Nothing is settled anymore in America, and it appears that so many of the gains we have fought so hard to win over the years are about to be rolled back by our new president and the party that has so cravenly backed him, even when it knows better. Obamacare, which millions of us — myself included — depend upon, is already under assault, and Medicare may not be far behind. Who knows what established rights the cadres of far-right justices who will now fill the federal benches for a generation may strike down?
.. When I watched the debates and the conventions this year, my thoughts kept going back to my parents, neither of whom lived to see this election. They would have been staggered by the sheer, pounding vulgarity of it all.
.. I have heard that it is unfair or condescending to say that all Trump voters were racists, or sexists, or that they hated foreigners. All right. But if they were not, they were willing to accept an awful lot of racism and sexism and xenophobia in the deal they made with their champion, and demanded precious few particulars in return.
.. Throughout our history, Americans have encountered economic shocks much worse than anything we know today, and with many fewer resources at their disposal. American working people have agency, they are plenty educated, and in past crises they rejected the extremism that other nations turned to. Even in the Great Depression they did not succumb to the ideologies of Fascism and Communism sweeping the world.
.. Once Russians, too, and especially Russian writers, were certain that there was a special destiny for the Russian soul. But a century of disastrous choices and their consequences seems to have disillusioned them. They have so much to teach us.
The Real Reason Trump Won: Part 3 of 4 Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443801/real-reason-trump-won-democratic-turnout-decline
Once again, as in every election since 1980, the winner of the popular vote got substantially fewer votes than the number of eligible voters who didn’t show up at all. 2016 set a new record: More than 95 million eligible voters did not cast a presidential ballot, producing the widest spread between the nonvoters and the winner of the popular vote since 2000:
The number of people tuning out of the process spiked for the second election cycle in a row, while the third-party vote increased and the number of voters for the major parties stayed flat (this time, unlike 2012, without a multi-state natural disaster ten days before the election).
.. Trump got the votes of 27.2 percent of all eligible voters, down from 27.4 percent for Romney, which was down from 28.1 percent for McCain, which was down from 30.5 percent for Bush in 2004.
The whole Democratic Party is now a smoking pile of rubble
The down-ballot party has withered, and Obama’s policy legacy will be largely repealed.
After all, in a year when fundamentals-based models predicted a narrow Republican victory, Clinton actually pulled out a majority of the popular vote. That makes the Democrats from 1992 to 2016 the only political party in American history to win the popular vote in six elections out of seven. It’s actually kind of impressive.
What’s less impressive is that at the sub-presidential level, the Obama years have created a Democratic Party that’s essentially a smoking pile of rubble.
No, Obama Probably Wouldn’t Have Beaten Trump
And it’s bad for the Democratic Party for him to say so.
Obamacare looms large, despite the fact that it is one of the most tangible benefits Obama delivered to working-class Americans, regardless of race. Yet the reaction to the program was undoubtedly tinged with racism.
.. many “Americans thought blacks would benefit more than whites.”
.. Obama really turned [one voter] off when, after a vigilante killed a black teenager named Trayvon Martin, he said the boy could have been his son. She felt as if Obama was choosing a side in the racial divide, stirring up tensions.”
.. one who had “grown somewhat disenchanted” with Obama after supporting him, then “talked about how much the Black Lives Matter protests against shootings by police officers grated on him” and lamented, “If I say anything about that, I’m a racist.”
.. “Does the country’s criminal justice system treat all fairly or treat blacks unfairly?” Seventy-two percent of those saying blacks are treated unfairly were Clinton voters, while 73 percent of those saying blacks are treated as fairly as everyone else were Trump voters.
.. many whites had stopped viewing Obama as “post-racial” and tagged him, however unfairly, as the source of racial tension.
.. “The biggest drop that I had in my poll numbers in my first six months had nothing to do with the economy. It was ‘the beer summit.’ Among white voters, my poll numbers dropped, like, I don’t know, ten per cent or something. If you don’t stick your landing in talking about racial issues, particularly when it pertains to the criminal-justice system, then people just shut down. They don’t listen.”
.. It forces us to acknowledge that the symbolic nature of Obama’s victory, however powerful it may be in shaping future generations, was not enough to heal past wounds. And it reminds the Democratic Party that the challenge of winning back working-class whites, many of whom still seethe with racial resentment