First, a hearty FUCK YOU to every single person who voted for Trump, all 57,518,551 or so of you. Even if you don’t consider yourselves stone-cold racist, misogynist pricks like the president-elect, you’re as bad as he is. If you were stupid enough to believe that your vote “sent a message,” you’re right: By voting for that degenerate demagogue, you’ve displayed such depraved indifference to the fate of women, immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, etc., that you’re now an honorary member of the Klan. So, put that fucking hood on, asshole.
Second, a rousing GO FUCK YOURSELF to Stein voters. There were two candidates who had a chance of winning this election, and you chose to preen on the sidelines. The fucking hilarious thing is, you didn’t even matter. You’re not a spoiler, but you’re still an asshole. When you get over yourself, you’re cordially invited to come be useful to those of us who will be opposing the fascist.
Third, about opposing the fascist: it starts tomorrow with a focus on 2018. Only determined, implacable resistance will get us through this. Having seen the writing on the wall, I turned my TV off before they called the race, but I just read an alert that popped on my screen that says “Trump calls for ‘America to bind the wounds of division.’” Fuck that. Trump is a racist, sexist, xenophobic demagogue who has elevated the very worst people in a country chock-full of lunatics, sadists and incompetents.
Trump is my enemy, and so is everyone who supports him, and starting tomorrow, I will do every nonviolent thing I can to oppose Trump and the sycophants and drooling morons who surround him. In contemplating this ghastly outcome, I keep coming back to something Kay said months ago, about how all the institutional barriers that were supposed to keep a manifestly unqualified and objectively terrible person away from the Oval Office had failed, including the Republican Party and the Beltway press.
And now we can add the Democratic Party to that list. I think Newell’s conclusions as excerpted in Mistermix’s post below are right on in some places but wrong in others. Hillary Clinton didn’t graft her 2008 campaign or Bill’s 1992 crew onto 2016. Obama people were running her campaign! She didn’t ignore Bernie at all but rather co-opted large chunks of his agenda! And trying to lay this at the feet of Debbie Wasserman Schultz strikes me as pointless. But that said, Kay was right about institutions failing, and so is Newell, to some extent. So here we are.
The thing that prompted me to turn off the TV before they called the race was an MSNBC commentator who spoke of Trump rising to the occasion and doing the fabled “pivot” to be more presidential now that he was actually going to be the, you know, president. She might as well have expressed a wish for a winged unicorn that pisses bourbon and shits bacon to visit the set.
There will be no “pivot,” no matter what words Trump’s PR flunkies put up on Trump’s teleprompter. He’s a walking collection of personality disorders who operates on the principles of dominance and vindictiveness. There is no reasoning with him, and soon he will have all the instruments of the US government at his disposal as he enters the White House with a GOP-controlled congress.
In short, friends, we are fucked. I’d say our only immediate asset is the near-certainty that Trump will continue to act like a crude, paint-huffing toddler because that’s who he is. And in doing so, he will fuck up so spectacularly that, if we survive the phenomenon of his ego gratification dramas playing out on a world stage with the trappings of democracy intact, we’ll have a decent chance of pummeling the Republicans in the midterm and reinstalling Speaker Pelosi.
So, that’s the goal at the federal level, in addition to strengthening networks and getting involved in state and local politics as if our very lives depended on it. Because you know what? It does. Yes, we should learn from this debacle, adjust and move on. No, we shouldn’t tear our party to pieces, not when we’ve got an honest-to-Christ fascist to oppose.
Anyhoo, that’s where I am at 4:30 AM-ish on November 9, 2016. You?
CarolDuhart2
Amen.
craigie
I’m contemplating the end times.
Seriously, I don’t think there is a bottom to this. We’re talking McCarthy era disfunction. Lives ruined. People hurt and killed. Institutions destroyed. We won’t recognize the place in 4 years.
mistermix
How about a top of the lungs fuck you to Republicans who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump but instead lodged their Johnson protest vote.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
really, he only got 57 million votes??
romney got 60.9 million.
Peter
Maybe we’ll get lucky and Trump will stroke out between now and January. He’s over 70, it’s certainly possible. Of course, then we’re still stuck with Pence, who is human garbage, but he was going to be in charge of policy anyway and he has the charisma of a snail
JPL
Emma on the previous thread, wrote this
She’s right.
Jeff
The most corrupt administration ever will be taking over in January.
Roger Moore
Shorter Trump: clean up my mess.
cmorenc
Realistically, we can do the most good in 2018 by concentrating on retaking state house seats + any gubernatorial elections that come in the off-year. In the US Senate, 25 incumbent dem seats are up, while only 8 GOP seats are, most of which are in safely red states. If Trump’s first two years are a disaster, we may be able to cut the GOP house majority in half – but even then, we can do ourselves far more good by winning enough statehouses looking toward 2020 redistricting to significantly reduce the gerrymandering structural advantage the GOP won in 2010 (after the GOP got its ass kicked most places at all levels in 2008).
satby
I’m just numb. I was so close, only 6 months until I got SS and a reliable income (my job has no possibility of ever becoming full time). I was signing up to get health care again on the exchange. Other people are worse off than I will be, but damn. Personally and as a patriot, I just can’t believe this.
And I will never blame Hillary Clinton. That woman gave it her all way past where most people would have just said fuck it.
But I despise the media in this country.
Trentrunner
I know this is enraging to think about:
But imagine Trump’s thought balloon as he’s inaugurated with Obama looking on: “I ran against everything you did, and I won on that. Now I’m going to undo everything you’ve done. Plus, I never REALLY believed you were born here.” Trump will LOVE this display of dominance, and he won’t be wrong.
Roger Moore
@craigie:
This. Obama wasn’t able to finish cleaning up the Bush mess after 8 years of trying, and Trump looks very likely to be an even bigger mess maker than Bush was. My only hope is that we’ll be energized enough in 2020 to win back a lot of state governments and undo the gerrymandering that’s helped the Republicans so much since 2012.
MobiusKlein
2 am on west coast, woke up. Broke my pledge to keep the phone off.
Peak wingnut? It is the foothills still.
M. Bouffant
“Get this: Fuck that, I don’t owe those fuckers anything & all I’ve got say is fuck yooooooou!!”
Also, this had damn well better result in the mother of all “wave” elections in two yrs.
schrodinger's cat
I can’t sleep either.
Betty Cracker
@mistermix: And fuck Weld too, although he tried to half-assed do the right thing. He should have whole-assed it.
But he didn’t see this coming. To be fair, few of us did. I sure as hell didn’t. I think the most appalling statistic to me is how many white women voted for Trump. Makes me wanna seek species reassignment.
Lit3Bolt
@craigie:
This.
This is worse than 9/11, by an order of several magnitudes.
We are fucked, and the only hope is that the establishment tries to get on our side after Trump trumps things up. But they probably won’t, because they’ll think they can manipulate the rage-baby with the borderline personality disorder.
This will not end well.
schrodinger's cat
This is not Hillary’s fault,she did everything humanly possible
Anne Laurie
Well said, Betty.
(Still) President Obama and the Democratic coalition have two months to shore up as much of civilization as they can. Meanwhile, there’s a small chance Trump has a serious medical event and a large chance he’ll do something so disqualifying that even his Repub enablers will have to pay attention.
Meanwhile, we’ve still got families, loved ones, pets, gardens, sports, movies, and individual causes/people we can help support. Now, more than ever, we must be stronger together or we will be picked off one by one.
Joel
A friend posted this David Remnick pierce on Facebook.
md S Oregon
West Coast here, still downing another glass of wine and a pink Benedryl, hoping for some sleep….may Nancy Smash and Schumer plus Harry’s replacement have some grand plan to save the planet…God knows we need it right now
Trentrunner
@schrodinger’s cat: Not liking the Hillary blame.
1) She’s probably going to win the popular vote.
2) Up until a few hours ago, everyone was talking about her high-quality campaign, amazing convention, winning the debates, great ads, et al.
3) The non-scandal emails coverage did real damage. Comey’s inflaming it did no favors, but the media’s hysterical over-coverage set the stage for Comey’s conference and letters.
Mary G
Thanks for the righteous blast of fury, Betty. I will resist that piece of shit and the lying weasels in his party in every way I can. And when he’s run the world into the ground again, we’ll clean it up for them again, because that’s what they do. I am proud so many of my fellow Californians didn’t drink the kool-aid.
KithKanan
As a Californian… If secession is on my ballot in the next four years, I’m voting ‘yes’.
And I say that knowing if it succeeds it will almost certainly cost my job and very possibly my life.
I want my country back.
cmorenc
@Roger Moore:
The place to start is to concentrate on making up ground in 2018 in a lot of state governments, with the goal of making it feasible to win back control of enough additional ones in 2020 to undo much of the gerrymandering of the US house (and state houses as well). We have the potential to stage a similar counter-revolution in 2018 that the GOP pulled off in 2010, except that our prospects for making further headway in the US Senate in 2018 are pretty grim – since the dems have 25 seats up for election in 2018, and the GOP only 8, most of which are in safely red states. More realistically, we will next have a chance to make big headway in the US Senate in 2020, when all nine of the seats the GOP won in 2014 will be up for election.
Lit3Bolt
@Anne Laurie:
Pfft. The Putinbots are already moving in. Can’t you hear them?
“Flawed candidate!”
“Baggage!”
“White nationalism is America’s choice!”
Obama is already being furiously demonized and delegitimatized by they media. White eyeballs and white racism is ascendant in America. And the media wants to be on the winning side, and claim that Clinton scalp once and for all.
quakerinabasement
I’d like to add a great big Fuck You to Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough and Politico and every other media outlet that normalized the shitgibbon. And a double Fuck You to the New York Times for its 25 year long war against the Clintons.
quakerinabasement
I’d like to add a great big Fuck You to Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough and Politico and every other media outlet that normalized the shitgibbon. And a double Fuck You to the New York Times for its 25 year long war against the Clintons.
mak
Crestfallen, despondent. Looking forward to being pissed off.
Joel
@satby: I’m so sorry. Wishing you the best.
Betty Cracker
@Joel: Truth. Trump won’t pivot, but the media already is, and in just the way Remnick describes.
Nicole
Ugh. I thought I knew how deeply patriarchal and racist this nation was, but in fact I underestimated. And you know, four years from now when things are terrible, the folk who voted for Trump and are suffering will be blaming the Democrats anyway, because if there’s one thing we teach white boys as they grow up in this culture, it’s that saying you made a mistake is for losers and to never, ever take responsibility for your actions. I know GWB voters who blame HRC for the Iraq War, because she voted for authorization, you see, so it was entirely her fault. I’m not making this up.
mai naem mobile
White women voted for Orange Douche over Hillary. Apparently they like random guys coming up and grabbing their pussy.
I get my healthcare through the exchange. I have no idea what I do after 2017. I also know a few Dreamers. These are good people who’ve lived here since they were young kids. They know Mexico about as well as I do(I’ve been right across the border twice for an hour or two.) They all work and pay taxes. I am guessing they’ll go underground and live illegally. I feel sick.
Anya
It’s not Hillary’s fault. She still won the popular vote. Trump was not her only opponent. She was fighting the MSM, rightwing machine, Putin, FBI and sexism. If I fault her campaign on one thing, it’s that they ignored Pence. The country doesn’t know anything about his radical anti-women, antiLGBTQ track record.
The Dangerman
@craigie:
4 years? More like a little over 4 months. Trump’s first 100 days are going to be a nightmare.
ETA: 100 hours? How long does the filibuster last so ACA can go?
cmorenc
@Trentrunner: 1) She’s probably going to win the popular vote.</quote?
Fuck of a lot of good that did in 2000 – George Bush went ahead and did what he damn well pleased, acting in office as if he had a mandate won by a landslide.
ALurkSupreme
I can’t sleep, either. And I just don’t get it.
Obama 2012: 66 million votes
Obama 2008: 69.5 million votes
Kerry 2004: 59 million votes
Clinton right now is below 58 million votes; she’ll get an extra million when California is finished counting. The Democrats seemed confident coming into Tuesday; yet, Clinton will struggle just to get to Kerry’s total from 12 years ago. How could their turnout models have been that wrong? I mean, the country has added 30 million people since 2004. All the anecdotal data I heard Tuesday told of long lines everywhere, and that turnout was expected to be impressive, if not record-breaking in some places. The exact opposite appears to have been true. Again, I don’t get it.
schrodinger's cat
Fear and hate won
BlueDWarrior
I’m not sure what to say or do, ultimately, either. We have a problem, at least as far as the left is concerned, with how to show that the broadening of the economic horizons and the tanning/browning of our countries aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but so many people are right now ready to go back the nationalist politics of the turn of the last century, where every nation was trying to bulwark itself against the other, while at the same time trying to carve up less developed nations into spheres of influence.
Right now is a time for grieving for the campaign lost, but at some point, we need to honestly ask ourselves how do you crack the nut of aggrieved ‘white’ populations who simply will not accept the world flattening socially the way it is?
BlueDWarrior
@ALurkSupreme: That’s the thing I’m worried about as well. And what it’s saying to me, at least at this stage, is that the Democrats are going to have to look at everyone they got under the age of 60 and see who can speak the best, and then see where to go from there. The two new Senators from CA and NV may be as good a place to start as any.
There is no reason why the Democrats vote total should have regressed back to 2004, and a EV total to match…
OzarkHillbilly
Got Vasel!ne?
Roger Moore
@cmorenc:
That sounds great, but the big worry is a massive increase in voter suppression tactics between now and then. This is my single biggest worry. Shelby County is going to be terrible for the Democrats for the foreseeable future, and I’m not sure how we get around it.
Juju
Betty, I am right there with you. I have all the numbers of the democratic campaign people I worked with for the Clinton campaign and all the other democrats. I am going to call them today and tell them never give up, never surrender, and that I am ready to work for more and better democrats, as soon as possible.
My mom couldn’t sleep and came down to check on me, she’s heading into 84, and we sat next to each other on the couch and held hands and snuggled. I haven’t done that for a long time. Sometimes you just need your mom.
Fair Economist
Remember Trump is an illegitimate President. More voters voted for his opponent than for him. He does not belong in the office, and will hold it only because of an antiquated and antidemocratic system.
Richard Mayhew
@The Dangerman: ACa is gone by 2/1/17 as it can be wiped out by reconciliation
Roger Moore
@The Dangerman:
It will probably be gone before the inauguration. The new session of Congress starts before then so they can officially count the electoral votes, and they can most easily eliminate the filibuster when they adopt rules at the beginning of the session.
MomSense
Well we voted for pot and against background checks in Maine. I think I need to plan an escape. Get my kids out. Wish I knew where to go.
Betty Cracker
My husband has to get up early for work and went to bed when the race was closely contested but Clinton still had the strongest path to 270. He asked me to wake him up and tell him who won when I knew, but I just didn’t have the heart. He’ll wake up to this nightmare soon enough.
Joel
@Roger Moore: At this point, all we can hope for is a road to damascus moment from (at least) one of the conservative jurists on the Supreme Court.
OzarkHillbilly
@KithKanan:
You can’t have it back. The Koch brothers aren’t selling.
Poopyman
Yeah, maybe it’s denial, but something stinks. And it smells Russian.
Malware would have deleted itself long ago by now, so maybe we’ll never know, but ….
Joel
@Betty Cracker: I went to bed right as Florida was called for Trump and the race seemed on the knife’s edge. I woke up in the early AM to put my son back to bed (he gets up in the middle of the night about every other night or so). Saw that my wife was awake and seemed shaken. I just, knew.
Richard Mayhew
@BlueDWarrior: a couple of things.
A) it looks like Clinton will win the popular vote by 1%+
B) trump pulled an inside straight flush to get an extremely efficient distribution of narrow wins
C) we are fucked policy wise
D) let’s take 12 hours to sleep and think before figuring out exactly what to do next
Matt McIrvin
@Fair Economist:
I haven’t seen evidence of that yet; it may turn out not to be true. It’s very close.
enplaned
Yes, Obama’s folks cooperated with Hillary this time because the fix was in — in 2012, the Clintons were all in for Obama, and in 2016, he was all-in for Hillary.
I love Obama, but this was a big mistake, and he owns a lot of it. The right thing in 2012 was to use the VP slot for an up-and-comer to groom them for better things. If it had been a 40-something woman in that VP slot, the excitement would have been incredible — perhaps even more so than for Hillary this year.
He’ll be writing his memoirs and have no further obligation to Hillary (i.e. to keep President Hillary viable) so presumably we’ll learn something then about what really happened.
Hillary should have stood aside and let a wide field try their hand this year. We ran a shitty candidate. Like old cold porridge — nutritious but unappetizing. Not even Democrats were revved up.
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker: My wife has been saying “I would be embarrassed to have Trump for a President. When I wake her up I’m going to say, “Be embarrassed.”
Roger Moore
@Joel:
And continued good health to the older and frailer liberal justices.
md S Oregon
@enplaned: fuck off you MFER
Tyler Forrest
@Fair Economist: this times 10000. It needs to be the first words out every democrats mouth. He didn’t win the Vote.
The people who make this economy work are the people in the states Hillary won. Blue state general strike.
OzarkHillbilly
@Poopyman: Don’t go there. Just don’t go the conspiracy route. Just apply Occam’s razor: Americans are stupid.
enplaned
@JPL: A significant part of the equation, but not the only part. Trump said some things that weren’t racist that resonated, like the destruction of US industry (and loss of jobs) by free trade and the bad shit that happened from stuff like Glass Steagall.
First of all, no other GOPer would have done that, because GOP paymasters *like* that stuff. Secondly, Hillary was uniquely implicated in that stuff because her husband did many of those things. So her ripostes were weak and even if they’d been good, she had a unique lack of credibility to say them.
Trump was, in that sense, uniquely suited to be kryptonite to her.
There’s a lot of crossover from people affected by this to people who maybe susceptible to the racist/misgynist stuff. But that stuff, per se, is NOT racist, is NOT misogynist and WAS damaging.
Roger Moore
@enplaned:
So the correct response to having the fix be in for the nomination was… to have the fix be in for an unspecified but supposedly better candidate. Now if you can just figure out who that magic candidate was, you’ll be set.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Roger Moore: God Lord, what does Trump think, he spent the last year calling for Crystal Night, you don’t just undo that….
enplaned
@md S Oregon: Get over it. We ran a bad candidate. You need to face reality without blinking if we’re to change it. We need to be very clear-eyed about why we lost. Racism and misogyny — a big factor, but not the only one.
Peale
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: yes. So there weren’t missing white voters after all. He’ll get a few more votes than McCain. So at least we can sigh a bit of relief there.
And it doesn’t look like a lot of our voters fled to Stein. Or Johnson. But we’ve lost about 10million voters in eight years. They haven’t gone to the republicans en masse. But our older voters must really be dying off at astronomical rates. Maybe that’s it.
Barb2
Yes! WHAT she said, every word.
There is no god.
Mother Earth is fucked.
Future generations are fucked.
Who or what will control the Lard ass Orange lying bastard? Putin?
The west coast should break away. So yes secession could be on tap for us in Washington.
Bailey
@ALurkSupreme:
I think this just means it was a lower turnout election–more votes went to third parties–and that all the record breaking early vote only served to cannibalize the election day vote. Moving deck chairs on the Titanic, not actually making way for new and more chairs.
tybee
jesus. now you sound like them assholes from texas when O won.
BlueDWarrior
@Peale: I think a lot of first-time or second-time voters during the two Obama elections just decided to not show up this time around, which does speak to the enthusiasm gap in polls bearing out against us.
dance around in your bones
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside a Red State with those Drumpster blues again ?! Argghh….schiess……fuckenzeshitz……. This is the 3rd time I’ve woken up since I went disbelieving to bed CUZ I JUST COULDN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!…at 11pm or so…….I’m in shock and DREAD…..
Betty, thanks for the fightin’ words. When I wake up again in an hour or so I”ll try to read them with something other than fear and loathing in El Paso…..
BlueDWarrior
@Bailey: That’d be a fair way to read it. A lot of people wanted to vote already and get their ballots in, but enough people just decided to wash their hands of the whole thing.
The question is how to fix that for ’18 and ’20?
Big Picture Pathologist
Hear, hear, but one point of disagreement:
KithKanan
@tybee: Fine by me. I feel like I’m going to die anyway, so it might as well be in the service of the cause of not having to share a country with these assholes.
satby
I am physically ill with revulsion at the voters in this country who would vote for that thing and the sycophants in the media who enabled it. And I’m spent. I picked myself up and fought on after Nixon, after Reagan, after Bush1, after Bush2, but the repeated body blows coupled with the disastrous effects of their policies on me personally have taken their toll.
Maybe I will feel better in a few weeks but…
Askew
Lashing out and blaming voters won’t do a damn thing and will just alienate people. Stein got hardly enough votes to matter. I’d guess most of those voters are just permanent 3rd party nutters. There are enough Green Party supporters in the country to back up those #s.
Hillary lost this on her own. You got to face that and figure out how to refocus the Dems on the midterms. First thing first. Clean out all the Clintons and their sycophants. They are past the point of helping the party and are just a reminder to the general public of NAFTA and the crime bill, both which hurt Hillary.
We got some new faces in the party. Let’s get them on TV and get their names known. Start working on the next Barack Obama now. There were no stars born at the DNC this year outside of Michelle Obama and she isn’t running for anything so we got to start at ground zero here. But, Harris in CA, the new Senator in NV, Duckworth in IL, are all good new faces. Let’s start there.
Also, get rid of Donna Brazille at the DNC and everyone else who spent more time making the DNC primaries a coronation for Hillary. Lordy. They are reminder of a bad election cycle.
As for Trump, our party is going to have a hell of a fight on their hands. The GOP is spineless and will let him do what he wants. The media is worthless so we’ll have to fight on our own. We can do it but not with blind rage and attacking Americans.
Jerzy Russian
I went to bed around 11:30 and literally woke up screaming around 1:00. Jesus fuck.
Lit3Bolt
@Roger Moore:
VOTING IS CONSUMERISM!
“OLD” candidates will never win, while “NEW” candidates do!
Clinton was just too…”well known?” Even though nobody really informed themselves of the facts of her life, they THOUGHT they knew her, and that’s what mattered.
NO ONE COULD PROJECT THEIR HOPES AND/OR FANTASIES ON CLINTON! (Not you you, I mean the general electorate.) THAT’S WHY SHE FAILED COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY WHERE OBAMA SUCCEEDED TWICE.
It’s not because Clinton was a woman. It’s because she was OLD NEWS. Trump was NEW and EXCITNG, because the MEDIA DECIDED IT MUST BE SO.
WHO KNOWS WHAT HE’LL DO NEXT?!?!! (For the next eight years.)
md S Oregon
@enplaned: no we didn’t. She worked her heart out and now my beautiful freckled faced grand kid will pay the price when the world burns itself out…..dipshit…edited, I think
Tyler Forrest
@MomSense: looking at our two year old girl and thinks the same thing. I’m in the process of starting a business and really don’t want to move. But how do you bring up a daughter in a country where she clearly isn’t valued as an equal. The other problem is where to move to.
BlueDWarrior
@Askew: A lot of the actual Clintonites in the party are rather old to begin with anyway, so a lot of them I would imagine are leaving of their own accord.
This result likely gets them out the door faster, but the Chair fights in the upcoming DNC elections are going to be absolutely brutal.
Big Picture Pathologist
@Joel: Wow — Orwell sums it up perfectly.
Poopyman
@satby: Courage. Yes, you WILL feel better in a few weeks, even days! And you know you’re not alone.
Roger Moore
@Peale:
I think the major part of it was that a lot of potential voters were turned off by there being two candidates with record low favorables. It’s the one place where I might be convinced that a different candidate- one without Hillary’s baggage- might have done better. The only problem is it would have to be a candidate who’s already well enough knows that they could survive the full blast of the Republican/Wikileaks/Russian slime machine.
Peale
@BlueDWarrior: I will put this one out there. The missing voters will turn out to be that very large contingent of Democratic voters who don’t like negative campaigns.
cokane
@Trentrunner: this, point 3 is critical. I think the Yglesias article on this might go down in history as being solid. And I’m not even a huge fan of his. But the media, for the most part, dropped the ball on this story. I doubt most Americans can even spell out what the actual scandal is. It’s become like BENGHAZI!
Lit3Bolt
@Askew:
The lust of the media for that Clinton Scalp can’t be discounted.
dogwood
I can’t completely articulate what I’m feeling right now. But I am physically ill. Everything I tried to eat or drink over the last several hours is running right through me. And I can’t sleep.
BlueDWarrior
@Peale: Given how things broke down in 2004, I would be inclined to believe that.
Dog Dawg Damn
I feel like we are going to go down an internal squabbling rabbit hole while Trump consolidates power OR we are going to stand resolutely firm against Fascism.
This is a fight that many conservatives, liberals, libertarians, leftists, and moderates are willing to stand with us on. IT would behove us all to put policy squabbles behind us and stand up for the future of the Republic.
HIgh stakes, and many lives on the line.
Bruce K
Let’s see what we can do in the next 727 days.
BlueDWarrior
@Dog Dawg Damn: We managed to survive Andrew Jackson while the institutions of the country were much younger and less proven, so we have that going for us, at least.
There is no telling where in the hell this roller coaster is going to go though, but white people apparently need to have their lash out moments if we are ever going to go somewhere positive.
Baud
So turnout wasn’t up. Our people just stayed home. That’s the biggest disappointment of all.
gene108
@Jeff:
With a Republican Congress that will do everything in its power to enable the corruption.
BlueDWarrior
@dogwood: Oddly enough, I was much more physically distraught at the 2004 result than this one. This one was “Well, that happened. Christ, what the hell do we do now?” in an intellectual sense. 2004 had me to the point of almost throwing up several times through the night, and I was so bad I had to skip class (I was still in college) the next day.
Roger Moore
@Dog Dawg Damn:
I wouldn’t worry too much about what you see here. We just lost when we were sure we were going to win, and there’s naturally going to be a lot of venting and finger pointing in the immediate aftermath. I think we’re going to pull together and get working on dealing with Drumpf when we get the kvetching out of our system in a few days.
JPL
Today I’m going to subscribe to the Washington Post, If we don’t support good reporting, we will be left with Drudge and the rest of the alt right media.
@enplaned: The people who cast their ballot for Trump did so knowing that he was an unfit racist pig. That says something to me.
BlueDWarrior
@Baud: Yeah that should be the front-line take away from this election post-mortem, you need to galvanize both under 40s and the minority vote, but you have to do it at the same time. Perhaps it will be borne out in further analysis that HRC simply was too old hat to get the under 40s and infrequent voters out there in the numbers sufficient in the Midwest and Urban South to hold/flip the states that we needed.
I’m not necessarily blaming HRC for having turn them off, but it seems like they just never got turned on to begin with and really didn’t care one way or another.
Dog Dawg Damn
As much as I hate to say it, I feel like this is a repudiation of identity-group politics (“SJW”, if you will).
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that with everything going on in the country (black lives matter, ISIS, etc.), the white voters wouldn’t be so inclined to play nice on that front. Truth is, the demographics are not on our side when it comes to racial solidarity.
Class solidarity is a far more potent weapon and one that was wielded AGAINST us.
That should be a lesson.
Betty Cracker
@Askew: We just elected a dangerous, unhinged demagogue. I’ll lash out if I goddamned well please. Other than that, some of what you say makes sense, some seems like a bit of score-settling of your own. Whatever. Onward and upward.
raven
@Roger Moore: This
gene108
@Lit3Bolt:
Republicans don’t give a shit about controlling Trump, as long as he signs their bills into law.
McConnell and Ryan said as much at the Republican convention.
Baud
@BlueDWarrior: I can’t jump on the anti-HRC bandwagon. But I had been feeling good about ourselves, and now I’m not, if we’re the ones who didn’t show up.
BlueDWarrior
@Dog Dawg Damn: Well, I agree with you in part, if only that a lot of rural, exurban, and suburban whites really don’t ‘get’ liberal Millennials and really don’t want to get them.
Now the fact that Trump is running slightly south of Romney’s pop vote total while making all of these explicit appeals says to me that the amount of outstanding white vote out there that can be galvanized in this manner is still limited, but we have to do a better job when it comes to getting our incidental voters up and out there.
Quite frankly there are things we can do in terms of primary reform to do that, but that’s a debate saved for at least another 18 months.
Roger Moore
@Dog Dawg Damn:
I think it’s a mistake to separate class and racial solidarity. The essence of white supremacy is to define class in terms of race so that racial solidarity is class solidarity.
Askew
@BlueDWarrior:
The Clinton people will never go away of their own accord. We are going to have to pry them away from the power within the DNC.
The chair fights will be brutal. Obama is a smart politician but he has put a lot of duds in as DNC chair. I would hope he’d be smart enough to back someone helpful this time. For as much crap as Dean gets, he was a great DNC chair and he was completely impartial in the primary fight which will be necessary because the next presidential primary is going to be a bloodbath.
While I am devastated that Trump won, I am in no way surprised that Hillary underperformed. She was operating at 1/2 speed this entire election. She did so many fewer public events than Obama did in his 2 runs. She spent a lot of time out of the media spotlight and I think that hurt her. I am not sure why that was the case, if it was a stamina thing, a strategy that Trump was doing so much damage to himself, etc. But, it was a mistake.
As much as I hate WikiLeaks, I’d love to see what the emails are saying post-loss right now and who is getting the blame within the Hillary camp.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Lit3Bolt:
I think you are right on this one. But I would say the racism and sexism is what got these voters attention and so Trump could pull the “If elected, I will..(write your wish here)…”
BlueDWarrior
@Baud: As a member of both groups (Af. American and 31 as of this year), I think a lot of us were just so worn down from all the bull of the last 8 years we just wanted to retreat back into the same non-news holes we were in as teenagers/very-young adults. As soon as Trump does some completely retarded, and we know he will, or at least let Congress do it, people are going to get woke again.
It’s sad that Republicans have to have power in order to get people awakened to their malfeasance, but it is what it is. Just like with Nixon, and Reagan, and Bush-43…
Dog Dawg Damn
@Roger Moore: Right. Totally agree.
What I mean more so is that the campaign was quite explicitly NOT BEING A BIGOT. Very little attention was paid to the disastrous policy consequences (class issues).
Baby boomers have rejected millennial sensibilities. They found class solidarity in an ethnic identity of their own (poor white). That the two are pitted against each other is unfortunate because there are more of them than of us.
Not sure the way forward, but in the U.S., it seems, historically, bigotry still sells.
Askew
@BlueDWarrior:
Not a Bernie backer but he got the liberal millennials engaged as well as white rural voters. So, I think there was an appetite for a candidate that spoke to them. Hillary just wasn’t that candidate.
Roger Moore
@BlueDWarrior:
No. The time to think about primary reform is now, when nobody is running yet. If we wait until candidates are lining up, there will be too much temptation to tweak the rules to favor some specific insider.
ALurkSupreme
I sincerely thank all of you for being here. I need to go to sleep now, or at least try.
dogwood
@BlueDWarrior:
I didn’t feel at all distraught in ’04. The mess George W. created wasn’t going to be fixed by electing a new president. There was a strong anti-war element on the left, but the country as a whole hadn’t gone there yet. I didn’t see how Kerry could turn the mess around, so while I happily voted for him, I was not devastated when he lost.
cokane
@BlueDWarrior: the bigger thing may be that working class minorities didn’t turn out. people are assuming that identity politics is only going to fail with white voters. but a lot of academic-sounding identity politics that’s grown to dominate liberalism isn’t appealing to working class americans of any race. it isn’t enough to get them to vote trump, but it’s looking like they felt little reason to vote. it’s just one hypothesis.
p.a.
Among other evils, this may spell the end of public employee unions. They were one of the last sources of non-Wall St, non-‘Big Law’, money sources for the Dems, and the right has benn targeting them forever.
Too soon for autopsies; we’re still in shock.
Mnemosyne
@BlueDWarrior:
As I said in the thread below, this whole thing is giving me flashbacks to the 2010 midterms. This whole combination of a specific group of white voters who didn’t vote in the last presidential election coming out of nowhere plus white voters being heavily propagandized under the radar (this time by Breitbart) feels uncomfortably familiar.
And the fucking MSM didn’t help at all with the propaganda issue. Again, just like in 2010 where they let idiots talk about “death panels” that didn’t exist.
Divf
@Dog Dawg Damn:
Bullshit. Clinton’s left-center policies never got heard above the din of Trump’s cult of personality and the media’s obsession with emails. No one the dems ran would have done better, and Bernie would have been crucified on the huge tax bill for his policies (and the certainty that it was going to the undeserving Other).
Tyler Forrest
What if Bernie never got into the race to begin with? No one was going to fall in love with O’Malley, Webb, or Chaftez. Maybe that gives Hillary the breathing room to reset her image.
I’m not saying Bernie cost us the election. But it’s clear he didn’t help. Though he made up for some of his primary damage in the general, its pretty clear that his negativity from March to June is what stuck. But hay, at least he pulled Hillary to the left.
In all seriousness, blue state general strike.
gene108
@BlueDWarrior:
Reagan won two terms with huge win totals, and his VP succeeded him. Not enough people “woke” to an anti-Reagan worldview.
Bush, Jr was bad, but it took two terms for his incompetence to fully manifest
.@Lit3Bolt:
This is a very good point.
satby
This is the culmination of the long Republican con- undermine confidence in the government, undermine voters engagement with the process of governance, undermine the media to turn it into a propaganda machine. And it worked. 30 years of propaganda worked.
It will probably take a few journalists being jailed to turn the media back into something worthwhile.
Zinsky
Well said, Betty. We are well and truly f*cked. I guess on Day One of the Trump presidency, they start building a wall with Mexico and Trump appoints a special prosecutor to send Hillary to jail for something no reasonable prosecutor would ever pursue. Trump said he would. Let’s see how that plays out. He will have people with pitchforks and torches on the front lawn of the White House if he tries that shit!
dance around in your bones
I’m gonna try and claw back a few hours sleep….sleep, that won’t knit up THIS ravl’d sleeve of care, not this time baby. Then wake anew into the nightmare.
JPL
@Richard Mayhew: You are correct, but I’m giving it 48 hours.
BlueDWarrior
@gene108: Perhaps we really are stuck on the see-saw where the same party just cannot find a way to win 3 straight presidential elections… except for once in 1988, since WWII.
Something invariably goes haywire in that near decade that makes people hate the party in power, and it seems like sometimes it’s just flat out fatigue.
Mnemosyne
@Divf:
Not to mention that Sanders would also have been running against the alt-right propaganda machine. Does anyone seriously think a Jewish man would have done better against that?
I really am getting more and more pissed about that aspect: Hillary told us that there was a dangerous propaganda machine working on Trump’s behalf, and the MSM pooh-poohed it.
mdblanche
Where am I? Trying to sleep. Failing.
Earlier Mistermix said this was the start to a worldwide turn to the right. But he’s wrong, this is the continuation. All the nagging fears I had in the back of my mind have come true. Like so many other elections around the world in the past few years the forces of hatred and division have beaten their polling expectations and won a victory even they didn’t seem to see coming. This really is a worldwide trend, and what happened really is another Brexit. A few polls showed Brexit winning a week before that election, but it was expected to lose even if it came close. That’s certainly what everybody involved thought at first on election night, until the vote counting started. I really thought it was a mistake when the GOP trashed their autopsy report to listen to the Breitbart crowd to chase after more white voters. But God help us, they were right. It was a campaign promising to restore their loss of social status that drew them out, not their loss of economic standing which is only going to get worse now. So that doesn’t leave me very hopeful that a Sanders style campaign would do any better. Not when they’re voting for social over economic status. And it’s not like bread and butter campaigns have been faring well abroad. I really thought our country’s demographics were more favorable and would make the difference. I really thought the Democratic Party was stronger because it embraced its role as the party of diversity rather than apologized for it like so many social democratic parties. But part of me always feared I was wrong. It really feels like around the world liberalism is sinking below the waves; liberalism in the broadest sense of tolerance, acceptance of disagreement, and openness to others and to the world. The Enlightenment values of the American experiment. And now it just got so much worse. Everywhere. We were the developed economy leading the recovery and now we’re crashing our markets. We were the lynchpin of a system that for its many flaws has kept the world largely at peace during the nuclear age. What happens to it now? None of this is good news for the democracies of Europe and Asia that are already dealing with homegrown crises. Based on what’s happened elsewhere I can guess what might happen next and I hope to God I’m wrong. A spike in hate crimes. A constitutional façade that looks like a liberal democracy but is neither. Even more malign forces waiting for their moment to emerge. We’re in a world crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1930’s and 1940’s. I was hoping we would be spared the worst like last time. Maybe could have even been the cavalry again. But it’s not to be. And I see no cavalry coming to rescue us.
I’m demoralized. I can understand how this could break some people’s faith in our country and our fellow citizens. I know mine is no longer intact and will never fully heal. I fear what comes next. If there is a solution, whoever finds it will have to be smarter than me. Maybe once I pick myself up, I’ll be ready to say on to 2018. But that assumes elections will still be truly free and fair then, but I fear… But I know retreat isn’t an option. There’s nowhere to retreat to. Maybe Canada, but that’s still a little close for comfort.
Possibly relevant historical trivia: Today is the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, Kristallnacht, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Dog Dawg Damn
@Divf: Biden would have done better.
gene108
@Askew:
But his message at the end of the primary was that Hillary and the Democratic Party are tools of Wall Street and big business and are corrupt, which I think turned a lot of people off in the long run.
Roger Moore
@Dog Dawg Damn:
I think the problem in that respect was that Hillary was trying to run a positive, uplifting campaign instead of a negative one. She wanted to talk about the positives from her policy rather than try to drive people from fear of Trump’s policies. That may have been her critical mistake, but I can understand why she made it.
Dog Dawg Damn
It may be that the party need turn right and be a broad-based liberal democracy / anti-fascist party that stands for decency and reason.
I would gladly trade a Romney win in 2012 for this disaster. This is horrific.
Roger Moore
@Richard Mayhew:
If I could sleep right now, I’d be doing that instead of posting here.
gene108
@mdblanche:
China will look to replace the US as the world’s superpower.
What the US offered was stability.
If our electing incompetents into office every eight years makes us seem less stable to the world, China will gladly step in to fill the void as the world’s second largest economy.
Dog Dawg Damn
@Roger Moore: Whatever the issues were, the data and experts were all on the same page, and by the books, she ran an excellent campaign. This is a sleeping giant.
4.9% unemployment. Relative peace. This is a zeitgeist that perhaps no campaign message would work against, and with her as the standard bearer, perhaps fatally flawed (rightly or wrongly).
Where to from here? It is going to be tremendously difficult to defeat him in 2020.
Tyler Forrest
@gene108: yup. Bernie was a net negative.
satby
@gene108: Bernie got people engaged with fantasy b.s. just like Drumpf did. A significant portion of the American people prefer fantasy solutions that won’t cost them money while giving them fantastic benefits rather than any level of honesty and detailed policy discussions.
Mnemosyne
@Dog Dawg Damn:
I love when white guys start talking about how I need to be thrown under the bus so they can get white voters back.
Caravelle
I was going to be a debbie downer about the odds of getting rid of him in short order because of how terrible and unqualified he is with the one-word comment “Berlusconi”.
But really… Is there something we can learn about the Berlusconi experience that might help figure out how to minimize the amount of time Trump spends in power ?
Dog Dawg Damn
@gene108: This this this. Yes, the world has flushed it’s standing down the drain.
I have been reading how in a globalized age our democratic system is too inflexible and power to diffuse to properly respond to the needs of a global order. A rule-by-committee one party system as in China is just more stable and able to handle the challenges. This is most likely the future, short of a Constitutional convention that strips the rural land of its over-representation.
cokane
@satby: this might not be wrong. Bernie also promised to punish his side’s opponents
Askew
@gene108:
Nah, people’s opinions of Hillary have been baked in for years. No amount of reinventing herself was going to change them. People don’t like her and she doesn’t have the charisma or political skills to overcome that. And she ran a negative campaign that offered no hope or something to cling to. Americans, particularly those on the left, really rally around inspiring campaigns. Bill Clinton knew this back in the nineties. Obama knew this. Hillary should have known this. She tried in the last couple of days but it was too late by then. No one was going to buy her switch to positivity.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Divf:
I said it before, this is also a lot about Trump’s fan bios like with Arnold and Ventura. Do keep in mind that those rural white and elder votes watch a lot of TV. Those people aren’t going to like finding out Trump isn’t the super hero who solves all problems in a 1/2 hour the TV makes him out to be. I suspect Trump own voters will be turning on him after six months. I mean seriously, how can he possibly change the economic dynamics for these states? The GOP isn’t the Nazi party in that they can pass a bunch of racists laws to go steal from non-white and give it to their base.
Dog Dawg Damn
@Mnemosyne: No need to throw anyone under the bus. Please don’t mistake the comment.
Defeating fascism is paramount. Sacrificing short-term policy goals for that may be necessary. There is large support on right for prison reform, for instance, so no need to *go* fascist in order to oppose them (and what would be the point?)
The fascist regime will depend on a fractured opposition. Looking past differences and priorities is something we ought to try.
Mnemosyne
@gene108:
Yep. China will be popping corks today, along with Russia. I’m sure they’re already looking forward to how they’re going to divvy up the world. Thanks, white voters!
Askew
@Dog Dawg Damn:
I don’t think that is true. The GOP is going to have own the disaster they are making for the next 4 years and there is no way we can pick another candidate with as little charisma and so much baggage as Hillary. A decent candidate could have won tonight. Hillary just wasn’t that candidate.
cokane
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: this is solid thinking. a lot of Trump voters were casting a fantasy vote for an anti-establishment guy. Trump can’t run on that twice. And barring some miraculous governance, the Trump establishment will be soon sullied.
Mnemosyne
@Dog Dawg Damn:
You say “short-term policy goals,” I hear “let’s ban abortion and stop making such a fuss about police shootings — after all, what are a few more dead women and Black people when there’s an election to win?”
Dog Dawg Damn
@Askew: 4 years of unbridled Trump and he’ll have a fully functioning propaganda apparatus and vote suppression regime the likes of which we’ve never seen. It will not be easy.
Divf
@Dog Dawg Damn: possibly. But I don’t see him bringing out the millenials or flipping wwc votes from trump to him in the rust belt. Question is, who stayed home?
satby
@Askew: 59 million people liked her and bought her positivity.
You, and people like you who just insisted that the purity of your unspoiled essence could never support her, can fuck right off.
Peale
@Caravelle: I don’t see him getting more popular. And people may get tired of a constant stream of fired cabinet members.
Mnemosyne
@Askew:
You’re so funny. Since when has the GOP ever had to own one of their disasters?
Obama and the Democrats will be blamed for everything, and white voters will vote Republican. Look at Kansas.
rikyrah
I agree Betty with all your sentiments.
CaseyL
I admire those of you who want to keep fighting, and I mean that very sincerely.
But here’s what I think: the country is broken, and it cannot be put back together. MLK was wrong: the arc of history does not bend towards justice. It bends toward entropy.
The US contained too many contradictions for too long; too many people believe irreconcilably contrary things about the purpose of government, the definition of freedom and equality, the proper role of the US in the word, the proper role and status of humans on Earth… even the very nature of the world and the universe. The center cannot hold when the contradictions between world views grow so enormous there’s no longer agreement on basic, first principals. When everything is debatable, nothing is true.
That the US was able to contain so many contradictions for so long is, frankly, amazing. I think the sheer size of the country helped; and the fact that until the latter part of the 20th Century, the country had a strong regional structure. If you didn’t like where you were, you could move. There would be different ideas, different employers, different cultures, different financial institutions…. doing their thing in their place, and not driven to take over every other place. But that’s no longer possible. The structure of the country, its financial and media structure, has gotten so consolidated that no state is “locally-owned” anymore. We’ve been forced into one another’s living rooms, irreconcilable differences and all.
I think the future is that the country breaks up. Needs to break up. I don’t want the policies that shape my life being written and enforced by people who hate everything that I love, who want to destroy everything I value. I don’t want to have to keep trying to “reach” them, “work with” them, put on a polite face when they spew their filth. They can’t be reached, or worked with, and politeness only lets them think they’re right.
This is where I’m at: enraged, disgusted, despairing… and ready to call the whole “country” thing off.
Roger Moore
@Dog Dawg Damn:
Is it? It depends on just how badly the Republicans screw things up in the next 4 years.
Mnemosyne
@satby:
This. It hasn’t been 24 hours yet and I’m already sick of white dudes explaining why white dudes just hated Hillary and couldn’t bring themselves to vote for her. Given how many other people voted for her, perhaps the problem is with white dudes, hmm?
Oh, wait, that’s just “identity politics” talking. Because white men never vote based on “identity politics,” they just happened to vote in a monolithic block for the white supremacist candidate.
kd bart
According to the CNN site, she just passed him in the national popular vote. She’ll probably end up 1M votes ahead.
Mnemosyne
Anyway, I have to get a crown at the dentist tomorrow, so I should probably try to get a little sleep.
Fuck 2016. Fuck white voters.
Jeffro
I didn’t really think I’d have to explain the whole “5 stages of grief” thing to my kids over breakfast this morning, but I did, and told them that it was okay to cycle through all 5 stages multiple times in an hour at times like this.
We’ve collectively decided to skip the “acceptance” part ;)
Mnemosyne
@kd bart:
Gerrymandering and voter caging on the national level. You almost have to admire it.
Jeffro
@Mnemosyne:
I know you’re angry and tired, but let’s revise that phrase a bit and go with “fuck Trump voters”, please. This white voter – this Obama-coalition Democrat – worked his ass off to try and get Hillary elected, just like I’ll work my ass off to get the next Democrat elected.
cokane
@Mnemosyne: I get that people need time to vent, but nothing you’re saying is productive. Nothing points to a path for ’18 nor ’20. If white people are as bad as you say, then why care? It’s fatalism.
It also misses an important, and likely more primary explanation, that minority turnout is down, significantly, from 2012.
Roger Moore
@Dog Dawg Damn:
Authoritarian rule looks great if you overestimate the importance of good rule and underestimate the destructive power of bad rule. Basically, authoritarians are great at getting everyone pointed in the same direction and keeping them going that way. That may actually work OK when the right path is obvious- when you’re trying to copy the solution others have used to build up their countries, for instance- but when you’re in unexplored terrain- when you’re trying to lead in a new direction- it can get you headed into a disaster with nobody to tell you you’re making a mistake. Democracies are messy and tend to present their leaders with artificial obstacles, which is annoying on a clear path but potentially lifesaving when those obstacles keep you from heading over a cliff. Most importantly, democratic government provides an easy, regular way of getting rid of the kind of foolish, dangerous leader who wants to steer you off a cliff. Hopefully, we’ll be ready to take advantage in 2020.
kd bart
Trump may not get as many votes as Romney received in 2012. I would say there are about 3-4 million less votes in this election than there were in 2012.
Aimai
@JPL: yes, I agree with this. I would love to think that we wont waste time and energy attacking Hillary, black lives matter, the obama coaitiin for failing to overcome leftist purity, wikileaks, FBI malfeasance, Putin, Fix news, Trumps free ride, Etc..etc..etc… any democratic candidate, in trying to reunite the ibama coalition, would have briught in the backlash of white racist hate.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@cokane: Consider his voters wish list –
Red State Econmcs – the reason why Cal is at 4% UI and the Red States suck is in sourcing. All companies want their staff as close to corporate HQ as possible. So what is Trump going to do, order Google to fire it’s non-white employees and hire their replacements only in a state he designates? Even if he figures this stuff out, since it’s all boring and shit like that about business and other stuff The Donald doesn’t care about, can you imaging the GOP going along with such a massive intervention into corporate America?
Race Demographics – that’s mainly about births and deaths out of Trump’s control. And a big driver in this is the white elders are dying and they are afraid.
Women not being ladies – the mind boggles on this one, but I dont’ see anything Trump could do that would change anything, I mean what? Make the Gor novels some style guide,…?
International Politics – So Trump is going to cave into the Russians and his hetro sexual life partner Putin on everything, yet make it America the feared again? Which is it Donald? (of course this is the scary, could end in nuclear war one)
cokane
@kd bart: yep, romney got 60.9 million, trump’s at 58.8 million. and were a bigger country. dem turnout is the tale more than white voters wanting revenge
enplaned
@Roger Moore: No, the fix is to have an open field and see who shows up. In 2015 the GOP had an open field, Trump showed up. He won. That should tell you that interesting things can happen with an open field rather than trying to fix it up front. Jimmy Carter was another — presidency wasn’t so wonderful, but he won the primary starting from a very obscure place.
Aimai
@cokane: how di minority voters get the blame here? Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations for white voters!
Roger Moore
@enplaned:
You described Obama finding a young up-and-comer to be his second term VP with the expectation said VP would be the obvious choice to replace him. That’s the exact opposite of an open field; it’s just having a different person be the one selecting the prohibitive frontrunner.
Shalimar
Hoping Trump puts all the media members who pissed him off at some point in prison. That would be pretty much all of them. We would have to get Farenthold and Eichenwald out somehow. All the rest can rot.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@enplaned: Clinton was an opened field
And minority Democract voters not showing up – do keep in a mind a lot of these people are from kleptocracies so the whole idea of the a former leader’s wife running is a big turn off to them.
Betty Cracker
@CaseyL: That sort of regional breakup might have been possible in the past, but if you look at the electoral maps, it’s an urban vs. rural divide now. How can Miami break up with Florida? How can Atlanta break up with Georgia? Philly with Pennsylvania, etc.?
We’ll have a better handle on what exactly went so wrong in the coming days, but something Nate Cohn said on Twitter made sense to me: It was white identity politics that delivered the win to Combover Caligula. Downscale whites voted like a monolith, and here we are.
Mothra
Shaking. Literally. No sleep. I want us to put my mom and the dog in the car and head for my sons’ homes in Maryland so I’ll at least be in a blue state.
And then I remembered that without the ACA, there’s no Medicaid expansion, so I’m not sure we can retire. My husband is a 63 year old construction superintendent with rheumatoid arthritis. He can work, but it’s hard on him. Our insurance is through my work. And now I’m in tears.
Teachers are on my Facebook page wondering how the Hispanic kids at school will be today. These are not well – off Hispanic children, their daddies mostly work construction and the kids are first generation Americans.
My goddaughter is worried about her wedding next year. They’ve already paid the deposit on the Episcopalian church where her grandparents got married. If they make same sex marriage illegal again, will the Episcopalian church still hold the ceremony?
And all that seems like nothing when I think about his flirtation with Putin and the KKK. That sorry fucker. Fuck Fuck Fuck
And now I’m crying. Geez.
cokane
@Aimai: it may be the truth. We may soon find out that more people cast votes for Romney than Trump. We already know turnout was down in counties like Wayne, Michigan. Seriously, don’t just shout about what you think can or cannot be true. Check the numbers!
p.a.
@Betty Cracker: Yes. Where tRump did well, he strongly outperformed rMoney.
IfWhen tRump can’t deliver his economic promises to these people, we’ll get a real sense of the ‘racism v economic anxiety’ argument based on their actions. Racism is the chalk, IMHO.Elie
Planned Parenthood. Huge cuts to Medicaid w block grants to states w no oversight. Who knows what other hits to the social safety net. Supreme Court. Funding for science
Mothra
Oh, God, his cabinet appointees.
Tokyokie
I wish I had the slightest bit of optimism going forward, but I cannot think of a single democracy that has chosen a psychotic fascist as its leader that did not fall into utter ruin. The winner of this election is Влади́мир Влади́мирович, and the loser is Western civilization.
Trump and his merry band of sociopaths will use the powers of the state to exact revenge against their enemies, while happily looting the treasury. The Trump administration will do what it can to criminalize dissent, and the mainstream media that produced this monster will dutifully do the monster’s bidding. Congress, with the approval of the Supreme Court, will enact its horrible retrograde agenda, and when its Kansasfication of the country does not result in Utopia, they will blame the downtrodden and proceed to kick them in the teeth harder.
If I had the means to do so, I would flee the country. As it is, I already feel like this country has embraced the model of apartheid South Africa, that the Stasi will be setting up shop down the street, and that I cannot trust anybody. I’m going to try to hunker down and hope that I can survive the next four years. But seriously, given the historical precedents, I don’t see how this ends without an unimaginably high death toll.
kd bart
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan & Wisconsin. As of this moment, Clinton received 1,225,120 less votes in those states than Obama did in 2012. Trump received 478,613 more votes than Romney. The third party candidates received 566,739 more than in 2012.
Lit3Bolt
@Mnemosyne:
A billion times this. White rural America has proven itself even easier to lead than the proletariat of rural China.
Lit3Bolt
Given the astounding success against Clinton, I guess we can expect hacking to be a regular feature in American politics now, yes?
dr. luba
@Jeffro: Hell, I’m white, and this morning I’m saying fuck white voters.
Jasmine Bleach
This is toooo fucking rich. Most of you eagerly got behind the most corrupt establishment candidate there was. and she couldn’t even defeat racist. sexist. sexual assaulter Bozo the fucking clown!
And now you continue to denigrate Jill Stein and Bernie Sandrrs supporters! Even though neither one cost you the election! It was your own shitty choice!
Look inwards and own it. And a hearty Fuck You in your own idiotic direction.
I hate the result. but would have either way.
Darkrose
@Mothra: Attorney General Giuliani.
Emma
@Jasmine Bleach: did you get it all off your chest, special snowflake? I’m so glad. You will spend the rest of your life telling all and sundry how you were a martyr to the terrible democrats. I suppose it’ll give you something to do.
Bighorn Ordovician Dolomite
I haven’t posted here in a loooooong time, (not that my contributions were all that noteworthy when I was active) but I want to add my Amen, and thank you for that.
Dog Dawg Damn
My 7 year old niece called this morning before school, crying and inconsolable.
This is what Trump has wrought.
For this family, we are going to save our nuts, hunker down, boycott red states.
My husband, in his infinite wisdom, picked us up and moved us back to California after a 3 year absence. He knew this was coming in March and wanted us to be here.
For those LGBTQ who don’t think Trump is bad for gay people, please remember that Pence attempted to hinge AIDS program money on gay conversion therapy and anti-gay bigotry propaganda. This is the devil behind the curtain we have to contend with. Thank God we aren’t in a red state anymore.
Linnaeus
I wish I had some cogent and insightful thoughts right now, but I have a bit of political recalibrating to do first.
Duncan Watson
@satby: I get health care back next month. I am shattered and depressed
Duncan Watson
@Lit3Bolt: no kidding. No more tax returns (unless hacked), no more truth. But to be honest this may be the last free US election.
Redleg
For some reason your post made me feel a little bit better. It must have been the first “fuck you” to the Trump voters that did the trick. I am looking forward to see how the Republicans deal with the many forthcoming Trump scandals and other idiocies.
At least now that the election is over, I can get back to focusing on my work, to which I have not been attentive enough to. Same goes to the wife and kids.
Miss Bianca
I still can’t believe it. And I have to hold it together for work, and I am shaking like a leaf.
Feckless
Maybe next time we dont let the emaciated democratic parties of solid red states pick our national candidates.
Oh sorry there won’t be a next time.
A Nazi president, congress, and supreme court will never let dems anywhere near power again.
Thanks alot Hillary “Amelia Ehrhart” Clinton.
Jasmine Bleach
@Emma:
Ahaahaa. Jesus. There’s some introspection! Nothing has changed since February when I was getting the exact same “snowflake” insults from you!
Interestin how Clinton lost WI, MI, NH where Sanders won the democratic primaries? And he was riding the populist wave like Trump, and had a lot of crossover support from Johnson supporters. Think on those things for a bit in your failed wisdom.
Oh, and good bridge building there trying to recruit us true leftists. Hillary taught you well. It definitely shows.
Own it.
Jonathan Holland Becnel
Hahahaha
YES!!! That’s the spirit! MORE HIPPIE PUNCHING!!! Fuck the democratic base!
Hahahahhahahahahaha
I voted for Jill Stein because Clinton sucked. She started wars and overthrew democratically elected governments and was in Wall sts pocket!
But yeah, go fuck myself.
Release all that anger. It’s cathartic.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha
HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE SO WRONG FOR SO LONG?
Eadgyth
@Jasmine Bleach @Jonathan Holland Becnel
You are not the “true left”. The true left makes responsibility for the less powerful a moral requirement. The true left does the hard work of learning the truth of things, instead of saying nonsense like “She started wars and overthrew democratically elected governments and was in Wall sts pocket!”. The fact that you think that tells me you are both arrogant and not as smart as I wish you were.
The fact that you are here surrounded by people shaking and crying and your reaction is to say “I told you so” speaks volumes about your own lack of character.
If you represent the “true left” I’ll be working to support whoever opposes you.
Luckily you don’t.
thepanzer
I voted for him, so did my wife, so did the rest of the country. We decided to pass on Dick Cheney in a pantsuit, thanks. Your candidate spent the last 3 months on a Mcarthy’ite with hunt for “Russian agents”, and promised war with Russia in order to protect jihadi’s in Syria, and you have the gall to present Donald Trump as the unhinged one?
Where’s your god now?
J R in WV
@Mnemosyne:
Mnemo, the Main-stream Media IS the dangerous propaganda machine. This is why they provided billions of dollars worth of free air-time to Trump, and covered emails to the exclusion of policies for the entire period between the 2014 mid-terms and last night.
Emails will continue to be the biggest political story in the news for the next 4 years. And no one will ever be able to explain exactly what is nefarious about Hillary’s email history.
BernieBros>HillaryBots
There is nothing better than reading the pathetic, impotent blathering of the Hillaristas today. Seriously. Calling out Jill Stein voters for sitting out the election after YOU enabled the DNC? After YOU enabled Hillary? After YOU enabled TRUMP? YOU were too arrogant to see the writing on the wall. YOU squandered our best chance to enact a progressive agenda. This one is on YOU.
Hillary and her enablers on balloon-juice, in the DNC, on Wall Street, etc. need to understand that you are OVER. You and the rest of your Keyboard Commando ilk can hurl insults all you want. But we don’t want, or NEED, your help to fight “fascism.” YOU are the enemy, and you have been since you threw in with Hillary.
This is what you get. You supported the DNC while it ignored the will of the people for 20+ years. I suppose you’re okay with some DLC/DNC dumbfuck (or group of dumbfucks) identifying Hill as a Presidential candidate the minute Bill left office and grooming her for the top slot in the corporation, come hell or high water (shenanigans, lies and iraq war votes and email servers be damned).
But it’s not okay to anyone with integrity.
Meanwhile, the Dems *had* a candidate that could win Florida and the Rust Belt. A candidate that actually represented the people, instead of a shadowy cabal of donors. A candidate that was vastly more well-liked and more trusted than Hillary or Trump. And they shit all over him. And so did you.
And you are reaping what you sowed. You ought to be ashamed.
So FUCK YOU. The revolution will continue WITHOUT YOU. Enjoy your impotence as you hoarsely cry from the sidelines like a Romney supporter, you pathetic loud-mouthed hag. Nobody is listening. You’re certainly not going to be welcome in any progressive movement moving forward.
In fact, the more you talk now, the less anyone hears you — you just sound like a bitter loser who’s stuck in a cycle of denial and self-delusion, flailing wildly, trying to score a hit somewhere and failing miserably. Which is fucking AWESOME, because you never deserved this forum to begin with.
So, in conclusion, FUCK you. The only good thing about today is coming here and seeing that you are reduced to wailing and gnashing — something you RICHLY deserve. I am chugging your tears, and they taste delicious. PLEASE CRY MORE.
Ithink
@Dog Dawg Damn:
Separating class from any kind of racial, gender, disability, sexualoty or any kind of identity politic equality is absolutely a mistake and will only further create some kind of expounded crisis that’ll be all the harder to solve further down into the future. Any individual who is two or more of those things (a supermajority of the U.S. population) will be further excluded and marginalized from the democratic process; I.e. making us no different from our know-nothing and most dreadfully useless Republican counterparts.
@BernieBros>HillaryBots: Do ilus all a favor and drink down battery acid you sewer dweller. If Donald deploys, God forbid, an iota of fascist instincts upon the vulnerable American public, your kind is worse than anything in the Basketful of Deplorables and deserves the full-on consequence of them. You have no value beyond your brief wisp of life time on this planet.