When we sit up in bed, we look out the bedroom door down a short hallway and out an east-facing window, which, when I awoke on Wednesday morning, was letting in the first pink light of day. Since the workings of the natural world persisted, I thought maybe I'd been hallucinating, but no, turning on the radio it was still President-elect Trump. A few observations.
(1) All the hand-wringing on the news shows over the question of how the polls could have been so wrong: at least arguably, exaggerated. From a sufficient altitude, you could say that the polls showed a tight race, with Clinton a little ahead--and, in a better arrangement, that would have been roughly correct, since, as I write this, her margin in the national popular vote, which in other countries is known simply as "the vote," has climbed northward to 400,000. On election eve, Nate Silver's 538 blog put the likelihood of a Trump victory at 30%, about the same chance as a batting champion getting a hit in a particular at-bat. The prognosticators at The Upshot blog were less bullish on Trump: in their estimate, his chance of winning was only about the same as that of an NFL kicker missing a 35-yard field goal. Fans of the local franchise know that can happen.
(2) If you carefully redistributed the ballots of 120,000 California Democrats across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Clinton would have won 274 electoral votes. There's obviously something wrong with a system in which 120,000 ballots, meaningless because they were cast in one state, would have been decisive if cast somewhere else. Another way to put it: on average, a vote for Trump counted more than a vote for Clinton. It's amazing to me that people are okay with that.
(3) In the scenario described in (2) above, what is called The Narrative would have been all about how Trumpism had been rejected, however narrowly. It's super crazy what a difference is made by essentially no difference at all. Instead of having to reburnish his business brand in relative obscurity (and defend himself in court), Trump will be the president. We're alarmed by that, naturally. Should have been more alarmed before.
(4) I watched Clinton's concession speech Wednesday morning. It's not what I would have said, and I'm sure not all of it was what was in her heart, but it was an above-average specimen of the genre and, of course, exactly what Trump had announced he wouldn't do. (In the scenario described in (2) above, it's scary to consider what Trump would be saying.) A journalist on the scene at the New York Stock Exchange reported that many of the traders on the floor booed and jeered and called "Lock her up" while she was doing what had to be done. Deplorable. One of them was interviewed and pointed proudly to how the Dow was up, which he attributed to a rally by drug stocks over the imminent repeal of Obamacare.
Yes! That's what's wrong with America! The drug companies haven't been making enough money!
(Good grief.)
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