As another foreign national, albeit one who now resides and works (legitimately, I probably should add in the 'new climate' we're facing) in the US, my impressions largely mirror PhoneLobster's above.
I remained pretty neutral (as a non-voter, hey) throughout the election, though my wife (who's a US citizen) had her car keyed for daring to have a Bernie bumper sticker in the liberal state of Colorado. That was as close as I got 'in' on the action.
Due to that neutrality, I didn't comment on this thread, except to post the Nate Silver site - and which, like nearly all other polls, led us vastly astray.
One thing that shocked me about this thread was the entitlement coming from Hillary supporters. It reminded me strongly of the 2008/2009 climate on Enworld and elsewhere when disgruntled 3.5 fans were told by the 4e establishment that 'hey, we can do without you - go away, buy Pathfinder'. Turns out the groups who were continuously told they were dispensable - and then voted 10% or more for a 3rd party - would have made a difference to this election. Even Trump voters interviewed on NSBNC say 'this election is not so much about Donald as it is about Hilary'.
I don't for a moment think Sanders would have carried this election. He'd have fared worse. That said, I live in southern Colorado, which is full of military people, and a lot of them are highly educated and identify themselves as liberal conservatives. I have it on personal authority that they'd have voted for Sanders, since they found Donald an opinionated dick who couldn't be trusted with actual leadership. But the Donald was running against a candidate with a 20 year track record of lying through her teeth whenever the opportunity suited - for often
laughably low stakes, and for not so low ones either. So there's this episode where Clinton claimed, in recorded footage / interview, to have been under sniper fire in Bosnia back in the 90s. Turns out, that was a fabrication to ramp up her credentials and international experience.
Now here's the weird thing with all those highly educated people in the army bases. The majority have been in action and either directly under fire or lost friends, close friends, to military action. And you don't go out there and lie about that, and say you've been shot at when you were in perfect safety. It's a huge insult to the armed services, to any veteran and their families.
Now, this is such a minor grievance, you'd think people would let it go and not let it color their feelings on a presidential election. (I certainly wouldn't let it sway me.) But that's the catch, for me, in a nutshell - that it did sway, and that across a wide spectrum of the electorate, Hilary had this thing here or there that alienated her from people who'd have otherwise voted for her. Over Trump. Over Sanders. But her campaign continuously emphasized, sometimes as aggressively as in this thread here, that none of these grievances were worth taking seriously, and that people who had a moral problem with her lying about Bosnia or other stuff could go fuck themselves.
Maybe on a
factual level, most of those grievances could be dismissed as insufficiently substantial or simply not worth addressing. (I actually believe that.) But from a
campaign perspective, dismissing all these concerns as white trash idiocy was a mistake with rather large consequences. And that people coming out of the 2008/2009 D&D edition wars and learning its lessons (i.e. the aftermath) would then turn around in 2016 and think that that's
smart strategy in a much larger arena - that, to me, is one of the more enduring puzzles about this forum.
Anyway, good luck America, and here's to four years of we know not what.