Glass Ceiling has been smashed!

[Benny B]

Yeah it's kinda cute when young people haven't yet been fully jaded by life.

I know, right?  Though I suppose you can't get to this level of cynicism without seeing a few puppies kicked first.

And I don't know why people were so shocked that the polls were so wrong.  Who is going to admit that they are going to vote for Trump, even as the lesser of two evils, when you are immediately going to be labeled an ignorant bigot?

All my coworkers laughed at me when I said beware of the Brexit effect.  Not going to say a word today.

[Eldon]

I know, right?  Though I suppose you can't get to this level of cynicism without seeing a few puppies kicked first.

All my coworkers laughed at me when I said beware of the Brexit effect.  Not going to say a word today.

Reminds me more of the Bradley Effect 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect

It's just so shocking that it was potentially so huge (yuge), if this is indeed the main reason that the polls were so misleading.

[MU82]

Hillary lost because she was a horribly flawed candidate and because she couldn't energize enough minorities and women to vote for her. She lost because she made some terrible mistakes - if they even were "mistakes" - with the email server. She lost because America is sick of the Clintons. She lost because the vast majority of Americans considered her untrustworthy.  She had near-record unfavorables (of course, having even worse unfavorables didn't prevent her opponent from winning!).

Trump won because Americans wanted change for change sake. He won because a large swath of America is gullible and pathetic.

Think about this man. He's outwardly racist -- it's not his "fault" that every radical racist group supported him, but he certainly didn't push back on that, and in fact, he hired an avowed racist as his campaign CEO. He's an admitted sexist, an admitted sexual abuser, an admitted pervert who bragged about being able to watch 15-year-old Teen USA contestants in various states of undress.

He has zero knowledge of anything beyond our borders and no intellectual curiosity. He brazenly refused to show his tax returns. PolitiFact said that more than 70% of what he said during the campaign was either "mostly false," "false" or "pants on fire." He wants to spread nukes around the world and has threatened to use them. He has offered few, if any, detailed policies. He is exceedingly vindictive; it will be interesting to see how he engages with the many Republicans who repudiated him.

He won because he did a brilliant job of appealing to the "deplorables" ... and enough non-deplorables to get over the top.

He won because he was right about the election being rigged; he was just wrong about the "rig-ee." The combination of the Russian hacks being leaked through Wikileaks and Comey's outrageously awful handling of the email situation -- all in the campaign's final two weeks -- made things very difficult for Clinton. Of course, those situations wouldn't have existed had Clinton not committed her multiple faux pas.

Our VP-elect denies science. He's a bible-thumping evolution denier who thinks God actually created the world in six days, and did so only a few thousand years ago: the classic "Jesus rode dinosaurs" guy. Disavows anything to do with climate change. Wants to deny women control of their bodies and futures. In many ways, I fear him more than I fear Trump.

In the end, more than half of America was bamboozled by a racist, sexist, bombastic snake-oil salesman. How embarrassing. We are the laughingstock of the world.

Look, as long as Trump doesn't blow up the world, this probably won't affect me personally. I'm white, I'm not rich but I am financially comfortable, I've got a house, I've got a Sugar Mama. I sure wouldn't want to be anything but a white male under a Trump presidency, though, especially with the GOP retaining control of the Senate. 50+ years of work on women's rights, black rights, etc, are in jeopardy.

Of course, Mrs. MU82 and I are probably going to lose about a year's worth of salary in the stock market today, but this too shall pass. Something fairly similar happened after Brexit, and the market recovered fairly quickly.

The girls basketball team I coach won our season opener yesterday afternoon and then the old-man's softball team I play on won our league championship last night, so I was feeling pretty jubilant until I started watching the election results.

But I did all I could do - even held my nose and voted for Hillary - so now I'll be a big boy and live with it. I don't have a choice. Despite my wife saying she wants to move to Canada, we're not going anywhere. We probably won't even leave North Carolina, which has erased a century of progressive progress in the last 4 years.

So I'm going to try to look at the few bright sides:

1. I like to think we have seen the last of the Clintons. Hillary couldn't beat an unknown rookie whose name sounded like Osama in 2008, and she couldn't beat one of the most unpopular people on the planet in 2016. She's toast, and she can take her douchebag husband with her.

2. This should open the Dems' eyes to see they can't just throw anybody on the presidential ballot and rely on the minority vote. They need to start tapping into their pool of younger potential stars that progressive whites, minorities, women, Millennials, etc can get behind - more like Obama, less like Clinton. It will be interesting to see how the Cory Bookers, the Julian Castros, the Eric Garcettis, etc, progress as political leaders.

3. This totally exposed the religious right as the hypocrites they are. Has there EVER, EVER, EVER been a less-Christian, major-party political candidate? Even if one offers Jefferson and a couple others from that era as atheists, they weren't blatantly, undeniably immoral, like this guy. And yet the Christians fell all over each other to vote him in. Here in NC, the GOP passed the infamous "bathroom law" because, they said, it would prevent perverts pretending to be trans from terrorizing their daughters in bathrooms and locker rooms. And then, for president, they back an actual pervert who literally bragged about spying on their daughters in the locker room!! Classic.

Finally, I'll be curious to see if the Dems in Congress have the nuts to wage the kind of stonewalling, obstructing and fillibustering attack that the Republicans did with Obama. My guess is that they don't.

All right. End of screed. I'd better get started on that bomb shelter.

[GGGG]

Nah.  This is why Clinton lost.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/the_democratic_party_establishment_is_finished_after_trump.html

"I think of the lawmakers, the consultants, the operatives, and—yes—the center-left media, and how everything said over the past few years leading up to this night was bullcrap.

The midterm losses? That was just a bad cycle, structurally speaking; presidential demographics would make up for it. The party establishment made a grievous mistake rallying around Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t just a lack of recent political seasoning. She was a bad candidate, with no message beyond heckling the opposite sideline. She was a total misfit for both the politics of 2016 and the energy of the Democratic Party as currently constituted. She could not escape her baggage, and she must own that failure herself.

Theoretically smart people in the Democratic Party should have known that. And yet they worked giddily to clear the field for her. Every power-hungry young Democrat fresh out of law school, every rising lawmaker, every old friend of the Clintons wanted a piece of the action. This was their ride up the power chain. The whole edifice was hollow, built atop the same unearned sense of inevitability that surrounded Clinton in 2008, and it collapsed, just as it collapsed in 2008, only a little later in the calendar. The voters of the party got taken for a ride by the people who controlled it, the ones who promised they had everything figured out and sneeringly dismissed anyone who suggested otherwise. They promised that Hillary Clinton had a lock on the Electoral College. These people didn’t know what they were talking about, and too many of us in the media thought they did."

[warriorchick]

Nah.  This is why Clinton lost.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/the_democratic_party_establishment_is_finished_after_trump.html

"I think of the lawmakers, the consultants, the operatives, and—yes—the center-left media, and how everything said over the past few years leading up to this night was bullcrap.

The midterm losses? That was just a bad cycle, structurally speaking; presidential demographics would make up for it. The party establishment made a grievous mistake rallying around Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t just a lack of recent political seasoning. She was a bad candidate, with no message beyond heckling the opposite sideline. She was a total misfit for both the politics of 2016 and the energy of the Democratic Party as currently constituted. She could not escape her baggage, and she must own that failure herself.

Theoretically smart people in the Democratic Party should have known that. And yet they worked giddily to clear the field for her. Every power-hungry young Democrat fresh out of law school, every rising lawmaker, every old friend of the Clintons wanted a piece of the action. This was their ride up the power chain. The whole edifice was hollow, built atop the same unearned sense of inevitability that surrounded Clinton in 2008, and it collapsed, just as it collapsed in 2008, only a little later in the calendar. The voters of the party got taken for a ride by the people who controlled it, the ones who promised they had everything figured out and sneeringly dismissed anyone who suggested otherwise. They promised that Hillary Clinton had a lock on the Electoral College. These people didn’t know what they were talking about, and too many of us in the media thought they did."

Not to mention that the press jinxed Hillary with all the articles titled "Why Trump Lost" that they published on Monday.

Also, the main reason the Dems had to back Hillary is that they all owned the Clintons too many favors.

[Galway Eagle]

Never will I ever set foot in or spend money in any state who voted for Donald Trump. I am so disgusted with the USA. That's not my country anymore, he's not my president.

Want a roommate? I put in for a transfer to one of the European offices this morning

[jficke13]

...
So can we start talking about compulsory voting in the US yet?  Or is everyone still afraid about having elections where candidates campaign on issues rather than turnout?

Absolutely, as soon as you make it legal for the government to compel speech. Voting = speech. Not voting = speech. Compulsory voting is in direct conflict with the first amendment and that doesn't change just because we really like the  kind of speech (voting) that we're forcing people to engage in.

[jficke13]

Remember all:

The Republic endures.

[jficke13]

And lastly, before this gets locked, it won't be as bad as everyone fears. I remember panic on the right when Obama won in '08 with majorities in the House and Senate. He managed to pass a stimulus, Dodd-Frank, and Obamacare before the midterms came and he lost the majority. That was with a (largely) united caucus and an experienced political operative in the White House.

When he's sworn in, Trump will have a deeply divided caucus in the House, a majority subject to a filibuster in the Senate, and practically 0 knowledge of, or interest in learning, the machinations necessary for passing legislation. If Obama managed three big things, I'd be stunned if Trump manages more than one.

[GGGG]

Remember all:

The Republic endures.

Exactly.  The sun rose today.  Marquette basketball starts Friday.  Two weeks until we gorge ourselves on Turkey and give our loved ones a hug. 

[4everwarriors]

Chill y'all. Everyone will survive, maybe even prosper, hey?

[MerrittsMustache]

Trump and Hillary are both awful, repulsive human beings who both said and did awful, repulsive things and who are both unfit for the office of presidency.

However, in basically the simplest terms imaginable, Trump won because he came across to voters as an actual person while Hillary came across as a cold, political robot.

[Vander Blue Man Group]

Instead of attacking those that voted Trump, you should be more disappointed in the Democratic party and their campaign.

They're not mutually exclusive.

I'm also embarrassed to be an American today.

[MU82]

When he's sworn in, Trump will have a deeply divided caucus in the House, a majority subject to a filibuster in the Senate, and practically 0 knowledge of, or interest in learning, the machinations necessary for passing legislation. If Obama managed three big things, I'd be stunned if Trump manages more than one.

The wall?

And the You Know Who-icans will pay for it!

[CTWarrior]

I watched until 2 AM Eastern and ran out of gas and went to bed.  No major news on the networks from maybe midnight until 2 AM other than calling Maine.  I was flipping around watching the coverage and it was interesting with the giddiness of Fox News, NBC's the sky is falling coverage (though Lester Holt kept trying unsuccessfully to reign in all the commentators-I kinda like him) and the comparatively centrist coverage of CBS and ABC, though of course they lean left.

Yesterday was the first time I ever voted third party (it doesn't matter much as CT is heavily democratic and Clinton winning the state has long been a forgone conclusion) because I very much disliked both major party candidates.  So I'm not disappointed this morning, I knew I wasn't going to be happy about the winner regardless of who won.

It's amazing that there was such a high voter turnout for two such disliked candidates.  I'm also surprised the third party candidates didn't do better, which I was hoping would send a message to both major parties to start doing the work of the people.

Well, lets hope that Trump surprises us in a good way.

[LAZER]

Chill y'all. Everyone will survive, maybe even prosper, hey?

Yup, just like everyone did fine the last 8 years.

[jficke13]

They're not mutually exclusive.

I'm also embarrassed to be an American today.

I'm darn proud that even selecting this particular leader, we still have a peaceful transition of power. I'm disappointed with the president that America elected, but I'm not embarrassed to be an American.

[Pakuni]

One factor I think is being underrated/underreported in all this is that Trump's win is in large part due to how cynical we've become about our politics and our politicians, something for which nearly all of us are to blame (not the least of which is our politicians).

In my failed efforts to understand Trump's support, I can't tell you how many times I've come across comments along the lines of "He can't do any worse" or "At least he's something different" or "They're all terrible, but he'll shake things up."
The election of Donald Trump yesterday is the same as the election of Jesse Ventura in Minnesota or Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, just on a much grander (and unfortunately, more serious) scale. There's such distrust for our politicians and institutions that people are willing to take this kind of a gamble and elect someone so clearly unqualified for the job because 1) What difference does it make? and 2) How much worse can he be? (Answer: a lot, but let's hope not)

Unfortunately, I think his supporters are going to be slapped with harsh reality when they realize he's spent the last 40+ years as a part of the same ruling elite they (and he) vilify and he cares for them about as much as the Clintons.

[naginiF]

I'm darn proud that even selecting this particular leader, we still have a peaceful transition of power. I'm disappointed with the president that America elected, but I'm not embarrassed to be an American.

I think that's a great perspective.  My only concern is in whom is emboldened by this outcome or, even worse, legitimized by it.  As long as the extremes are kept as extremes we'll be fine as a society. 

[Badgerhoney]

Hillary lost because she was a horribly flawed candidate and because she couldn't energize enough minorities and women to vote for her. She lost because she made some terrible mistakes - if they even were "mistakes" - with the email server. She lost because America is sick of the Clintons. She lost because the vast majority of Americans considered her untrustworthy.  She had near-record unfavorables (of course, having even worse unfavorables didn't prevent her opponent from winning!).

Trump won because Americans wanted change for change sake. He won because a large swath of America is gullible and pathetic.

Think about this man. He's outwardly racist -- it's not his "fault" that every radical racist group supported him, but he certainly didn't push back on that, and in fact, he hired an avowed racist as his campaign CEO. He's an admitted sexist, an admitted sexual abuser, an admitted pervert who bragged about being able to watch 15-year-old Teen USA contestants in various states of undress.

He has zero knowledge of anything beyond our borders and no intellectual curiosity. He brazenly refused to show his tax returns. PolitiFact said that more than 70% of what he said during the campaign was either "mostly false," "false" or "pants on fire." He wants to spread nukes around the world and has threatened to use them. He has offered few, if any, detailed policies. He is exceedingly vindictive; it will be interesting to see how he engages with the many Republicans who repudiated him.

He won because he did a brilliant job of appealing to the "deplorables" ... and enough non-deplorables to get over the top.

He won because he was right about the election being rigged; he was just wrong about the "rig-ee." The combination of the Russian hacks being leaked through Wikileaks and Comey's outrageously awful handling of the email situation -- all in the campaign's final two weeks -- made things very difficult for Clinton. Of course, those situations wouldn't have existed had Clinton not committed her multiple faux pas.

Our VP-elect denies science. He's a bible-thumping evolution denier who thinks God actually created the world in six days, and did so only a few thousand years ago: the classic "Jesus rode dinosaurs" guy. Disavows anything to do with climate change. Wants to deny women control of their bodies and futures. In many ways, I fear him more than I fear Trump.

In the end, more than half of America was bamboozled by a racist, sexist, bombastic snake-oil salesman. How embarrassing. We are the laughingstock of the world.

Look, as long as Trump doesn't blow up the world, this probably won't affect me personally. I'm white, I'm not rich but I am financially comfortable, I've got a house, I've got a Sugar Mama. I sure wouldn't want to be anything but a white male under a Trump presidency, though, especially with the GOP retaining control of the Senate. 50+ years of work on women's rights, black rights, etc, are in jeopardy.

Of course, Mrs. MU82 and I are probably going to lose about a year's worth of salary in the stock market today, but this too shall pass. Something fairly similar happened after Brexit, and the market recovered fairly quickly.

The girls basketball team I coach won our season opener yesterday afternoon and then the old-man's softball team I play on won our league championship last night, so I was feeling pretty jubilant until I started watching the election results.

But I did all I could do - even held my nose and voted for Hillary - so now I'll be a big boy and live with it. I don't have a choice. Despite my wife saying she wants to move to Canada, we're not going anywhere. We probably won't even leave North Carolina, which has erased a century of progressive progress in the last 4 years.

So I'm going to try to look at the few bright sides:

1. I like to think we have seen the last of the Clintons. Hillary couldn't beat an unknown rookie whose name sounded like Osama in 2008, and she couldn't beat one of the most unpopular people on the planet in 2016. She's toast, and she can take her douchebag husband with her.

2. This should open the Dems' eyes to see they can't just throw anybody on the presidential ballot and rely on the minority vote. They need to start tapping into their pool of younger potential stars that progressive whites, minorities, women, Millennials, etc can get behind - more like Obama, less like Clinton. It will be interesting to see how the Cory Bookers, the Julian Castros, the Eric Garcettis, etc, progress as political leaders.

3. This totally exposed the religious right as the hypocrites they are. Has there EVER, EVER, EVER been a less-Christian, major-party political candidate? Even if one offers Jefferson and a couple others from that era as atheists, they weren't blatantly, undeniably immoral, like this guy. And yet the Christians fell all over each other to vote him in. Here in NC, the GOP passed the infamous "bathroom law" because, they said, it would prevent perverts pretending to be trans from terrorizing their daughters in bathrooms and locker rooms. And then, for president, they back an actual pervert who literally bragged about spying on their daughters in the locker room!! Classic.

Finally, I'll be curious to see if the Dems in Congress have the nuts to wage the kind of stonewalling, obstructing and fillibustering attack that the Republicans did with Obama. My guess is that they don't.

All right. End of screed. I'd better get started on that bomb shelter.

Evangelists will vote for the pro life candidate every time. Nothing hypocritical about that.

Wisconsin has voted Democrat every election since 2008, and NOW we are racist because the WOW counties switched?  Michigan, Pennsylvania the same. 

You said gullible and pathetic?  Hope and change any different?

Bill Clinton was a sexist, did you vote for him? 

[Badgerhoney]

The media and the elites were smoked last night.  The people have spoke. The person for whom laws didn't matter and laws were for little people, lost. 

For those of you claiming to move, why don't you move to Mexico?  Why is it always Canada or Europe?  What is wrong with Mexico?

[LAZER]

For those of you claiming to move, why don't you move to Mexico?  Why is it always Canada or Europe?  What is wrong with Mexico?

What point are you trying to make here?

[Vander Blue Man Group]

I'm darn proud that even selecting this particular leader, we still have a peaceful transition of power. I'm disappointed with the president that America elected, but I'm not embarrassed to be an American.

I respect that perspective.  It is not one I can share. 

[Dr. Blackheart]

Clinton forgot the one rule of politics:  "All politics are local".  It was again the South and the Rust Belt who decided the election.  Trump was indeed the better campaigner. 

Leader?  TBD

Btw, I voted for neither

[MU82]

Evangelists will vote for the pro life candidate every time. Nothing hypocritical about that.

Wisconsin has voted Democrat every election since 2008, and NOW we are racist because the WOW counties switched?  Michigan, Pennsylvania the same. 

You said gullible and pathetic?  Hope and change any different?

Bill Clinton was a sexist, did you vote for him?

Will evangelists also vote for the pervert every time, too?

I didn't say Wisconsin was racist. I try not to talk in such broad terms. I'm saying Trump made it mainstream to be racist again, in Wisconsin and everywhere else. The leader of the Republican Party, a respectable Wisconson conservative named Paul Ryan (you might have heard of him), rebuked Trump for comments that were "the textbook definition of racism."

Obama was different because we did not already know him to be all the horrific things every one of us knows Trump is. There was mystery to Obama, hope for something different. Think about the way Obama introduced himself to America: with one of the most uplifting, inspiring, inclusive speeches ever made. And now think about the many ways Trump introduced himself to America, and specifically the way he opened his campaign: by calling Mexicans rapists.

For all of Bubba's foibles, and there were many, he never boasted publicly about getting to see pageant contest entrants as young as 15 undressing. He never bragged publicly about getting to grab women by their hoo-has. He never publicly said: "I think that putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing. If I come home -- and I don't want to sound too much like a chauvinist -- but when I come home and dinner's not ready, I go through the roof."

To borrow from Ryan, that's the textbook definition of sexism.