37 comments

  1. Not going to be a short night. At home with best friends.. Three bottles of wine done.. A fourth is looking like a possibility.
    Republicans came home to roost. So much for the disgust for the Donald.

  2. We may have forgotten that the pain from losing what you had is greater than the pain from not getting what you had hoped for.

  3. I’m sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for one of the battle states to go for Clinton so I will feel maybe she is going to make it – like you said. This is sad, sad. Certainly nothing usual about this election year. I will go to bed probably not knowing who will be our next President and I will wake up and be afraid to peek out from other the covers. Like you said as the election gets closer the chickens come home to roost. Obviously more Trump voters out there than anybody admitting.

  4. Your students are finding out that the world is not a safe place. No trigger warnings in this election.

  5. Well, I knew he had tapped into something significant, but what is surprising me is how he has down so in a way that has brought out voters who did not support Romney in 2012. .

  6. My home county, Gloucester County in NJ just went for Trump by 0.5%. This is blue NJ, went 54-44 Obama in 2012. Hard to describe this in any way other than a Trump surge.

  7. Wayne County Michigan seems to be moving toward Clinton–the obvious guess, as CNN is implying now, is that the inner city is coming in, whereas earlier we had the suburbs. PLENTY of votes still left in Wayne County, and also in the area around Flint.

  8. Still seem to be significant towns with Democratic leaning populations left in New Hampshire–Nashua, Salem, Portsmouth, Rye, Hanover, Lyme. Only needs 8.5 k votes from those towns to catch Trump.

  9. yes, our local New Hampshire person agrees with you. But Trump almost doesn’t need New Hampshire now if he wins North Carolina and Michigan.

  10. Tarsi – I can tell you, I think it’s the opposite. Dem’s thought Trump’s support was almost all hate and fear – but as I’ve said repeatedly, that’s not what is driving most Trump voters. I’ve spent time talking with them – they are completely different than the stereotypes you see on cable.

  11. What troubles me is most Dems are bemoaning “How?”, but too few are trying to figure out “Why?”.

    There’s a reason for this and I fear media/masses aren’t going to dig far enough into this in coming hours, days, weeks – regardless of result. Too many people in the Midd bubble can’t fathom this America exists, but it’s very real.

    I anticipate a lot of Facebook punditry from my peers which will point to a “disgusting” ~40% of Americans, but as you’ve said today that’s not the issue. The issue is that’s where we put our focus and put blinders up to what I feel are the real, underlying causes.

  12. Also the one Washington elector says he’ll flip, could others theoretically follow suit across the country?

  13. In theory there’s nothing to prevent any elector from acting as the Framers intended – that is, by exercising independent judgment.

  14. Yes. Best I can tell is that there was, in fact, a hidden Trump vote that pollsters didn’t pick up. Why they didn’t pick it up is a crucial question. One answer that their likely voter models screened out a lot of Trump voters because they hadn’t voted in 2012. The other explanation is that they just wouldn’t talk to pollsters. Could be a combination of both.

  15. Absolutely right – if Democrats don’t understand why they lost this, they are going to take the wrong lessons away from this debacle.

  16. Perhaps this is a moment when intellectual elites gain some respect for the working stiffs.

  17. Still some big towns left to count in NH–Keene, Salem, Derry, Lebanon. Most look to have been consistently Democratic in the past. But the biggest concern for Dems seems to be Wisconsin…Can Clinton make up 90,000 votes there?

  18. Prof. Dickinson – When do they call the election for Trump? Seems like it will be soon.. between MI, PA, NH and Wisco, it doesn’t seem like Clinton can win all or even half of those.
    Thoughts?

  19. Yes although listening to Paul Begala and Van Jones on CNN right makes me doubt that they understand just how left out the working stiff feels in this country.

  20. It really depends on how these last votes come in. Remember, states have automatic recount provisions if the popular vote total comes in with a less than 1% or .5% margin so it’s not clear that even if he’s declared the winner that this the end of it.

  21. Matched vote for vote indeed. Without a ground strategy. Does it matter…how badly would she have struggled without it?

  22. Professor Dickinson,

    Though I’m a liberal, I also never bought the “all Trump supporters are fearful racists” argument, no matter how much my Facebook feed of 95% liberal friends wanted me to. This might sound crazy, but, since it seems like many voters who stayed home during 2012 with Romney came out in droves for Trump, do you think Bernie Sanders might have been more appealing to these kinds of voters than Clinton? Could Sanders, after being accused of being just the opposite, actually have been the more electable candidate in the general, based on what we just witnessed? It just seems like anti-establishment sentiment won the year (first in the republican primaries and then in the general), more than either of the two main parties did, to say nothing about their overhyped campaign strategies. I’d be interested to hear your take, since I’m already seeing the same old headlines by journalists trying to explain what happened.

    Also, thanks for the Trump rally updates over all these months. Other than your observations, I only read one story that treated his supporters like actual, complicated human beings this year (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/in-the-heart-of-trump-country)

    From a polisci 104 alum, good luck in Twilight tomorrow at 8:30am!

    Will

    *Please note that I was also never a Bernie bro, so I’m not trying to endlessly beat his drum!

  23. Will,

    The Bernie question is a great one. As you suggest, I’m already beginning to hear from Bernie supporters who say his candidate would have done better in the general. I don’t think that is true for two reasons. First, while he ran on a strong economic populism platform, he was also part of the political establishment (at least in part) and so his message wasn’t nearly a anti-government, or politically populist, as was Trump’s. Second, and related to this, the policy positions he espoused were more radical than Trump’s (whose policies were admittedly ill-defined) and that doesn’t seem to be what the public was buying. They didn’t want more statist solutions pushed by one extreme wing of one party – they wanted more moderate policies supported by (in theory) by both parties. So, I don’t think Bernie would have been a stronger candidate than Hillary. I also think not one Bernie supporter will find my argument persuasive.

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