Let’s start by saying that I did not expect last night’s results. I think I’m still in shock, really. We watched the election results, switching alternately between CNN & Fox News, while I simultaneously checked my twitter feed (I had to switch to cellular when the wifi stopped working), up until a bit past 11:00, when Michigan and Pennsylvania were still undecided, and when there were a few scenarios in which Trump and Clinton would end up with a tie. (Utah, I’m very disappointed in you! McMullin finished with little more than 20%.)
To be sure, my preferred blogger for checking what the extreme right is saying, was, up until yesterday morning when I last checked, touting the small number of polls that showed Trump on top, and claiming all the others were wrong. But I considered that to be nonsense. After all, Republicans in 2012 were full of reasons why the pollsters were adjusting their polls wrongly and Romney really had a better chance than they showed.
Ah, Romney. A good, competent man, who was mocked for identifying Russia as a threat, who was deemed a threat to women and workers and all that is good, for nonsense “transgressions” like the “binders full of women” comment. And this is where that got us: voters tuning out media warnings about Trump as an unacceptable choice, because they’d heard it all before, in a boy-who-cried-wolf fashion.
But, still: Trump took Ohio and Florida. I expected that. Trump took Pennsylvania. I did not expect that. Trump appears to have taken Michigan, though the vote count isn’t complete — and in both PA and MI I had expected that Clinton’s lead was too strong for Trump to have any chance. CNN is also reporting that Clinton has a razor-thin popular vote margin.
Now, to be sure, I had hoped that Trump would finish respectably, with a showing in the mid-200s, not out of support for the guy, but because it seemed to me that a Clinton blow-out would leave us in a worse position in terms of long-term national reconciliation. So in the early part of the night, when Trump picked up states, I was relieved that he was climbing successfully to that benchmark — and then he blew past it.
So, indeed, what next? Let’s start with the remote, but not completely impossible events over the next couple of months.
- By CNN’s count, we need 10 faithless electors to prevent Trump from getting an absolute majority, and throwing the decision to the house. Not likely, but, eh, I’m putting this out there anyway.
- Trump, who has no doubt himself woken up with a bit of a shock, realizes that he doesn’t actually want to be president; all he really wanted was to have been elected president but has no desire at all for all the hard work that comes with the job. He resigns and hands the seat over to Pence.
- Something in Trump’s past, say, the Trump University lawsuit, comes back in an ugly way, or else Trump makes a major misstep almost immediately after taking office — something that doesn’t destroy the world economy, but pisses the House off, and he’s impeached.
OK, fine, none of these are going to happen.
Instead, everyone who had all those nice words to say about reconciliation and bipartisanship, when it looked like Clinton was going to win, has to find a way to make it work, to keep the U.S., and the world, functioning in some reasonable way for the next four years. After all, for all that Clinton called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables,” most of them are good, decent people, and many of them even opposed Trump personally but chose him in a lesser-of-two-evils fashion, or feared the generational impact of a Clinton-appointed Supreme Court.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump
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