Yes, He Is Your Next President

     How the fuck did we get from this...

     ...to this...

     ...to this in less than a year and a half?
     Well, as V said in V For Vendetta, "You have only to look in a mirror."
     As of this moment, Hillary Clinton still leads Donald Trump in the popular vote by over 209,000. Of course, in the United States, it's not the popular vote that counts, which seems to run counter to the idea that we're a democratic republic, but the Electoral College. And the Electoral College, that perennial School of Hard Knocks, tells us that Trump has won the presidency with 279 electoral votes to Clinton's 228. And Trump will likely get 27 more when Michigan's and Arizona's votes are finally tallied, putting him well above 300.
     But wait. Wasn't Clinton the one who was supposed to get over 300 electoral votes, according to the Unimpeachable Poobahs of the Punditocracy? Yes, yes she was. Hours before the first polls began closing at 7 PM here on the east coast, every major poll had Clinton winning by 3-4%. And the political zeitgeist informs us every election cycle that the closer you get to an election the polls get more accurate. And exit polls are completely worthless if you're trying to run a clean Democratic primary.

     This is what happened last night, instead. And I don't feel one bit sorry for them. In fact, I wish I could drink their tears as a chaser to a few shots of Bushmill's.
     Keith Olbermann must be wearing a football helmet in his broom closet of a sound stage at GQ to keep his already swelled head from exploding in a thousand sticky pieces.
     You want to talk numbers? OK, let's talk numbers:
     As I'd predicted, this would be the lowest voter turnout in at least three general election cycles, perhaps ever. The numbers bear this out. In fact, since 2012, AP and the networks stopped using exit polls in 19 states and one wasn't even commissioned after the UK's historic Brexit vote.
     Yet, while exit polls are currently under siege, there's still a long tale of the tape for us 13th round referees to parse. And they show a significant enthusiasm gap, a missing voter engagement that wasn't quite so much in evidence when Obama ran for re-election four years ago. In other words, Hillary brought fewer voters to the polls than Mr. Obama while Trump brought them out in quite a few states that Romney didn't.
     Enough of the numbers have come in so that we can extrapolate this year's voting trends so that one can comfortably say that Hillary's Get Out the Vote fell flat on its face and it can't be said the Purloined Letters helped, either.
     For instance, in Michigan, Clinton got 13% fewer votes than Obama. Trump got 7% more than Romney (and in Romney's home state).
     In the battleground state of Pennsylvania, Clinton got 5% fewer votes than Obama. Trump got 9% more than Romney.
     In Wisconsin, Clinton got 15% fewer votes than Obama. Trump did slightly worse than Romney.
     In 2008, President Obama earned 69,498,516 votes when we had 23-25 million fewer people in the population. Compare that to Clinton's 59,649,228 (as of right now). The President, with a smaller population, got nearly 10,000,000 more voters to vote for him than had Hillary.
     And so forth and so on. And, mind you, we've added 47,000,000 people to our population since 2000.
     The only consolation Democrats can take away from this clusterfuck of a general election is that we'd wrested back control of one extra seat in the Senate, in which the Republicans still hold a 51-49 edge. That's it. After all those billions spent in those 34 Senate races, we won back one seat.
   

 

     Well played, Koch brothers and their redneck puppets, well played. We kept Rand Paul in the Senate and kept Russ Feingold out of it.

     And, of course, the GOP kept its stranglehold on the House. At last count, they still controlled 239 seats, with 218 needed for a majority.

     Say what you want about President-Elect Trump. But he brought out the parishioners in a way that Hillary didn't (even though she actually won the popular vote count by 209,000 votes). So stop blaming the millennials, the Bernie bros and the third party voters. Gary Johnson still inexplicably got millions of votes on his Libertarian Party ticket and that could only hurt Trump and help Hillary. Jill Stein did so horribly, including her home state of Massachusetts, that her vote totals wouldn't've come close to making up the splits. And stop with your childish, whining #NotmyPresident hashtag on Twitter. That's what the rednecks said after the 2008 election and again four years ago.

     Donald Trump is your next President, like it or not. And if you supported Hillary, the crook who stole the primary and kneecapped the guy who was polled as having a better than even shot at winning, then you are to blame for last night. You are to blame for the presidential race's outcome and many of the down ballot races if you voted for establishment, Blue Dog Democrats. Or, as the numbers state, stayed home.

     Look in the mirror. You own Trump and you can't return him for something better like a bad Christmas present.