* * * ! Official 2016 US Presidential Election Day Thread ! * * *

[Czarcasm]

Of all the people in this thread crowing about Trump winning, how many are on record saying they wouldn’t vote for him?

[harmonicamoon]

NPR says Trump will win PA.

[cochrane]

@Quint

You finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to Hell!!

I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

[Spice_Weasel]

@asterion

I think part of the problem is that the Democrats made this primarily an identity politics election and it has come back to bite them.

Yup. This is where I am. Millenial (33 years old) social worker, completely convinced institutional racism and misogyny are huge problems, totally on board with the ‘‘diversity is strength’’ message, yet completely not okay with the way that message is being delivered these days, and I don’t know what to do. I increasingly feel like an alien in my own tribe, but I sure as shit don’t belong on the right.

[Locrian]

… :o

[JKellyMap]

Spice Weasel and/or asterion, could you explain what you mean? I am genuinely curious.

[octopus]

I didn’t vote for Trump. I just thought that the left wing tactic of demonizing those they might need might actually back fire.

Calling people you disagree with Hitler, racist, the Devil, Beezelbub, sexist, homophobic etc just for supporting a different candidate wasn’t going to convert them.

Trump’s not even a conservative. So this is a weird election and it’s demonstrating that conventional wisdom and assumptions of the electorate need to be seriously and soberly studied. Not everyone is going to be STEM in this global economy and industrial displacement is a real issue.

Where’s the pride in having a job as a Wal-Mart clerk when you used to build machines?

[SlackerInc]

@Neo-Calredic

Yup. Stupidity, selfishness, and irrational fear of The Other have won the day. Welcome to the twilight of America.

Yup. Paul Krugman nails it:

What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in the end, vote for a candidate so manifestly unqualified for high office, so temperamentally unsound, so scary yet ludicrous.
We thought that the nation, while far from having transcended racial prejudice and misogyny, had become vastly more open and tolerant over time.
We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.
It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about. For them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy.

What still puzzles me is that those people voted for Obama in 2012. (2008 I can understand better.) And, of course, the significant uptick in Hispanic support for Trump compared to Romney. And the fact that white women (all white women, including those with college degrees!) favored Trump by nine points. Those things, I just can’t process.

[levdrakon]

@Zero-syde

Well, there will probably be an emboldened Russia paired with a general detente with the USA. Who knows how the rest of NATO will feel or respond. I can’t conjecture, but I wouldn’t think a nuclear war would be more likely there with Trump, but who knows.

China is another story. Trump advocates sparking trade wars and interfering with the very beneficial (to China) trade arrangements between countries right at a time when the South China Sea is making every small point of tension a massive one. China’s internal problems (Hong Kong, for one, and its economy for another), coupled with its present foreign relations nightmare, coupled with Trump’s bombastic foreign policy posture further stacked on top of threats of trade war do not make for a good situation…

Also, China has, historically, been a lot more prepared for nuclear war than we are. Let us never forget that Mao would have happily allowed 9/10ths of the Chinese population to get wiped out, because the remaining 1/10th would vastly outnumber the few survivors elsewhere… and that mindset hasn’t exactly vanished with time. No politician would want it, but have you listened to the Chinese generals?

Well, I’m pretty sure whatever Trump advocates is bullshit and won’t happen. But, I agree the rest of the world is going to jump at the chance to do whatever they were thinking about doing now the the US is impotent for at least four years. I just don’t see anything escalating to nuclear war, but the US’s influence over things is going away for awhile.

[Bullitt]

Wow what a surprising election so far. It ain’t over. CNN projections are 247 to 215 right now.

What a wild and crazy election season this has been.

[HurricaneDitka]

@Bullitt

Wow what a surprising election so far. It ain’t over. CNN projections are 247 to 215 right now.

What a wild and crazy election season this has been.

You (and CNN) are in denial at this point. That’s the first stage of grief, IIRC.

[Rigamarole]

It’s definitely over. President Trump is real. Time to get used to that.

[truthSeeker2]

yessssssssssssss!

[davidm]

@levdrakon

Well, I’m pretty sure whatever Trump advocates is bullshit and won’t happen. But, I agree the rest of the world is going to jump at the chance to do whatever they were thinking about doing now the the US is impotent for at least four years. I just don’t see anything escalating to nuclear war, but the US’s influence over things is going away for awhile.

Maybe a long while. Maybe a lot longer than 4 years. If they get the SCOTUS they want then they can have whatever voter suppression laws they want and can maintain power indefinitely.

Meanwhile the planet will get hotter and hotter as the anti-science crowd has their way.

[truthSeeker2]

All trump haters, don’t be sad. you will start liking him in a few days.

[drewder]

@SlackerInc

Yup. Paul Krugman nails it:

What still puzzles me is that those people voted for Obama in 2012. (2008 I can understand better.) And, of course, the significant uptick in Hispanic support for Trump compared to Romney. And the fact that white women (all white women, including those with college degrees!) favored Trump by nine points. Those things, I just can’t process.

Well Trump and Obama both ran on basically the same platform. They were both for hope and change while leaving what that meant intentionally vague.

[davidm]

As of 3 minutes ago, CNBC still hasn’t called PA, but it does appear that others have.

Trump just won the White House: Here's how he did it

[davidm]

@truthSeeker2

All trump haters, don’t be sad. you will start liking him in a few days.

Does he have some sort of mind control ray?

[Princhester]

@asterion

The post-mortem on this will be fascinating. I think part of the problem is that the Democrats made this primarily an identity politics election and it has come back to bite them.

I don’t think that’s accurate. I think Trump made it an identity politics election and the Democrats couldn’t combat that. As I understand it, identity politics is about forming a voting bloc based around an identity rather than a broad based policy platform. Trump picked out the biggest strongest voting block and unashamedly wooed them by (in substantial part) making it clear he wasn’t merely for them he was against minorities.

[SlackerInc]

@Sage_Rat

Don’t forget Turkey.

The founders were cynics. They believed that your average person couldn’t make an informed or intelligent choice about good governance, so they opted for a republican model. And they believed that the people couldn’t make an informed or intelligent choice about who to elect, so they set up the electoral college to do so.

But as time has progressed, the electoral college had been forced to bow to the popular vote, politicians are at the mercy of the people, to vote as they demand, and the Senate is no longer elected by the state governments. If, as many desire, the lobby system is removed, we’ll have voted away our final protection against ignorance and braggadocio.

The founders, in no uncertain terms, called the lay public idiots. Our leaders can no longer do so, and so the idiots will gradually win.

This is well observed. (My hero Bill Maher often expresses similar sentiments.)

@Absolute

Oh, and fuck the Democratic Party and fuck the Clintons for fucking this up. This country elected Barack Hussein Obama twice and yet somehow they managed the spectacular feat of handing the election to Donald Fucking Trump. It wasn’t even close.

No, this is on the people who voted for Trump. I don’t care if Hillary was a bad candidate (and she wasn’t *that *bad, IMO–but let’s say for argument she was). The election was actually *very *close (Hillary’s likely to win the popular vote)–it’s just that it shouldn’t have been close. People should have had enough sense to know you don’t elect Donald Trump president, even if you don’t think Hillary Clinton is all that great.

@Zero-syde

Well, there will probably be an emboldened Russia paired with a general detente with the USA. Who knows how the rest of NATO will feel or respond. I can’t conjecture, but I wouldn’t think a nuclear war would be more likely there with Trump, but who knows.

China is another story. Trump advocates sparking trade wars and interfering with the very beneficial (to China) trade arrangements between countries right at a time when the South China Sea is making every small point of tension a massive one. China’s internal problems (Hong Kong, for one, and its economy for another), coupled with its present foreign relations nightmare, coupled with Trump’s bombastic foreign policy posture further stacked on top of threats of trade war do not make for a good situation…

Also, China has, historically, been a lot more prepared for nuclear war than we are. Let us never forget that Mao would have happily allowed 9/10ths of the Chinese population to get wiped out, because the remaining 1/10th would vastly outnumber the few survivors elsewhere… and that mindset hasn’t exactly vanished with time. No politician would want it, but have you listened to the Chinese generals?

I agree: it’s pretty scary. I started a thread in here that got inexplicably moved to the Pit, about whether some sort of coup d’etat might be possible to keep Trump from taking office. Now that “the shit is real”, I don’t think this possibility can be completely dismissed. An existential threat, even a low-probability one, has to be taken as more serious than fealty to some rules written by guys in powdered wigs centuries ago.