No, just, no. Please. Stop. Enough.
Wang fucked it up. Wang was sooooooo fucking wrong on this.
I thought we agreed on this?
Michael Moore predicted there would be voters like this. I thought he was nuts, but I think he was right.
The 97th and 98th Congress had significant Democratic majorities in the House of Representitives, while the 99th and 100th Congresses featured Democratic majorities in both houses. Reagan, by pragmatics, had to deal with the opposition party as he had under much of his governorship of California, and this was prior to the radicalization of the Republican party to a neoconservative rhetoric. There is some argument for parallel in Reagan in terms of bombast, but Reagan was well educated in politics before becoming president and well understood the need for compromise and not demonizing his opposition. Trump has no such experience nor temperment; for all of his dogmatism, one cannot even imagine Reagan refusing to accept electoral results or threatening to imprison a political opponent. The closest analogue to Donald Trump is Hugo Chavez; despite their ideological differences and upbringing, both have ascended to executive power without any experience in office or sense or responsibility for the people.
Please do not do the disservice of equating Trump to Reagan; Reagan was no moderate, but he was at least rationale, and genuinely believed he was doing the best for e nation. Trump has no such elevated aspirations; he is in this for himself and his own gratification.
Stranger
AKA the “some men just want to watch the world burn” vote.
Reagan had literally the same campaign message as Trump (OK, Trump dropped the “Let’s”). 
Those Trumps sure love other peoples’ words.
Michael Moore is an opinionated asshole, but he is also a smart asshole with a better gauge on the pulse of the middle class than anybody on NPR. He has repeadedly made the point that people are afraid of the volatile economic conditions from a very personal perspective and could be swayed by rhetoric even without promise, and he’s abolutely right; people voted out of fear that was not ameliorated by Clinton. Trump offered simple solutions. That they were stupid and unworkable, or indeed, without any basis whatsover, is irrelevant. People who feel (or are convinced to feel) as if their lifestyle is in jeopardy will grasp at any branch.
Trump appropriated Reagan’s slogan, but the mentality of The Joker. He’s an unimaginative politician and a horriffic human being. And he’s what almost half of the public that decided to vote selected. This says as much or more about he collective us as it does of him.
Stranger
Um no. Well he was fucking wrong but not about that.
The statement made was 100% completely correct: the polling was incredibly stable and indeed behaved exactly as he had predicted.
He was way wrong on how much the certainty in polling stability meant certainty in voting behaviors. He was wrong that the increased polarization of the electorate baked the cake early. But not on how the polls would behave.
The issue is that the polling was in aggregate systematically off and it does seem that the miss was in the likely voter screens. Polls over-estimated how likely it was that Clinton supporters would vote, likely overweighting that they voted in both 2012 and 2008.
Of note Silver thought that such an LV screen miss was not a big risk. He thought the big risk was undecideds and third party selectors disproportionately flipping one way or the other. But that is not what seemed to happen. This was more that turnout in Democratic leaning demographics was significantly off and that the pollsters did not see that such was going to happen to the degree it did. When asked if they were sure to vote these registered voters must have lied yes more than GOP supporters did.
Because things did get better, eventually. It may take years, and maybe people will die, but they did get better. Sorry, that’s all the solace I got.
Oh, and we survived Nixon too. We will survive Trump and his trash supporters.
This once again goes toward proving the old saying “Democrats fall in lover, Republicans fall in line”. It seems that without a candidate they really wanted to support, many Democrats stayed home, while Republicans came out to vote anyway.
One more silver lining: Four years of Trump just really might put paid once and for all to the Republican Party.
This may go down as the most-studied presidential election in US history.
One thing I don’t understand; I read an article saying that this is now the largest GOP House majority since 1928, but isn’t their majority smaller now than it was after the 2014 midterms?
It probably didn’t say that. What it probably said was that, the combined Republican control of the House, Senate, White House, 2/3 of governorships, and control of state legislatures is the greatest since 1928. In other words, the GOP is running the country, in many ways.
This, this, a thousand times this! If Democrats want to see consistent gains they need to absorb the attitude that, while there may not be anyone to vote for, there sure as hell is someone to vote against. They also need to take to heart that the down ticket campaigns matter just as much, if not more, than the flashy spectacle of the Presidential election.
I really don’t know how to instill this into the public consciousness but I will say I think the Republicans have done a great job of it on their side.
I don’t think that’s going to happen. Trump will be a terrible president, but, as you are saying “we will survive this.” That attitude, that feeling, and the ongoing normalization of the things that come out of Trump’s mouth will prevent the Republican party from suffering seriously for more than perhaps one election cycle.
The thing is, people get used to bad, so long as they survive. It’s been happening ever since the Newt Gingrich revolution in 1994. People around me were saying “oh, let them run things for a while and when they see how bad thing are, they’ll learn their lesson.”
Well, no, that’s not what happens. What happens is the people see that they can still survive, and they learn that it’s not so bad because “I’m still here.” Combine that with other political factors, and, no, the Republican party is not going to die out just because of a disastrous presidency. Or two. Because it’s never big enough of a disaster. And if a big enough disaster ever happened—like the Great Depression—that would finish us all and fuck politics then.
Anyone sparing a thought for that poor betting site from Ireland that paid out to Clinton backers before the election was over?
Sam Wang ate his bug on The Smrerconish show on CNN.
Covered in honey. Pretty small bug but it was a bug.
That’s somewhat encouraging. Things started really looking up in 1929, didn’t they?
Ah yeah I probably misread, thanks.