Why Trump Won

Obama’s signature “achievement” of a corporate-servile health care law also played an underappreciated role in this election.

Z

Holy shit; Trump is the president…

The Clinton dynasty crumbles; it’s over.
Even as a win; the Trump presidency will be expected to deliver a lot.
His acceptance speech was low key and fraught with social faux pas.
Trump will be a great president or a tragic failure…
If the latter, may the gods help Usians.
I’m not hopeful and expect the worst.
We’ll see…

Dem ineptitude has brought us another disaster, and this one might make us **nostalgic** for the days of Bush the Lesser!!!

Naturally, Dems being Dems, the most important thing is to blame everyone else. Check out Saint Krugman’s twitter feed. Early on he was smearing the Greens for Clinton’s loss in Florida. The really beautiful part is that Stein votes were maybe **half** of the margin between Trump and Clinton. Meanwhile the libertarians got about **three times** as many votes as the Greens — votes that almost certainly would have added to the Republican margin.

So it seems like every believing Dem’s favorite “Nobel Prize” economist has a problem with elementary arithmetic. Not to mention basic integrity — this is all of a piece with his earlier Big Lie smears against Sanders.

Clinton lost Pennsylvania, for God’s sake! It looks like she didn’t even carry Philly!!! How the hell do you pull **that** off?!?!?

I hope this ends the Democratic Party and its hangers-on. They deserve it.

Interesting how the polling companies got it so wrong. I believe the only one that consistently got it right was the USC/LA Times tracking poll.

From my point of view the result is a relief. I believe that prospect of America going to war with Russia has receded considerably.

Finally, the Clintons are dead.

Now come the price we are going to pay, the is a reason for telling the working class what to do. remember they are the electorate, and the new Democrats has not gotten that.

Excellent round up. What I find interesting is that the Democratic leadership totally refused to listen to what voters were telling them. If you are in the lower 80% of the population, you know that the status quo is killing you. You see not just your future but your present slipping away while corrupt elites make out like the bandits they are. Your jobs are going to China and Mexico or have already gone. You see your healthcare premiums skyrocketing each year even as your coverage goes through the floor. You see millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal, coming into the country each year when you can see we can’t take care of our own. You want answers. You want a plan.

So what did the Democratic Establishment do? They tried to force the most arrogant, corrupt, elitist defender of the status quo down your throat, someone so untruthful that their every statement has to be decoded and parsed to remove all the lies from it, and then they told you to STFU and vote for her because Trump.

After Clinton and the party’s defeat, I think the party leadership will go through the usual rounds of “soul searching” from which they will draw, as usual, all the wrong lessons. Rather than go populist, they will turn even further to the right. Instead of listening to the electorate, they will try to come up with more effective ways of telling it what to do. Rather than returning to their New Deal roots which so energized the Sanders campaign, defective as the candidate was, they will continue to cling to their neoliberal, neocon values. Rather than fight and stand for anything, they will embrace the meaningless mush of bipartisanship even more.

I have two take homes here. The first is that shit sandwich (R) beat shit sandwich (D). The second is that both parties deserved to lose but only one could.

When my home state Michigan went into play for Hillary, I knew she had done fucked up and was going to lose. Then Trump took Ohio and Florida and that was all she wrote. Pennsylvania was icing on the cake.

And when the night was over she sent her campaign manager to the party to tell her faithful the lie that it was not over and that they should go home and get some sleep while votes were still being counted, while she called Trump to concede the election and slunk out the back door with no public farewell.

I avoided the news last night and went to bed depressed but as the sun rose this morning into a clear beautiful sky with a slight breeze clearing the miasma of Clintonism forever from view things are looking up. Whatever Trump does as president I’ll have to deal with later but for now I can celebrate never having to listen to the Grifter Queen or her gloating quislings ever again.

Ian,

Good write-up but, you wander off the mark when you imply that this is the culmination of a long coming “populist” backlash. In fact, this is just the latest backlash from the same group of people. From the Silent Majority to Reagan Democrats to Tea Partiers to now Trump, this is the latest version of the “taking “our” country back” backlash.

OTOH, this is an inflection point as the American decline that was underway is now set in stone.

Uh-oh, and it looks like the stock price of the Clinton Foundation just took a big hit overnight …

Z

This is also another sign that the political acumen of the Clinton political machine is way overrated. The only reason they won the big corporate lapdawg’s first election was that Perot took almost 20% of the vote – he was the 3rd point to their triangulation – and the republicans are more independent-minded than the demo-zombies. Then in 1996 he ran against one of the most listless candidates ever: Bob Dole.

Z

As a Sanders supporter and someone who deplores Wall Street and what has been done to Libya, Syria and Yemen, every time I would read an article about the Clinton Foundation corruption, how the DNC rigged the nomination, Hillary’s kissing Wall Street’s ass or news of another atrocity committed by our military or their proxies I would get so furious that I would actually consider voting for Trump.

Then I would calm down and that idiotic idea would pass (ultimately, I didn’t vote). But I’ll bet there were a lot of other people out there beyond just those whose livelihoods were destroyed by globalization who did vote out of anger, and that’s what likely turned this election.

None of this matters. Neoliberalism won. The markets are up. Neoliberalism was never in a position to lose. It would have won with Hillary. It has won with Trump.

I feel satisfied about this outcome. It’s so rare to see someone get what they deserve these days, and Hillary Clinton got it good and hard. If she had voted against invading Iraq, she would be president right now, packing up to move out of the White House and reflecting on eight years of leading the free world. Instead she helped to throw millions of human lives to the wind, and now will go down as an embarrassment. Actually, that’s less than she deserves, but it is something.

Now we’ll find out what Trump intends to do. I think we should remember the first nine months of George W Bush’s presidency, and how listless and ineffectual it was. He was universally believed to be a one-termer until, well, you know.

Don’t look to the Democratic apparatus for answers. Instead, find good candidates and prepare to work for them. 2018 will offer lots of opportunities for the right people and ideas.

Site problems? A comment I made after Tom’s which showed up this morning is gone, and Tom’s is now the last comment that I’m seeing. It seems that somehow the refresh isn’t working.

Now that I made a comment I’m getting the comments up to that new comment.

I agree with EmilianoZ. You look at Trump’s positions and, aside from free trade, the rest looks pretty standard neoliberal or conservative, there not being much of a difference between the two anymore. More than this, the Establishment was going to win no matter what: the Republican grotesques, Trump, Clinton, and even Sanders. They’re all members. Trump may be the bad boy, but it only took markets a couple of hours to realize he’s one of them.

Lisa, I keep coming back to saying, “Character is destiny.” The whole lot of them: Sanders, the Republicans, Clinton, and Trump had to act the way they did, and make the mistakes they made, because they were incapable of doing anything else. All of these people, like the rest of us, had the possibility, and in their case, the opportunity, to rise above, but they didn’t and couldn’t.

From the start, as Ian notes, the Clinton campaign was never about us. It was about her and what she, as the consensus candidate of the powers that be, felt she deserved. Unlike Bill who could fake empathy with the common man and woman at the drop of a hat, Hillary never could hide or bother to hide her contempt and condescension toward those whose votes she needed. Rather than spend time among the people, she spent a lot of it raising money among billionaires, her people. Add to this the well-known Clinton greed and inordinate love of money, her corruption, dishonesty and penchant for legalistic lying, her sense of entitlement and that rules and laws that applied to everyone else did not apply to her, the Clinton habit of throwing people and groups under the bus the moment they had served their purpose, and finally Clintonian triangulation that left everyone with the feeling that she had no convictions, just a moving and everchanging group of interests. It just says so much that about the Democratic party that such a person could command the party’s machinery, its leadership, and the leaderships (as opposed to the rank and file) of its traditional allies in labor and among women, blacks, and Hispanics.

I think Clinton’s view was both elitist and mechanistic. She seemed to think that if she garnered the support of leaders of some group that had x voters in it, she would get x votes from that group. Her math was no doubt impeccable but totally ignored the human element. The leaders did not speak for their memberships and many in these groups did not like her personally and even if they did, not necessarily enough to vote for her.

Clinton ran against a dreadful Republican candidate but she could never see past herself to see what a dreadful candidate she was or how distrusted she was in the eyes of so many. Character is destiny.

One of the most interesting analyses I’ve seen so far of why Trump won. Concise too. One thing I would add, though, is that while Trump did indeed sell hope, he simultaneously sewed seeds of fear. He frequently lied in order to paint America’s situation as much darker than it arguably is, and he demonized entire groups of people in order to create the sense of a bogeyman infiltrating/sullying America’s greatness. This reprehensible fear-mongering made his message of a beautiful future and/or a return to an idyllic past all the more impactful.

The numbers are starting to come out, looks like the non-voters made a difference.

Voter turnout in 2016 looks low so far — and that may have helped Donald Trump
” But if those numbers hold, that would be the lowest turnout since the Bush-Kerry election in 2004.

If so, that’d be unexpected. Many observers thought 2016 might shatter turnout records, with voter registration at all-time highs and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump attracting unprecedented news coverage.

Turnout might have even cost Hillary Clinton key states. Voters in some Democratic strongholds who came out for Barack Obama in 2012 seem to have passed on Clinton this time around. And, as Domenico Montanaro of NPR points out, that could have been a difference-maker in Wisconsin and Michigan:”

n case that tweet is hard to read, Clinton garnered 129,000 fewer votes in heavily Democratic Detroit than Obama did four years ago — and lost the state by around 61,000 total votes.

She also got 95,000 fewer votes in heavily Democratic Milwaukee than Obama did — and lost the state by 73,000 total votes. This obviously isn’t the only reason Trump won, but it’s an important subplot.

CNN has a more detailed breakdown of Clinton’s failure to hold together the Obama coalition: exit polls suggest she underperformed among African-American, Latino, and young voters ”

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/9/13573904/voter-turnout-2016-donald-trump

It is true that primary voters who rejected more than a dozen Republican hacks, including !JEB! and delivered the nomination to Trump handed a giant F-you to the Republican party.

Also true that in the general slightly under half the electorate voted Trump, for the fifth time electing the numerical loser to office via the Electoral College, and delivered a giant F-you to the corporate Dems and the third way Clintonistas.

In the absence of a left populist alternative (thanks Debbie Wasserman Schultz) they voted the right populist alternative.

No one was more deserving of this defeat than Hillary and her feckless predecessor, Obama, who deserves much of the credit for this debacle.

While loudmouth bigots and gun nuts have featured prominently in the Trump phenomena, the truth is a large number of suburban/rural counties that went Obama in ’08 and even ’12 went Trump this time around, putting the lie to the claim this election was driven by xenophobia and racism.

Trump and the rest are surfing deeper forces of popular revolt, confused and inchoate as that may be, and pretending to lead the march they stumbled into and waving the the banner as if it belonged to them.

But we should not be fooled for a moment that Trump-ism, if that’s what it is, will deliver anything to the people who have vested their hopes in his victory and the many millions who refused to vote Hillary or to vote at all.

He is surrounded by a cabal of the worst retreads of 1980-1990’s republifascists and crooks, from Giuliani and Christie to Gingrich for God’s sake. Trump is no policy wonk and can’t be bothered with the details of legislation and governance, and the wrecking crew that will wash in with the wake of his spurious victory will move quickly to pack the court, rig the redistricting for 2020, demolish the tattered social net, purge the voting rolls, roll back already weak environmental, healthcare, reproductive choice and worker rights and privatize everything in sight.

Expect Paul Ryan’s budget blueprint to be enacted.

The betrayal will eclipse anything Obama, as bad as he was, could ever hope for.

Don’t kid yourselves. But maybe, just maybe, there is an opening to build an opposition that will not be controlled and directed by the fatally corrupt Democratic party and their minions in the press and elsewhere. Where is our Jeremy Corbyn?

After Clinton and the party’s defeat, I think the party leadership will go through the usual rounds of “soul searching” from which they will draw, as usual, all the wrong lessons. Rather than go populist, they will turn even further to the right.

I was thinking exactly the same thing. What else will happen is they will consolidate even more power at the top and make sure a campaign like Sander’s NEVER EVER happens again.

You forgot to mention the part about news media and bloggers (such as yourself) taking every opportunity to raise questions about Clinton’s honesty or ethics (“She’s a monster”…Ian Welsh), which apparently sowed just enough doubt (say, 1-2% of voters) to put Orange Mussolini in office.

Thanks for your contribution. I hope you realize that whatever happens is partly on you.

@ Orbital Debris

Pardon me for pointing this out, but do you realize that you left your head all the way up your ass?

New poll just out says that it is all Orbital Debris’ fault.

Morons abound, and are united in their certainty that none of it is Clinton’s fault. LMAO.

Let’s get this straight. “America” did not elect Donald Trump. Hillary got more votes that he did, just as Gore got more votes than GWBush in 2000. Donald Trump “won” — if he winds up winning the Presidency — because of the Electoral College, not because more Americans voted for him. They did not.

We won’t know how many more votes Hillary got until they’re all counted– which may be never, knowing how cavalier some jurisdictions are with uncounted ballots once a “winner” has been declared.

“Rural America” did not elect Trump; it can’t elect anyone to national office because not enough people — let alone voters — live in rural areas. I live in a rural county. 6,286 votes were cast for president, 58.78% for Trump, 28.16% for Hillary, 10.94% for Johnson, 1.05% (66 votes one of which was mine) for Stein, and the remainder for assorted others. It was much the same in many of the other rural counties. Nevertheless, Hillary won the state, 48.26% to Trump’s 40.05% and Johnson’s 9.34%. (Stein came in with 1.34% all told. Pitiful.) Hillary won because the urban areas voted consistently for her, and like the rest of the country, 80% of the population lives in urban areas.

I have reasonable confidence that our Republican County Clerk counts the votes accurately and does her best to conduct as free and fair and accessible an election as possible (early and absentee voting are easy, there is no onerous ID requirement and no attempt at all to suppress voter participation. The county uses scanning machines and paper ballots), but I don’t have that confidence about any number of jurisdictions and alternative methods of casting and counting ballots. Even the scanning machines can be jiggered, but the paper ballots are retained, so it is at least possible to check.

It is way too easy in too many places to jigger the results. Whether it was done, I don’t know, but I don’t have confidence that it wasn’t. What with all of Trump’s incessant whining about a rigged election, he could be right — that it was rigged in his favor, even though his vote total is less than Hillary’s.

Demonstrations against Trump’s elevation to the Presidency have started, and I expect them to grow. During the 2000 recount, most of the demonstrations were by armed insurrectionists threatening mayhem if their candidate (Bush) wasn’t granted the Presidency forthwith. And when the Supreme Court lawlessly intervened, Gore and the Democrats caved, and the insurrectionists got their wish. Bush’s reign was an unmitigated disaster. But that’s what the insurrectionists, the courts, and the Democrats wanted.

This time, despite all the calls for calm and “unity,” I don’t think it will go so well. I spent the day yesterday among a lot of Native American Indians. They were in mourning, deep mourning, many dressed in black and some were terrified of what would happen especially to the Water Protectors in North Dakota. Many wanted to go and help protect the protectors, and some will be headed up there this weekend with supplies and solidarity. 

This sense of mourning and fear and solidarity is found in many other communities, especially those who have faced so much prejudice, oppression and hate from the Dominant Society for most of their history.

Trump partisans and their fellow travelers discount that as unimportant or irrelevant, but it’s very real, and there are more such communities than Trump and his radicals realize.

One person said to me yesterday, “I will not take one step backward to follow that man.”

@CP

Now we get the lament of the loser and the butt-hurt whining about the unfair system that if the outcome had been reversed would have probably produced silence from the Clintonites. I recall the Clintonites bragging just before the election that they had the electoral college vote secured and they were very proud of using this system. The Clintonites couldn’t convince enough of their own people to come out and vote where it mattered but their apologists have to find external targets to deflect from their weakness, corruption and failure.

Your Indian friends seem a bit dim or at least overly conditioned by Clintonite propaganda. The water protectors are being harassed, attacked and evicted by forces acting on policies Obama is responsible for not Trump. They may be evicted or frozen out before Trump even takes office.

The Trump/Obama meeting produced mostly empty rhetoric but one statement was interesting. Obama is setting up a multi departmental security task force to assist the Trump regime in addressing the expected and already apparent national unrest. The Clintonite cult is disintegrating and spilling into the streets to vent their rage.

Orbital Debris, don’t shoot the messenger. You are just setting up an analog to the “Gore lost because Nader” narrative. Both are false. Nobody forced her to be the godawful candidate she was, nobody forced the Democratic party to rig its process to select her, and nobody forced her to run the lackluster campaign she did. You are also ignoring how totally in the bag the MSM was for her.

Being an adult is about taking personal responsibility. I’ll stand by actions, and I am sure Ian will stand by his. Why does this not apply when someone is a politician?

Hugh, the presence or absence of the Electoral College is not the point. The point is very, very simple: “America” did not vote for a Trump victory. More voters voted for Clinton than for Trump. Period. Full stop.

Neither, by the way, received a majority. The plurality for Clinton is razor thin but it appears to be real. We don’t know what the ultimate margin will be — we may never know — but it is significant and it is growing as more votes are counted.

This is the second time in 16 years that the presidency has gone to the loser of the popular vote, and the fifth time it has happened in our history.

The Electoral College may be The Rules by which our presidents are (s)elected, but that is beside the point when one is contemplating who got more votes.

* Munro (who wrote as Saki) – had a horrible childhood which accentuated all his many unpleasant characteristics. He’s further proof of your thesis above about writers.

Either way, Israel gets a pass, it seems. SURPRISE!!!