by the latest count she won 400,000 more votes than Trump, who got fewer votes than either Mitt Romney or John McCain.
.. Trump won Florida by one; Trump won Wisconsin by fewer than 30,000 votes.
.. nearly 10 percent of millennials voted for third-party candidates
.. On the reasonable assumption that by far most of those who voted for the third-party candidates would have otherwise gone for Clinton, Gary Johnson, the odd-duck Libertarian, with 3.2 percent of the popular vote, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party, receiving just 1 percent, damaged and perhaps destroyed Clinton’s chances.
.. A CBS News exit poll found that if those who voted for Johnson or Stein had had to choose only between Clinton and Trump they would have supported Clinton by nearly two to one. It’s not a stretch to conclude that, absent the third-party candidates, Hillary Clinton would have won the election.
.. Hillary Clinton wasn’t giving people a reason to vote for her. “Stronger together” meant what?
.. Bill Clinton worried that the leaders of his wife’s campaign were too fixated on their supposedly fearsome get-out-the-vote drive and were failing to craft a coherent message for her
.. Bill Clinton worried that the leaders of his wife’s campaign were too fixated on their supposedly fearsome get-out-the-vote drive and were failing to craft a coherent message for her
.. The “moral” of the story may be that if you’re going to lie in the course of a public contest, lie so often that people can’t keep up with you
.. she started off being dismissive, and then sarcastic: asked in a press conference if she’d wiped her server she replied, “With a cloth?” And her explanations were often legalistic and evasive
.. she got nearly five million fewer votes than Obama did in 2012—resulted in the lowest voter turnout in twenty years
.. Trump channeled the anger at Washington institutions that particularly the working class felt had failed them, while Clinton came across as the very symbol of those institutions. Though Trump was a wealthy man, his populist message—even the baseball caps—made him seem accessible
.. The Clintons’ greed kept getting them in trouble.
.. white voters, whom Trump won almost across the board: not just among the working class, as expected, but also among college-educated voters, except for college-educated white women, whom Clinton won by a small margin. Among white men overall, Trump dominated, winning 72 percent of non-college-educated ones and 54 percent of those with a college education.
.. For many women voters, culture and class mattered more than gender.
.. David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, by an innovative method he devised: look at how people voted in the 493 counties that have Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores, and in the 184 counties with Whole Foods stores. In 2012 Obama carried 75 percent of the counties that had a Whole Foods and 29 percent of the counties with a Cracker Barrel. But that spread was exceeded this year—in the other direction—with Trump winning 76 percent of counties with Cracker Barrel stores and just 22 percent of counties with Whole Foods.
.. Clinton came across to them as an creature from another, urban, world—a wealthy woman who liked big government and didn’t understand them.
.. He uses a critical word in describing how Trump wins the support of so many of his people: relatable. “People who are drawn to Trump are drawn to him because he’s a little outrageous, he’s a little relatable, and fundamentally he is angry and spiteful and critical of the things that people feel anger and spite toward,”
.. Trump did a good job instilling fear of an America overtaken by immigrants and it didn’t take much imagination to understand his dark prophecies of where, when blacks were also counted, this country was headed. Trump’s presidency won’t be a good time to be poor, especially a black person who is poor. And in Trumpland, with a president who ran a racist campaign, divisions between the races are set to deepen, as already shown in incidents of harassment and violence against minorities since the election.
.. His ideas for education play to those who don’t care for integrated schools
.. I always tell my clients, If you lose, lose big. Then you won’t chew over for the rest of your life what you should have done differently.” The close election is all the harder to shake off
.. Steve Bannon, of Breitbart News, pushes the “alt-right” theme of white supremacy and is believed to have been the guiding spirit behind Trump’s chillingly anti-Semetic final campaign ad, which charged that Clinton associated with three people who happen to be prominent Jews: George Soros (“those who control the levers of power in Washington”); Fed chairman Janet Yellen (“global special interests”); and Lloyd Blankfein (“put money into the pockets of large corporations”). It’s hard to see how it could have been more blatant. These weren’t “dog whistles,” they were dogs barking loudly.
.. Trump has led his followers to expect a lot. He promised to end Obamacare “on day one,” which will be difficult because it was passed by Congress and therefore isn’t his to eliminate.
- Iran deal
- renegotiate trade agreements to get better terms for America
- bring back jobs to the US
.. In probably our most divisive and ugliest election ever, he prevailed in part because he intuited much about the voters’ psyche and he’s an experienced entertainer.
.. He knew how to appeal to the angry and discontented, who saw in him someone who would “shake up Washington” and deliver on his campaign slogan to “Make America great again.”
.. what happens if Trump fails to deliver to his followers? Who, and what, will they turn to next?
Ari Fleischer: Here’s how I figured out whom to vote for
The numerous lies she told about her private email server and classified records are a window into how she operates. When she needs something to be true, she lies and says it. From her false claim that she had nothing to do with the travel office firings to landing under sniper fire in Bosnia to her statement suggesting that a YouTube video caused the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Libya, her pattern is to lie. Those lies were the warm-up act — get ready for really dishonest Clinton if she wins.
.. I will vote for Republicans up and down the ballot. But when it comes to the presidency, I’m going to leave my ballot blank.
Donald Trump’s Playbook for Smearing
“This is a classic example of where Trump begins to demonstrate something he talks about all the time today, which is he’s a counterpuncher. So somebody comes after him and says that he’s done something nefarious and horrible, and he just goes back at them with all guns blazing — you know, boom, boom, boom. And admits nothing, never admit anything, never say you made a mistake, just keep coming.
And if you lose, declare victory. And that’s exactly what happened there. He lost as clearly as you could lose but he loudly proclaimed his victory.”
.. But of course the description also applies to so much else — including Trump’s support for the Iraq War, his “birther” conspiracy theory, his refusal to release tax returns and, most recently, his history of sexual assault.
.. “His lawyer said to me, ‘Donald is a believer that if you repeat something enough, people will start to believe it,’” the journalist Marie Brenner says in the same episode of Frontline that includes the Schwartz interview I quote above.
.. When Trump is feeling cornered, in business or politics, he has a go-to strategy: He lies, and he just keeps lying.
The Barroom Brawl in St. Louis
for all of his repeated claims that he would be the president of everybody, Donald Trump doubled down with his base, repeating all of right-wing radio’s talking points: emails, conspiracy theories, Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.
.. The many television commentators, who have served us so badly throughout this election season, will judge him on these points and not on his constant lies, shameless distortions (“I was against the war in Iraq”), messianic pretensions (“Captain Khan would be alive today if I’d been president”)
.. Perhaps the worst part was that, during the warmest fall in recorded history, there was not a single question on climate change, and only one on energy, at the very end of the debate. Just the same old trivia that has dominated the last year and a half of this interminable campaign. We, the media, have failed the country in this election.