Election 2016 -- December 19, 2016

Updates

July 23, 2017: the cultish Hillary worship continues to fascinate me. Cupcakes, fruitcakes, just can't get enough of Hillary.  Even Newsweek is unable to move on. At least they call her a loser. They forgot to mention: fraud, grifter, felon.

April 6, 2017: LOL. Hillary blames misogyny for her lost to Trump This from The Chicago Tribune back on November 21, 2016: want to blame women for Trump's win? Start with Hillary Clinton.

"White women sold out the sisterhood and the world by voting for Trump," one Slate headline read. A former communications director for the Clinton campaign recently told MSNBC that "internalized misogyny" led white women to support Trump.

Should progressives really want to find out the reason Clinton lost, however, it will require them to crawl out of their safe spaces and realize this is the sort of senseless liberal blame-shifting that tempts even members of #NeverTrump to don a "Make America Great Again" hat.

If anyone wants to blame women for Clinton's loss, they ought to start with Hillary Clinton.

Clinton repeatedly misled the public about the circumstances of her off-the-books email system and became the first candidate in history to be under FBI investigation while campaigning to be president. That's her fault.

Clinton, essentially, positioned herself as the anointed inheritor of President Barack Obama's third term instead of crafting her own identity in an obviously anti-establishment year. She ran on all the policies Republicans opposed in previous elections that led the GOP to win record numbers of state legislative chambers, governors' races, as well as control of Congress. That's her fault.

Clinton never stepped foot in the state of Wisconsin, even though it's home state to the Republican national committee chairman, the well-liked GOP speaker of the House, and a governor who beat the labor unions in a terribly contentious right-to-work battle.

According to NBC News, Trump spent 50 percent more time in battleground states in the last 100 days of the election. That's her fault.

April 6, 2017: Hillary "blames everyone and everything but herself" for her huge lost. Story everywhere; this was not the best article, but the only one I have right now. She does not mention:

• that she did not campaign in Wisconsin, a critical state, that went for Trump
• that she had one campaign event three times / week when Trump was having three events / day
• that her husband, a disbarred lawyer and prior president met on the tarmac with the US attorney general to discuss their grandchldren
• that she had a fair amount of baggage, starting with Benghazi

On top of all this, incredibly poor timing: the interview and the story occurred the very day President Trump launched 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria following a chemical attack there. Her interview becomes part of the trash bin of history.

Original Post

1. "Faithless" electors. Hillary was even less well-liked by her party than Trump by his party -- by four to one.

This is pretty funny, when all is said and done. And it was never mentioned on MSNBC this evening. I will be curious if it's mentioned on "Morning Joe" in the a.m. I can hardly wait; I've already got my alarm set.

For all the talk about "faithless electors" and all that pressure -- including death threats -- to get Trump electors to vote for anyone other than Trump, it turns out almost three times as many Hillary electors than Trump electors "defected."

Again, almost three times as many Hillary electors than Trump electors "defected."

I knew folks generally did not like Hillary but I did not know it was that bad.

In addition, there were three additional Hillary electors who attempted to defect, but two were replaced with Hillary electors, and the third eventually saw the light and changed his/her vote. In all there were at least eight Hillary defectors to two Trump defectors, or four times as many Hillary defectors as Trump defectors. 

Wow. 

How many times  has Hillary lost now? Two earlier elections and then lost three times in 2016.

The New York Times noted the "record number of defectors" but hesitated in making it clear that the record was set because of the Hillary defectors. Wow.

On a percentage basis it's even worse:

• Trump: 2 of 306 electors were "faithless" = 0.654%
• Hillary: 8 of 232 electors were "faithless" = 3.45%
• and, it's even worse, three of Hillary "faithless" electors voted for a GOP "candidate" 

2.  Post-mortem.

• CNN passes debate questions to Donna Brazile, and Ms Brazile passes questions to Hillary [Update, April 6, 2017: this turned out to be true; Donna Brazile admitted and apologized.]
• Hillary speaks publicly about "deplorables." Podesta has a long list of deplorables in his e-mails.
• Obama says he was aware that Podesta was a subject of phishing but never bothered to tell Podesta. The only way that Obama would have known that would have been if the FBI told him. The NY Times says the FBI left a message over at the DNC that their e-mail account had been compromised, but the DNC "help desk" was less than helpful. 
• Everyone will point fingers at everyone else, but MSNBC summed it up pretty well today: Hillary ran a lousy campaign; she had no message; Americans like narratives and she had no narrative; she averaged about one campaign stop to every eight stops by a self-funded opponent; her opponent made seven stops, seven speeches in the last 18 hours before the election; the only thing on Hillary's schedule the day before the election was a music concert; Hillary did not visit the state of Wisconsin once during the election; once she connected fracking with the lead in Flint's water supply, she could never return to Michigan; and that stance on fracking cost her Pennsylvania

3. Landslide. Trump refers to his electoral win as a landslide. MSNBC begs to differ. Considering that everyone -- including MSNBC "knew" that Hillary was going to win, even if Trump won by a single electoral vote, it would have been seen "huge" by his supporters, and maybe even his opponents. But winning with 306 votes to 232 when everyone thought he would lose, is a landslide in the mind of the man on the street. And in the minds of Trump and most of his supporters.

4. Reality. Trump did better than expected in every demographic except along the southern California coast. Even with outright cheating, Hillary could not win Michigan: Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books. Voting irregularities in Detroit have spurred plans for an audit by Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson’s office. Thirty-seven percent more ballots than folks who actually showed up to vote and no one at the Federal Election Commission seems concerned. 

5. Observation. George Will made this observation. Obama is the most loquacious president in modern history. He asked a panel of four journalists if any of them could remember one -- just one -- memorable line made by Obama. No one could think of any. I thought of -- "If you like your doctor, you can keep our doctor." Or, "I set a red line at Syria using chemical weapons."

6. The Russian job. It is obvious that both parties want to divert Americans' attention from all the real problems with this elections and they will do this "blaming the Russians." This will get lost in some committee.

7. Trump is celebrating his third win over Hillary.