I’m trying to look on the bright side (early) this morning…
Maybe Missouri is on a path toward regaining its bellwether status.
Some of you might not be familiar with the Missouri bellwether phenomenon.
From 1904 to 2004, Missouri voted for the winning presidential nominee, with one exception. That was in 1956, during the landslide re-election of President Dwight Eisenhower. Showing its Democratic tilt at the time, Missouri voted for Adlai Stevenson, governor of nearby Illinois.
The sound of the bell began to get faint in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president. By a margin of about 5,000 votes, Missouri went for John McCain. During that election, a lawyer from out of state was staying at our house while working on the Obama campaign. We didn’t know him; the local Democratic Party hooked us up with him and asked if we’d put him up.
My most vivid memory of him was how upset he was the morning after the election. He wanted Obama’s national campaign staff to demand a recount in Missouri, even though Obama had won the election and didn’t need Missouri.
“I know we can find 5,000 votes somewhere!” the lawyer said.
Four years later, in 2012, the bell stopped ringing. Missourians voted for Mitt Romney by a margin of more than 250,000 votes. Missouri had gone decidedly red.
This year, I thought the race between Clinton and Trump would be close in Missouri. At one time, I even thought Clinton might win. (Thank God I never predicted that in this blog! Kept my big mouth shut for once.)
Yesterday, the Republicans blew the doors off the state. At this writing, with more than 80 percent of the precincts reporting, Trump was leading Clinton by more than half a million votes.
(He also won by more than half a million votes in my home state, Kentucky, which also used to be Democratic.)
**
I’ve said several times in this space over the last few years that Republicans were on the wrong side of demographics, with the Latino, Asian and African-American vote expanding and the older-white-male vote shrinking.
Well, that theory got turned on its head in Missouri and many other states yesterday.
I don’t know exactly how this happened, but I do know one thing: Emails can be very dangerous. You not only have to be very careful before you hit the “send” button; you have to be even more careful about setting up your own email system. Clinton lost a lot of voters when that scandal surfaced a few years ago (we can now officially call it a scandal), and many of them never returned to her.
Anyway, congratulations to my Republican friends and to Donald Trump. He did it his way, and, by God, he won big. We Democrats should have been paying closer attention to those huge crowds he was drawing instead of to the pundits who were sometimes predicting an 80-percent-plus likelihood of a Clinton victory.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Why can we only now officially call it a “scandal”?
The people have now spoken on it, in large numbers.
Well, to kinda paraphrase Honest Abe, you can fool a large number of the people on some election days.
Well, yes and no. Looks like she will win the popular vote.
Not all large numbers are created equal.
Some bright side.
The media has focused on “extremism” in the Republican Party while ignoring the huge log in it’s own eye. The Democrat Party needs to kick the totalitarians, anti-Americans and snowflakes to the curb. I know there are good, solid Americans who love their country, support the Bill of Rights and our civil liberties, but for the past few decades they have been increasingly shoved to the back of the bus.
I’ve spent much of my adult life in various sociology departments and saw this as early on as 1970 when I was told by one of my colleagues that “You need to join the Young Socialist Alliance, it’s the most democratic of the bunch.” Really? And when my wife complimented her non-union work environment I was asked “How can you let her think that way?”
Political correctness and the attacks on our cultural institutions need to take a hike. People, including many of my friends in academia, are sick of being harangued for using the “wrong” pronoun, and being subjected to what amount to totalitarian speech patterns. While those on the left shuddered at Trump’s crude commentaries, the American people reveled in them and the thumb in the eye to the fascists they represented.
As I’ve stated before most of what Trump claimed he was going to do was either bullshit, legislatively impossible, or unconstitutional, so now we’ll see how he manages to follow up on his promises to “Make America Great Again.” Quite frankly, he can’t do much worse than what we’ve seen from the left for the past few decades.
I have the feeling we’re going to see a lot of surprises, even though Trump has already prepared us for them. The journalists — who completely missed the signals, by the way — are going to be working more hours than they thought possible.
One of the beauties of a Trump presidency is that journalists will actually go back to work after their 8 year siesta.
Great comment, John!
Thank you.
I wonder if this might prompt the Sulzbergers to start thinking about selling The New York Times. It’s publicly traded, but the Sulzberger family has the controlling interest.
They did the brand name no good this election cycle. The only ones looking worse are CNN after wikileaks demonstrated their open collaboration with the Clinton campaign and the Politico guy who submitted his articles for approval from them.
Both Clinton and Trump received more no votes then yes votes when you take the other two canidates into account. What does this mean? Anything?
We knew that neither candidate was wildly popular. We still know that.
It means the American public is unable to discern the truth of things.
That, however, has been the case nigh on 40 years, since from Reagan onward each successive White House has sold us all off to the highest corporate bidder. This was just the most egregious example.
Trump will try to set himself up as a dictator and will quite possibly succeed. We’ll have to tough it out the best we can.
His upcoming lawsuits should rein him in a bit, if only by further tearing at the tattered cover of his ‘image’.
On a personal note, I still can’t believe that in my lifetime the American public willingly, nay avidly, purchased a pig in a poke.
One of my greatest frustrations is that after toiling for two decades in the vineyard of the conservative movement I had to put up with sleazy scumbags like Milton Wolf and charlatans like Trump as the movement’s legacy. But then again, look what you had to represent you.
Avidly…That was perhaps the most surprising part.
Not going to happen Julius. First, there are the checks and balances built into the system itself. Certainly his will not be the only gigantic ego in DC with a substantial amount of power. Secondly, the bureaucracy itself can be immensely immovable. It takes a minimum of 4 years to fire a federal bureaucrat and any attempt to become overly authoritarian would have to be filtered through them.
Folks on my side felt the same about Obama (and with far more evidence given the misconduct at the IRS, DOJ and FBI), but here we are.
But, John – we made progress, personalities aside: We didn’t go backwards, devolve into the nebulous and mostly mythical morass to which Trumps “promises” to return the country (and we won’t even speak of the imaginary factory jobs “returning” from overseas – what a gullible lot you conservatives are!)
We pushed our faces to the future, knowing full well our inspirations were more than fallible; they were too human.
Why should I be anything less than proud to be part of a movement that blazes forward instead of anchoring itself to the past?
You know what Trump will make great again?
Enemies lists
WH scandals (bald enough to put Reagan’s to shame)
“Just Say NO” pap
The First Lady’s silicone-enhanced breasts
A discredited American exceptionalism
Racism
Ethnocentrism
Fear
Lies
Bald pandering
I want no part of that and believe neither do you.
Yet that is what you (and your brethren) have chosen.
The racism is a bitch.
“Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugness-of-the-press-presidential-election-2016/
Good piece..”Let the new tantrums commence.”
It wasn’t just smugness, it was willful blindness.
Michael Moore had it right back in July: Thor help me I believed him then, but ended up relapsing like a long term junkie…
We gotta get out of here!