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Let\u2019s start by saying that I did not expect last night\u2019s results. \u00a0I think I\u2019m still in shock, really. \u00a0We 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. \u00a0(Utah, I\u2019m very disappointed in you! \u00a0McMullin finished with little more than 20%.)<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0But I considered that to be nonsense. \u00a0After 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.<\/p>\n
Ah, Romney. \u00a0A 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 \u201ctransgressions\u201d like the \u201cbinders full of women\u201d comment. \u00a0And this is where that got us: \u00a0voters tuning out media warnings about Trump as an unacceptable choice, because they\u2019d heard it all before, in a boy-who-cried-wolf fashion.<\/p>\n
But, still: \u00a0Trump took Ohio and Florida. \u00a0I expected that. \u00a0Trump took Pennsylvania. \u00a0I did not<\/strong> expect that. \u00a0Trump appears to have taken Michigan, though the vote count isn\u2019t complete \u2014 and in both PA and MI I had expected that Clinton\u2019s lead was too strong for Trump to have any chance. \u00a0CNN is also reporting that Clinton has a razor-thin popular vote margin.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0So in the early part of the night, when Trump picked up states, I was relieved that he was climbing successfully to that benchmark \u2014 and then he blew past it.<\/p>\n So, indeed, what next? \u00a0Let\u2019s start with the remote, but not completely impossible events over the next couple of months.<\/p>\n OK, fine, none of these are going to happen.<\/p>\n Instead, everyone who had all those nice words to say about reconciliation and bipartisanship, when it looked like Clinton was going to win, \u00a0has 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. \u00a0After all, for all that Clinton called Trump supporters a \u201cbasket of deplorables,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n from https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Donald_Trump<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Let\u2019s start by saying that I did not expect last night\u2019s results. \u00a0I think I\u2019m still in shock, really. \u00a0We 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":4831,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[494,442],"class_list":["post-5626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-donald-trump","tag-election-2016"],"yoast_head":"\n\n