing Wall Street ass.”
Well, I’m not disappointed.
What debate? Joint press conferences with different questions are not debates. Lincoln-Douglas, Kennedy-Nixon, they were debates.
As for the press, I just think of Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry”
Hey marduk, the election’s over. Hillary isn’t going to pay you for stifling dissent anymore.
36 years ago I worked in Burlington at the polls. On the way home I talked to Pat Leahy at length – a big deal for an 18 year new to politics.
On that night a woman and I (who were at the start of something romantic) met and we sat in a bar to watch the returns.
And watched the country that I thought existed change horribly.
So this morning she sends me the poem she thought of on the night so long ago. That is the great thing about the relationships we make in politics – they are wonderfully enduring and capable of surviving breakups and any manner of reversals and surprises life hands us.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
I am beyond angry. I am beyond sad for the people who will pay the price for this failure.
Politics is an affair of the heart. There are some who just don’t understand this.
But to those of us that do, and whose hearts are breaking this morning, it is easy to see is on Arnold’s darkling plain.
The anger and blame will come when the Radical Repubs and their new Strongman fill Scalia’s seat with someone even worse and then begin dismantling the 20th Century next February. Then the reality will hit. It’s kind of dreamlike right now.
The ultimate attribution of blame will be an interesting and speculative process, but ultimately of merely historical significance. For the world has turned, and we have gouged out our eyes to spite our face.
It will be critical to establish some avenues of dissent.
Hillary’s nominee would have been just as bad. I’ll wager he would have bought his seat.
You have no grip on reality, but you don’t know it.
Back at you.
That is doubtful. Secretary Clinton was the person who pushed for Justice Ginsberg to be nominated by President Clinton. She also was supposedly pushed for Justice Breyer’s nomination. For all of Bill Clinton’s faults (and there were many) the one thing he has an impeccable record on is the two justices he nominated to the Supreme Court.
I can’t interpret what these results mean, if that is even possible. Why did Trump do so much better than previous GOP candidates in the midwestern states? Hillary hate? Rejection of “elites”? Racial backlash? I have no idea. It’s like a blank canvas people can project on.
My conclusion would tend to be that the human species is simply not capable, long-term, of collectively governing itself at the level of hundred of millions of people spread across a continent.
The greatest issue of our time, or any time in human history, is the climate crisis. This crisis can be seen as a kind of galactic test of our species’ fitness to endure. All evidence suggests we are failing and will fail this test, which seems to require us to more or less evolve to a higher form of social communication and understanding, and to a higher moral relation with our world.
We barely (till now) survived the threat of nuclear annihilation. And that risk was in the hands of a small number of government and military elites in the USA and USSR. There were a number of very near misses. The climate crisis is even more dire and massively more complex…
Maybe it’s darkest before the dawn and all that, but I think if we are to have hope we have to think about how we can elevate the moral reckoning of vast numbers of people. I have no answers.
I’m sure you don’t live in the Midwest Rust Belt or you would understand.
You’re welcome to make public your understanding of the situation.
I have: http://www.boomantribune.com/comments/2016/11/9/51647/8424/8#8
Read this by Michael Moore. He has a deep understanding of the industrial heartland now known as the Rust Belt.
http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/
The rust belt has been called the rust belt for 30 years. Why revolt for Der Trumper now?
Perhaps because there has never been a Democratic candidate whose disdain was so palpable. Who was so visibly phony. And maybe we proles are slow and stupid like you think.
Congratulations on your excellent and perceptive mind reading.
Here are a few reasons: profound changes to communities as their economic base evaporated, immigrants with very different cultures moved in, traditional social norms changed, and rural areas were ridiculed, as was their way of life and so forth. Often by the newcomers to their towns.
I’ve lived most of my life in or on the edges of urban areas but have now lived almost 15 years in a rural community. We have lost mining, railroads and ranching in the last 30 years. These have been replaced by tourism and second or vacation homes, gobbling up ranch land and altering the countryside. An entire way of life is disappearing and for many people the extent of this change has reached a critical point.
It was only in days gone by that DJT was a con man who made promises he did not deliver.
Now he can totally be trusted to bring jobs back, the best jobs, he totally has a plan for this.
This is the end of the last hope to avert climate catastrophe, but I think you know that.
As for nuclear weapons, we now have a deeply damaged impulsive prez who will be surrounded by hotheads and macho shame-honor imbeciles.
An absolute calamity, brought on by the electoral college once again. There are no answers.
The was no hope of that with Hillary.
Yes indeed, the entire environmental movement was hoodwinked by her!
You really have lost it, sorry to say.
I dont really have the answers but I wish you’d been right. Im not sure how to come back from this, what tools to use.
No reason to beat you up. I could say that my relatives and in-laws have the same right, since they know I frequent all of the usual sites and had been putting them at ease by predicting a strong Clinton win.
At a very basic level, we do need to understand why all of the data failed us. Even Silver, while hedging his bets, did not foresee last night’s electoral outcome, to say nothing of Clinton’s campaign, which barely spent any resources in places like Wisconsin. We’ve been hearing that demographics are destiny and that the results were largely “baked in,” when that was clearly not the case. Unless and until we can understand the methodological flaws, it will be difficult to craft a message that speaks to those that are reachable but voted for Trump.
WI is a state with an R gov, an R SCOWI, R house, R Senate, and 5 of 8 HoR members are R, who all got re-elected last night. Feingold lost despite a supposed 10 pt lead, which had been slipping. Part of the reason he lost was due to Johnson’s very effective and modest demeanor during the campaign – he ran as the only manufacturer in the Senate which is a fact.
I hope people stop saying the WI is a blue state. It was a blue state for brief periods 16 years ago. Since over the last 50 years, it has elected as many R senators as D, it is purple. The gov is often R.
It’s not a blue state, and until Dems start seeing rural areas as having people instead racists clinging to their guns and religion, it’s gonna stay purple with a red tinge. Today, it’s red.
I have a house there. We go there 3-4 times a year. I know that state better than many.
Milwaukee and Madison were blue, like Chicago and Springfield.
I live in Wisconsin year around and I’d say you’re at least 95% right. In particular on “until Dems start seeing rural areas as having people instead racists clinging to their guns and religion” — the reason Republicans control Wisconsin government is that they have understood and weaponized the politics of class resentment. The Democrats don’t have an answer. Worse yet their organization has been rotting for years and now it’s caught up with them.
What is the answer?
Sorry to be brief here; I’m at work and can’t spend much time on this.
You can’t come up with a solution to any problem you can name, until you recognize there’s a problem. That’s why I keep hammering so hard on the failures, shortcomings, disastrous state of the DP here — and I think, a lot of other states in the upper Midwest. And of all its failures, the biggest is its failures to recognize its own contribution to the situation it finds itself in, by its ignorance and betrayal of the interests of the people it claims to represent. The DP has largely ruined its brand here.
That’s a large part of what dataguy is trying to say to you all too. And I don’t get the sense that he’s being heard much. God knows, people here are plenty racist but unless you can get beyond that and focus on what’s really going on in people’s lives you don’t have a chance of coming up with a solution to this problem. Try to do that and you’ll start to see that although racism is a real thing it doesn’t explain everything — Obama carried WI in 2008 and 2012 too; those were largely the same voters who were voting yesterday.
As for my answer, as I said I have to cut it short but I’ll offer 2 words: “class warfare”. The Republicans are really good at it. The Democrats are really not. Why is that and what do we want to do about it?
I hope we can discuss this further on. My immediate plans concern me and my family as we are inter-racial, but my parents sacrificed so I could make it more than they. It’s my turn to do the same for those who come after me.
Yes, and I grew up in a rural community there, but the result still caught me off guard.
Me too, I have to say.
I was a bit less caught off guard, in that my in-laws live in Bachmanistan. They are quite liberal but it’s Bachman’s old district so the region isn’t. I just didn’t think there would be THAT many votes.
Thanks for a very good and important message, Booman.
But I will add that its also important that we figure out what positives we can somehow take out of this election. I can think of 2, IMHO at least. First is the death of neoconservatism – Trump is no neocon (though he is a full blown imperialist), while Hillary is every bit the neocon. Second is a few chinks in neoliberalism’s armor – while Trump’s message is more xenophobia than anti-neoliberalism, this election does show that more neoliberalism is not going to win the voters even with a better candidate.
Now its up to Democrats to reform for 2020, and perhaps 2018 wont be as bad as it would have been with a Hillary win. And I hope Hillary doesn’t go yammering about the female vote in her concession speech.
Probably Clinton will be back in 2020, or Kaine. You have to drive a srake through a vampire’s heart. That’s what neoliberals are, vampires sucking the lifeblood from the working class.
There really is nothing to be gained from comments like this. Presumably you feel better? I’m sure that HRC is done with politics as are the rest of her family and Tim Kaine remains as a Senator from Virginia.
I really really hope so. Though I wonder if Chelsea and Ivanka still speak.
“Neoliberal” huh? That word once conveyed actual meaning as being people like William Kristol and Doug Feith.
Now it is just an all purpose insult as used to mean people (politician, pundit, whatever) described better as “someone I don’t like.”
And until the Democratic party is back in shape I’m guessing you will be hearing it a lot more. We just watched the whole box set.
Minor though they be, there were some positives in my state, which has been totally controlled by the GOP since 2002. No state wide office being held by a Democrat at all. Neither in Atlanta nor in D.C.
3 Democratic state candidates defeated 3 GOP incumbents for seats in the State legislature. Two huge suburban Atlanta counties, Cobb and Gwinnett, went blue primarily because their populations are no longer massively white. There are lots of Asians, Africans, Latin Americans who’ve moved there. The Democratic Party of Georgia fielded it’s own grass roots effort that the Clinton/Kaine folks later glommed onto. I volunteered for that effort here. We have created the beginnings of an ongoing grassroots effort in the state.
Also, the state voted down Amendment 1 which created Opportunity School Districts of underperforming schools (there’re 9 in my county) which would have allowed the governor to take control of those schools away from local school boards and hand them over, to a for profit out of state entity if he chose to do so, that could close them, move them, fire the teachers, all without reimbursing the local system for the buildings, etc.
It’s a beginning.
Nathan Deal’s thing, no?
We discussed it here a day or so ago. Glad to hear it went down in flames.
Yes, his deal.
You are the last person I would blame.
But I do blame the entire Democratic Party. I think it’s time for them to fold their tent and depart. If your party can’t beat Donald Fucking Trump, you can’t beat anybody, anywhere, anytime. The party is literally over. The Democrats have no power whatsoever in any branch of the Federal government, and control only a few states. It’s time to go.
The tragedy (and it is a real tragedy) is that there was a Democratic candidate who was genuinely popular and would have won the election, but Debbie Wasserman-Schulz and company stacked the deck against him.
But I’m through. The Democrats have to gol
Senator Sanders didn’t lose the primary because DWS stacked the deck against him. He lost the primary because he didn’t connect with a cross section of Democratic voters. Not only did he no connect. He got trounced.
As for the election last night given how badly progressives like Russ Feingold and many of the congressional candidates that Senator Sanders threw his support behind did I have my doubts he would have won either.
Well, he was trounced when half a million new voters were disenfranchised in California.
Those rules have existed long before either Senator Sanders or Secretary Clinton ran. DWS nor Clinton can be blamed for Senator Sanders not organizing better.
Voice, I live in California. You’re just straight up lying now. The sort of disenfranchisement claim you claim here did not happen.
Bernie would have lost the Democratic Party primary even if he been able to eke out a win in California. I was unsurprised when he did not.
Go ahead, run Kaine next time or Clinton redux or some other wall street toady. To think that this site once supported Occupy Wall Street and then forgot the Occupy part.
I actually wouldn’t run a candidate like them either. I just remain unconvinced that Senator Sanders would have won either.
Whether you’re convinced or not is neither here nor there. We’ll never know. The campaign would have been completely different. Very many people thought Donald Trump would’t win either. Have you noticed that he has. Bernie Sanders could very well have won. He generated energy and excitement, something HRC refused to/could not do. And here we are today.
Russ Feingold lost as did almost the entire slate of congressional candidates that Sanders supported.
You know who we can say was a winner in the D party last night? Harry Reid. His operation ran the board – from senator to congresspeople to state senators. Everyone he supported got elected/
Yep. Machine politics DO work. Just that unions (or other groups) are too weak to organize them in most places. Harry has a great pool of members.
When voters don’t come out for the top of the ticket, it does effect down ballot. Dems did not show up for HC.
Did Ross run as a supporter of Sanders’ policies? I don’t think so.
He lost the primary because the Clintons had been gearing up for decades for this run at the presidency. The Democratic Party operatives did everything in their power, which was considerable, to undermine him. He developed an entirely new organization and brought in funds without the help of Wall Street or any pacs. With his message, he attracted young people and people who don’t consider themselves Democrats. Despite his age, his message was clear and fresh. That he did as well as he did was an early indication of Clinton’s weakness as a candidate.
No one knows if he might have won if nominated, but it was an election season when people were crying out for change, and he was for bold change, not wonky incrementalism. Unlike Trump, his message was positive and constructive. Sort of the opposite side of the same coin.
Yes, well said. He also showed the party the way out of this mess.
This is true but his support grew as the campaign wore on.
Not even close enough.
Way back in the longago, you fuckers had a choice…and you blew it on Clinton. KNOWING her flaws.
I AM QUITE FUCKING DONE WITH YOUR BULLSHIT. Unless you want to foment a serious revolution, fuck you because I will quite literally be leaving this country in the next year.
Fuck that noise. The only time you Democrap assholes aren’t useless is when you’re actively enabling the other side or bathing in the smug of post-Englightment liberal logic. HILLARY CLINTON?!?? Please.
Stripped of the bad manners, I mostly agree. But I was born here and my parents were born here. I’m not going to let anyone chase me out of my homeland. But, please, more manners.
I’d chide you for biting our host’s hand, but after the insults he hurled at me this election cycle, he can damn well defend himself. I will say that he’s from Jersey and it’s a different culture from Illinois. Apparently, Jersey doesn’t have fighting words.
It’s as if these people didn’t believe that the Democratic Party cared about them or offered them any hope of an improved future.
Go figure.
Or maybe they are just bigots happy with voter suppression and keeping out refugees etc.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
I feel like the victim of my own willing suspension of disbelief. I almost always let my answering machine screen my calls, only exception is if I am expecting some specific call. Looking at my own behavior, why should I trust polls that depend on telephone responses?
So it turns out Nate Silver was right to allow for possible systemic bias.
If I may…
America craves for sapience tightly knitted with pragmatic humanism and genuine authenticity. And the uncommon gravitas of its future standard bearer, the ‘better angel’ of the Obamas, Michelle.
There is one incontestable reality that unites almost all Americans today: Donald Trump authenticates best the universal feeling of alienation. For, he epitomizes to-and-fro alienation.
America does not need a uniter. They just voted for one. And voted out a unity poser within the same authentification process.
Believe me, it is a very small step for one who has just voted a shout-out to unbridled alienation, to cast a future ballot to its serene antithesis. However, the flipping of the humanism switch requires an à-la-Michelle sort of vector to carry it through the incipient darkness of suddenly-on-the-loose alienation.
berult.
Martin, none of this is on you. This country is just more screwed up than anyone thought. I lived through Nixon, Reagan, and both Bush and Shrub,and this is the first time I really feel frightened for what this country could do to itself.
A very dignified and gracious retreat, Booman. You have nothing to reproach yourself for.
Sam Wang:
Not only did the polling industry fail to predict Trumps margins by an average of 4% (He may yet lose the popular vote when California’s votes are all in) but they had an even greater failure in down ticket races – 6% in Senate races. So this is not an exclusively shy Trump voter problem, but a failure to predict across a wide range of States, demographics and candidates. It can only be seen as an ideological failure, because many of those candidates had directly contributed to the legislative and administrative gridlock in Washington.
Perhaps it can be attributed to a wish not to grant Obama and his allies an effective third term, but then how do we explain Obama’s massive +10% personal approval ratings? Perhaps it can be attributed to a disapproval/dislike of Hillary Clinton and the Washington establishment, but then how do we explain the fact that Trumps approval ratings were always worse than hers? Perhaps it can be attributed to differential voter enthusiasm/turnout rates, but then precisely what does it take to get (say) Latino voters engaged? According to exit surveys, Trump scored higher with Latino voters than Romney did.
Perhaps it all confirms that the USA is a deeply conservative, authoritarian, confusing society which longs for a great dictator who can make things simple and end partisan gridlock. Certainly Trump ran against much of the Republican establishment as well, and successful GOP candidates owe more to his success than the GOP brand. (GOP favourable/unfavourables were always much worse than Democratic ones). Certainly the more inclusive Democratic brand and their far superior GOTV effort were overwhelmed by a wave of white working class protest which belied their demographic decline. This was more of a class vote, than an ethnic one, and the working classes chose to overthrow their elites.
GOTV effort proved weak. HRC turned out 129k fewer votes than 2012 Obama in Detroit. Turned out 95K fewer in Milwaukee. Both would have flipped their states but HRC could not hold the Obama coalition which perhaps was specific to him.
Turnout as a whole dropped since 2012.
For myself I think if the candidate lacks a compelling narrative no ammount of work will save you.
You say:
Then go on to say:
You did, IMO, reach a correct conclusion in your last sentence, but maybe it’s time for Democrats/liberals to stop using white working class as a pejorative. Not so long ago they were the bedrock of the New Deal Democratic Party. Such a large portion of the base was flagrantly and violently racist that I may have recoiled in horror from them enough to ally myself with the GOP that kept all workers down, by violent means if necessary.
The reality is that white workers could never afford the racism put in their hearts to keep “the man” wealthy and in power. White, European immigrants saw how religion had been used on them and their ancestors to accomplish the same thing and supported doing away with that when this country was formed, but they didn’t perceive that same old dynamics were just as easy to accomplish through slavery and its racist legacy when it was outlawed. Outlawed at a high price for both northern and southern working class folks.
I remember distinctly after Watergate and the Nixon resignation a period of comity emerged between partisan individuals, and partisanship ran deep. It doesn’t always have to be this way, at least historically. The problem is the corporations have screwed everyone and people are more pissed off than well informed.
I don’t blame you at all. You were, in fact, one of the only sane ones.
But this: “Trust me, a new generation of leaders will emerge shortly”?
They’ll be lucky if they’re not locked up or thrown out of helicopters.
The game is over, the bad guys won, end of story.
I think any honest analysis of the outcome has to account for turnout. Demographics may be destiny, but they mean nothing if people don’t turn out. Trump had fewer voters than Romney four years back. Republicans pulled their levers. Many Democrats didn’t. There are countless reasons for this, which don’t need to be rehashed exhaustively.
I think this is important to account for. The only reason the increase in white rural support swept Trump to the Presidency is because it was accompanied by substantially lower turnout from the Obama coalition. Trump will end up with many fewer voter than Romney gained when he was trounced by Obama in 2012. Think that through for a minute.
This race was so very close in a number of States that Hillary would have won if she had kept anything close to the President’s turnout. The Trump campaign openly told reporters that their strategy was to make the race so dispiriting and unpleasant that they would lower voter turnout. They appear to have succeeded, with major assistance from the Russians, WikiLeaks and the FBI.
I’m struggling to find myself imagining how I will work in coalition with people who want to take away health insurance, health care access and protections against health-related bankruptcies from over 20 million Americans. My value system just doesn’t mesh with theirs.
And then we could consider the fact that Americans chose as their next President a man who thinks sexual assault is perfectly fine “when you’re a star.”
In my rural county Obama had a professionally staffed field office, as well as several local employees. They organized people to canvas door to door. Amy Klobuchar even paid us a visit in his behalf. He lost this conservative county by 1 vote in 2008 and won by 18 votes in 2012.
Hillary had no presence here. I saw only one Hillary yard sign. She lost the county by over 500 votes. I’m surprised it wasn’t more. I know a few Republicans who simply didn’t vote for president and a number of unaffiliated voters (big deal in this state) who voted for Hillary or Johnson.
In the last 5 years or so the general tenor of the county has changed. For the most part people who differed used to be polite and reasonable with each other. It was socially unacceptable not to be. We now have become infected with the hostile, hateful attitude we are seeing nationwide. Oftentimes it’s the newcomers, not the old timers who are leading the charge. It’s as though an infectious disease is spreading across the land.
Thanks Martin, having to write this after last night must have been tough. You frequently point out your previous prescient posts (rightly so), and there were a few loud voices in the pond who shouted over and over again about Hillary Clinton as a flawed candidate, mostly preferring Bernie. Thanks for letting them have an “I told you so” moment.
By the way, where’s Arthur?
Probably hung over.
There is one argument that I hope we see less of – that the demographic makeup of the US is going to produce a Democratic future.
This argument is false, as we learned last night.
Trump got Latino votes. Latinos are not natural allies of the Democratic Party of today. Many are very religious. Many do not support gay marriage, gays period, abortion.
The electorate is not static. As one thing happens, another thing changes in response to it. In politics, this is very true. A coalition involving one group produces a coalition to oppose it. And groups that ally with one side today may not ally tomorrow.
Demographic trends may not be the friend of the Democrats.
The most important component of this is that it promotes lazy thinking. “We’ll just sit back and they’ll drop into our hands like ripe fruit” thinking.
Finally, the notion that the old white people are gonna die off is totally stupid. The nature of time is that it makes more old people every day. Why today my wife is one year older. And as people age, they change their opinions and politics.
A good point. I have never been entirely comfortable with the fact that so many Democrats cite demographics as a major part of their strategy going forward. It proved to be a dangerous assumption, just like the assumption about high early voting always being a positive indicator only for Democrats. Those things cannot replace actually standing up and fighting for something. If demographics help, that should just be icing on the cake. It can’t be looked on as the main ingredient. A very dangerous and short-sighted strategy.
Trump did the most effective type of “polling.” An old fashioned and inexpensive type of polling.
At every rally her threw out an array of bait (messages). Whichever bait was taken was offered at the next rally. Often with an amplified message. That which didn’t get a response was dropped. At the next rally he’d add in a few more types of bait. He changed positions on various issues until he found ones that his audience responded to.
By the time people started voting, he had perfected his message to get the maximum positive response from his audience.
My comment above this was meant to be in response to your post below on polling.
So much for my Election Night little party last night. At least there were friends there to help me get through it. I called it quits just before the Vulgarian was to appear for his victory speech. Didn’t want to ruin my new big screen smart tv.
I’m staying away from the news, at least directly, for the near future. It’s just too much to bear. Similar feelings in 2000 and 1988 (after the ugly way Poppy won and his margin of victory), only this seems much worse. Like when the honorable Germans learned of Hitler and the Nazis coming to power in 1932.
While I respected the sane analysis by Booman here and a few others (flamdem notably), I could never shake a dread feeling about this one when weeks ago Allan Lichtmann came out with his prediction for Trump. There was another perfesser on the radio with Ian Masters recently who used another somewhat similar non-poll model to arrive at the same results. I tried to tell friends about my doubts, but they only wanted to know how much I thought H would win by — 10 or 20 pts. I was wasting their time as they saw it by noting that Donald did have a chance to win.
And every thoughtful person who made light of Michael Moore’s warnings on Trump winning needs to explain why they think he was crazy just a month ago. He knows the Midwest as do I, and you didn’t need data to tell you what’s been happening here for 30 years. It doesn’t matter if you class-splain it to them that their jobs were not taken by Mexicans, that technology/mechanization has replaced their roles. Drive through Rock Island, Illinois, near where I live now and look at closed factories. All those folks who used to work there know is that Somebody did this, and Trump exploited it here, in Wisconsin, Michigan, PA.
Spot on. Although it’s been many years since i left the Midwest, I did live in 3 different Rust Belt states, and we still have connections to friends and a few remaining family members.
When US Steel left the Chicago/Indiana area, 200,000 jobs disappeared. Youngstown OH is a ghost town, as is much of Detroit and Cleveland. Every small city in these states used to have one or more manufacturers. Most of them are now gone.
Rescuing the auto industry certainly helped Obama win Ohio. Sherrod Brown is a friend of labor. But in general, the Democratic Party has abandoned labor, and as jobs have left, the unions no longer have much power.
I thought this was a well done take on Trump voters (obviously done before election day): Wendy Cramer.
Get real, Martin and look at the map.
WI: Last poll set (4 about the same time) HRC +6
PA: Last poll set (5 about the same time) HRC +2
MI: Last poll set (5 about the same time) HRC +6
Now take the combined EV: 20+16+10=46
Now the change the totals:
306 – 46 = 260 (I include MI and AZ in Trumps total)
228 + 46 = 278
No way could you or anyone else predict those flips. Not with the available data.
As far as the “principled” vote, Stein’s vote count would have won her MI and WI, but it didn’t matter in PA. HRC still loses. Without PA it is irrelevant. Stein wasn’t on the ticket in NC. In FL it wasn’t enough to move the state. So no, this was not 2000 and HRC didn’t get Nadered.
There’s a problem on Polling Island, and no one knows what it is. Polling simply is not working. Brexit – fail. Polls in WI – fail for both Clinton and Feingold. Many many many recent voting surprises.
My wife and I have gotten so many calls this year I have lost count. Many of them were annoying. I had one call which lasted 20 minutes about commercial products. Most of the questions were incredibly stupid. I had to hang up while this guy was asking more questions.
Several reasons:
Remember those ads telling women that they didn’t have to vote as their husbands told them to? Well, it’s also the case the husbands did not have to vote as their wives might have wished. “Sure, honey, I voted for Hillary”.
You could not predict those flips from the last polls because that was an uncontexted single data point.
What Nate Silver’s model did was provide a broad historical context for interpretation of those numbers, indeed an aggregate of a large number of polls, generally considered to converge on and estimated value.
The estimated value was there, but the convergence did not happen because the variation in polling was so great this year as compared to all previous years.
The actual result was in the range of a 0.5% probability in the 10,000 trials. That’s 50 times the probability of a purely random 1 in 10,000 probability (0.00001 or 0.001%). Were not most of the mesa pattern in the center of that distribution generating local peaks of that amount and the three peaks of 1% being the highest on the Clinton side, that would have been an outlier. But it likely is within 1 sigma of the estimated value of 306 electoral votes for Clinton.
It was not the third party voting. Indeed not.
I would look at the purging of lists of minority voters at the last minute in states that did that. At systematic voter suppression through all sorts of mechanisms identified in the Voter ID bills. Of nullification of court orders on boards of elections to obey the law and suppress votes. NC, WI, MI, OH, AZ, TX, FL, GA.
I will wait to see BooMan’s take on what happened in PA.
Polling did not fail as never converge.
Sorry Boss, but 4,5 and 6 distinct polls over a 4 day period is NOT one data point.
What was the variance in those polls?
Would the actual result be a likely result within that variance?
If the polling methodologies used by all the pollsters is the same and there’s a serious flaw in it, they could run the polls a gazillion times and still get the wrong answer. However, at a certain point, polling response fatigue can set it and the polling can become worse.
I’m not yet convinced that there was a systematic polling error. But might later still grind through the numbers to look more closely at that question. However, one thing I did note was that in the last two months of the campaign, there seemed to be a high number of DK/UND. If one assumes that those voters will break in a similar fashion to those that have decided, no problem But what if they don’t? And this may be key.
Clinton and her team went where the polls told them they should go to nail down slim leads. Dem polling watchers fretted over the numbers and for the most part affirmed the campaigning choices Clinton was making and frequently laughed at Trump’s choices. One exception that I noted was fladem’s criticism of Clinton for reducing efforts in CO bc it was “in the bag.” I sided with Clinton on this one, but with a final margin of 2.7%, the it was a weaker margin than I expected; so, fladem’s did have a valid point.
Trump, OTOH, didn’t pay that much attention to the polls (apparently not even his internal polling that he stopped paying for — another thing that prompted giggles among Democrats). He appeared to have looked at all the potential swing states, regardless of how much they needed to swing from 2012. Then he went wherever his “gut” told him there were more voters to be found for him. As it turned out, his efforts in CO and NV got him closer than Mitt had but not close enough. OH broke early for him and as Clinton threw in the towel on it, he didn’t have to squander time and money there. Like Clinton, he focused a lot on FL and NC. Neither campaign seemed to stop working FL, but my impression was the Clinton worked it harder in the last month than Trump did. I could be wrong on that, but with Rubio’s solid lead in the Senate race, he had a bit of breathing room. I always got the impression that more Clinton’s team put more into NC in the last two months than Trump did — again I could be wrong — but she did have a much larger contingent of surrogates to put out there than Trump did; so, perhaps my impression was based on the differing level of those efforts.
The other comparison that shouldn’t be overlooked was the size of the crowds that candidates drew on the stump. Clinton with 5,000 in FL is less than Trump in FL with a 10,000 person crowd. And Clinton never let up on all the time she spent with wealthy elites in fundraising. So, four hours privately picking up many millions of dollars may not be as an effective use of a candidate’s time spent holding a rally for 10-15,000 people.
So, where was Trump in the last six weeks? Other than FL, CO, NV, and NC, he was in MI (wtf?), PA (wtf?), and WI. States near or bordering two, IN and OH, that he had in the bag. Assuming he carried AZ (which still hasn’t been called), FL, and NC (and excluding ME CD2) he only needed eleven more EV votes out of the five states he was working and all of which his gut told him contained more potential voters for him.
The polls indicated that he was wasting his time. And I now suspect bc many were reading the polls as if the elections were more settled in those states than they were bc that’s what we wanted to see.
Very good analysis.
As much as I have been quoting from Nate Silvers column in the past month, there is a glaringly obvious reason the polls in FL and NC and probably MI and WI as well did not come out like the polling estimates. All four of those states had Voter ID laws at one point and election operations dedicated to suppression of minority voters. Election protection operations in all four states filed lawsuits and documented many instances of precinct-level voter suppression practices in counties with Republican-controlled boards of election.
You last sentence goes to my frequent comments about the peculiar shape of the distribution curve of the 538 model. It showed the ambiguity you are describing, but most articles focused only on the the estimated value of electoral votes alone and ignored the smear over a wide range of possible model states. Because that is what they wanted to report–how unlikely a Trump victory was.
Read my comment above about how he settled on his messages. And what I didn’t say jibes with what you’ve said–he went where his gut told him he’d get the biggest response.
At this point, I’m with the DP for the duration. My advice for 2020 – don’t clear the field for one candidate as the DNC tried to do, and bring on the next generation of leaders.
This left the party without any flexibility. Bernie’s rise without any institutional or organizational support was evidence that many voters wanted more choices. Or a different type of candidate. The Clintons and the Democratic Party locked themselves in years before the election. That was enough time for the whole political landscape to change.
I have no anger against you, BooMan. I’m frustrated by a party elite that was in the bag for a heavily flawed retread in a year of outsiders. I’m just hoping that the midterm gives something back to us. Thanks for all your work.
Let’s take stock of what Trump’s win might mean.
1. One of the Chicago Tribune’s first reactions was that Trump might really set up a special prosecutor and throw Hillary Clinton in jail. Yes, the Tribune is and has always been a Republican rag. Yes, there are checks and balances in the American justice system to prevent arbitrary arrest, trial, and imprisonment. But there are a lot of T-shirts and posters if not actual people claiming that Hillary Clinton peremptorily should be locked up or even executed. I’m not sure that even Donald Trump will do either of these, but after 9/11 and the Obama normalization of Bush policies, he has that power even if it technically unconstitutional. Let’s be honest. Democrats built that, and not just President Obama. It was Congressional reluctance and the same sort of desertion that Joe Manchin is reportedly considering that allowed the greatest surveillance state in history to be built while the President argued, “Trust us to do the right thing.” That institutional power passes peacefully to Donald Trump on January 20, 2017. When in his business dealings would any of his business partners be comfortable without having the institutional power of civil courts to go to and just accept a Trump assertion, “Trust us to do the right thing.” Let that sink in.
Whatever political response a loyal opposition coalition builds to check and balance runaway Republican and Trump policies must consider this fundamental change in domestic political power over the past 15 years. The normalization of torture goes with that power. And Trump in the campaigned said that he was willing to order torture against “our enemies”.
2. The true power in Trump’s presidency will be the people who are appointed to the positions listed in the Plum Book (named after the plum job positions). The Obama administration helpfully has made Trump’s transition easier by creating a web site, Presidential Transition Directory. This provides an overview of the current structure of the executive branch, the current list of politically appointed jobs, and links to the Federal Government Manual and the Federal Register (the daily listing of upcoming changes in regulations and announcements of executive orders).
The new President need not keep all those political appointments, but few can resist the temptation to buy political loyalty with what remains the vestige of the spoils system. Although some of these people must be confirmed by the Senate (hardly a check or balance in the new Congress), the majority do not and need not be especially qualified for the positions they are assuming. (One is reminded of the baby elephants who ran the agencies in the Iraq Provisional Authority). You might even see some of these faces from 13 years ago become senior administrators in Executive agencies. We will not actually know the Trump policy direction until we see these names. That is, we will not know how far Trump departs from the status quo until we see how much he puts status quo people into these positions. Let that sink in as to the consequences of large actions of reversing policy and regulations and small actions of agency sabotage. Also watch the appointments at State and Defense and the publicly identified Intelligence Community directors. A purge of neo-conservatives from these offices would be a sign that Trump intends to deliver on his new direction in foreign policy. But my hunch is that that was window-dressing like W’s “humble foreign policy” and will not be seen in his appointments. To the extent that he actually embarks on a new direction of any kind, that will be bucking the deep state unless their institutional interests have been written into the new policy. Let that possibility for profound change in the executive branch sink in.
In North Carolina, that means that even with a Democratic governor, Hate Bill 2 likely will not be repealed. Those of us concerned about having clean water adequate for rapidly sprawling urban areas will have even less power over real estate developers.
Writ nationwide, we are on the fast track to ecological and economic collapse because profit knows no limits and decision-makers are socialized into what fattens their wallets.
5. Well we survived Coolidge-Hoover; we survived Nixon; we survived Reagan-Bush; we survived W. That is a tempting false hope now used to justify complacency and a retreat from politics that allowed all of those disastrous Presidencies to get deeper engrained and more radicalized because they could not eradicate all of the New Deal or the civil rights movement gains or the criticism of the militarism that was enriching the military-industrial complex. And the Democratic interregnums were so beset with character (and real) assassination that every one of them adopted policies of some form of triangulation. With the one exception of Lyndon Johnson’s drive to pass the Civil Rights bills that lost the Democrats power over the past 50 years to the forces of bigotry.
This election was carried out almost like the election of 1876. Only the violence shifted from paramilitary groups like the Red Shirts and other secret societies of former Confederate veterans to the Fraternal Order of Police, the Oath Keepers, and the Ku Klux Klan members embedded in law enforcement and likely in National Guard units as well. There has been a low-level race war going on in American society for a very long time, and it is a one-sided war because the other side does not have an organized and well-funded army. White people saw that war shoved into their faces with Black Lives Matter and the protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. Instead of repenting, controlling the police, and changing course, with Trump they doubled down. And all the legal forces imagined by Judicial Watch and other GOP election law strategists were employed to suppress the votes of African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and other groups easily identified on voter lists and at polling places. In North Carolina’s rural and small town counties, it worked. In Connecticut it worked too; polling officials were questioning state issued IDs as not being suitable for a “federal” election. An African-American friend of ours was administered a literacy test at he polling place; she passed it but it was suppression harassment of those less confident of their right to vote. Many states that deprive felons of the right to vote purged lists with searches so loose that, when examined, they purged many other people of color with the same name but strangely did not purge any white people of the same name. Residential segregation is convenient to politicians.
And they wanted to extend exclusions of citizenship and the right to vote to immigrants no matter how long they were naturalized, no matter how many elections they had already voted in, but only to certain immigrants.
The clear motive here is to communicate to all designate Democratic constituencies that the Democrats will not protect your right to vote or your interests. You are useful only during election years.
And so began the rhetorical pogrom of immigrants in the Trump campaign.
But it is employers who drive immigration, and they will not change. The same employers who supported Trump for his tax policies and promises to Make America Great Again. There will be not wall except for the one that Obama extended. There will be not deportations beyond the pace that Obama set. The xenophobes will not be satisfied for the same reason the pro-life community will not be satisfied; they are too useful a constituency election after election. As useful as the Democratic constituencies like labor that the GOP has gradually pealed away from long-term support of Democrats. And Democratic elected officials have notice that pealing off of support by screwing the interests of workers through legislation promised but never delivered.
Last night after the results were clear, a group rallied on a bridge over I-40/I-85 near Mebane in Alamance County NC to celebrate their victory. The group claimed to be the local Ku Klux Klan. With the politicians already in their pocket, the night rides were not necessary.
6. Disunity among the 99% and co-opting both parties by the 0.01% has allowed a complete seizure of power by the billionaires to bought this election through multiple campaigns of highly targeted marketing. The narrowcasting used by politics now is so specifically targeted through so many media, it now flies below the noise of the traditional media sources that Trump voters believe were in the tank for Hillary Clinton. The mainstream media, to use a deceptive term, is now a delegitimized as the Democratic Party and President Barack Obama. (His recent surge in popularity could be connected to the fact that he’s finally leaving office, making some folks especially grateful that he did not suspend the election as Alex Jones said he would.) Much of these were essentially unattributed to the actual source of funding such a large campaign but came off as some cottage industry operation or just a lone crank.
The crisscrossing of that multiple source propagated marketing media gets amplified through Facebook, Twitter, and good old-fashioned chain emails. And that trigger misinformed gossip at the office, at church, and in kaffeeklatches. The adapted traditional campaign marketing that the Clinton campaign did by contrast was very public, with cross-posting of links to get the faithful cheering. And it preached to the choir. That is, it did not get the evangelists of Trump’s message that all of the astroturfed media did.
And then there were that 20% class that was outside of the the supposed Clinton class interest group. The self-described conservative professors “oppressed at liberal universities”, the politicized “Religious Right” preachers, and the retired military officers lounging in cushy locations. These were the opinion leaders in the Trump movement who connect the local business class segment with a popular populist movement. There was a lot of clarity in Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr. proving who we thought they were–the inheritors of a diversion from Biblical Christianity for the sake of hobnobbing with the powerful and the wealthy.
Who in all this mess of propaganda can claim to have made an actual well-informed decision? Welcome to the post-modern circus.
Or democratic political process for developing authentic consent of the governed in fundamentally broken in a way that is new, troubling, and aiming a permanent position of minority power that can lock down the political process to a narrow set of ideas and practices.
That is troubling when you realize that those ideas and practices accelerate our march of folly. That the promise to Make America Great Again cannot happen that way. The respect we commanded when we were actually respected had to do with our struggle to match the lofty words of the Founding Fathers of our national mythology. When we acted with wisdom about the condition of what other nations needed from us instead of unalloyed grabbing what we needed from them. When we were capable of taking steps to reducing armaments or reducing global instability.
When most of the world thought that the Statue of Liberty and the poem of Emma Lazarus about the Great Colossus symbolized the aspirations of the American people and not its worst fears.
I said all along that I was pessimistic about this election. I voted for Bernie Sanders in hopes of a redirected Democratic Party establishment that understood why they had lost election after election and state after state.
A week or so ago, BooMan put up Dylan’s “It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” as a witness to these times. That was on target then and more so now. Within the Democratic establishment the fact that “Money doesn’t talk, it swears” so evident for a while was laid out in intimate conversation in the Wikileaks Podesta emails. And the fact that John Podesta is a brother of one of the biggest lobbyists in DC did not evade notice of the public. That connection more than the content of the emails sunk whatever hopes Clinton might have had of overwhelming with traditional marketing aesthetics the astroturfing of 20 years duration.
Might there be a Wikileaks expose of power in the GOP as a result of the fabled three-way knife fight that BooMan bruted (that’s a favorite traditional newspaper headline verb)? Or of emails from US lobbyists to clients that causes loss of lobbying business?
If one half of the duopoly status quo party system is gone and the other one is shaky from the impact of Trump’s victory, what is the sociological form (not assuming it’s a party) of the realignment in US politics that will move what were the lefty to left-center wing back into the local, state, and federal political process?
Parties were a cost-sharing device of politicians in the early Republic, no matter how Madison despised and then used factions. Are they necessary anymore? PACs have become that cost-sharing device for candidates but are just open bribery. What returns us to the democratic path of governance we so long pretended to be on?
I doubt that I’ve yet gotten the shock out of me. Of 1968, 1980, 2000, and now. And there are specific policies yet to consider.
About all I can say right now is that this feels like a death in the family. My country just strapped on a suicide belt and set it off. The collateral damage is yet to be sorted out.
I’m not going to blame you, Booman. I just hope that now you understand better where I was coming from.
No blame Martin. Thank you for your insightful and compassionate analysis. I’m tremendously grateful to be able to come here to read and share. Please don’t give up.
Martin,
We were all told this was coming, but we got swept up in believing our own BS. Michael Moore, Nate Silver, Andrew Sullivan — all of us saw their reports and we looked, said “Nah”, and moved on.
I’m glad to see you feel responsibility. I am sincerely touched by your sorrow. I misled my friends as well, I quoted the Huff Post 98.4% probability based upon 10 million computer simulations that Trump was a winner in 230,000 of those simulations. Once again I said, “Nah” and moved on once again. That’s too many paths to victory.
I’ve learned a potentially life ruining mistake last night. I hope my newfound wisdom is allowed to be useful down the road somewhere. The Trump folks are playing the positive PR game today, while the Hate Hillary Executive Council (Bennen, Bossie, Conway, et al) are in a political back alley getting ready to rip the politically viable babies from America’s womb and abort these children of ours.
I had been letting my 6 year old daughter have 3 minutes of complete trust every morning before they opened the gates to the Charter school she attends.
I was, until yesterday, comfortable telling her that she was safe in most situations around people charged with her care. At swimming lessons, Gymnastics, tennis lessons, on the playground at school–I would assure her she was in good hands.
New rules for that child today. She will be taught that every adult of both sexes can be dangerous, and will cover up for anyone to gain themselves some type of power over anyone and they will have no loss of sleep over hurting you.
New rules for my house. Guns. I will have a couple before the end of the week.
If any Trump follower ever tries grabbing my wife or daughter’s p***y…
If any Trump FBI thug comes a knockin…
Shooting lessons will need to be worked into the budget.
I saw the children playing on the playground this morning. There was only happiness. A few of them mouthed the words “Donald Trump”. No policy discussion, of course, however I guarantee that coming to playgrounds near you will be the white kids telling the brown kids, on January 20th an hour after Trump gets sworn in that buses will be there to kick your illegal, or Muslim butt out of here. Don’t let the wall hit you in the butt…
Might as well add Michael Moore’s take to the stew here: