Election 2016

[Kaelik]

So does anyone know what the fuck Trump is going to actually do?

I mean I suspect go down the "brown people R bad" route and more gridlock...but you could power the country off his waffling.

WHAT FUCKING GRIDLOCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There will be a fucking 15% maximum tax rate by February fucking 1st you psycho idiot!

[Captain_Karzak]

Holy Shit, it Lago!

Yeah I was thinking the same thing!

Welcome back!

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, at this point we're just trying to figure out how to get some lube involved.

[CapnTthePirateG]

WHAT FUCKING GRIDLOCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There will be a fucking 15% maximum tax rate by February fucking 1st you psycho idiot!

You mean besides Dems fighting like hell to stop Trump by any means necessary?

Look, let me have my dream, because the alternative is a bunch of Congressional cowards rubber stamping Trump's dumbass ideas.

[PhoneLobster]

Yeah, gridlock isn't a thing here. The drowning the state in a bathtub strategy has two gears and you are about to shift into the other one, the fast one.

And the democrats would need to suddenly grow a spine to apply any form of positive gridlock. If you are lucky they will do like they did with the gun reform posturing they basically pretended recently. Spend about an afternoon symbolically blocking something of massive significance like the repeal of Obamacare then just cave on it so everyone can go home for the evening/weekend without significant disruption.

[Koumei]

Well at least this means America has to stop claiming to be the best country in the world and is relegated to "a global embarrassment".

[Lokamayadon]

I'm not american so I don't know a lot about your situation and all but I hope not too many people will suffer from it...
Good luck.

[Captain_Karzak]

Well at least this means America has to stop claiming to be the best country in the world and is relegated to "a global embarrassment".

Yep. If there's one thing us Americans are going to learn from Trump under his xenophobic and authoritarian leadership, it's how to be more humble towards the rest of the world. For sure.

[spongeknight]

Hey, America will always be the best country! There is literally nothing you could possibly do to make Americans stop thinking that. It's impossible.

USA! USA! USA!

[Windjammer]

Leave it to Trump to walk on the stage, accepting the presidency, to a cheesy 1990s movie sound track - AIR FORCE ONE.

"I hereby accept the nomination to be your HARRISON FORD."

[Josh_Kablack]

Well at least this means America has to stop claiming to be the best country in the world and is relegated to "a global embarrassment".

That's spoken like a furrinerr.....If'n you truly undetstood what Americn Exceptionalism means, you would know that America will now be *THE* global embarrassment.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Well at least this means America has to stop claiming to be the best country in the world and is relegated to "a global embarrassment".

Yep. If there's one thing us Americans are going to learn from Trump under his xenophobic and authoritarian leadership, it's how to be more humble towards the rest of the world. For sure.

More likely they'll double down on the stupid and stupid even harder than before. Americans are like that, we cut off our nose to spite our own face, especially if someone else tells us to not cut off our own noses.

[Username17]

The only path forward is working class solidarity.

My take home is exactly the opposite. I don't think we can win the white working class because it does not matter what we say or do for them. The white working class is white first and working class second, and they will vote for Hitler if it means shitting on black people.

We ran on a platform of doing nice things for poor people and they didn't vote for us because the media literally spent more time on a bullshit non-scandal about how Clinton sent emails to people than it did on all policy issues combined - and white people don't care anyway because the prospect of being allowed to punch Mexicans in public without fearing reprisals provides more utility than a better economy and affordable healthcare.

Leaving aside the fact that there's probably a 30% chance of a fucking civil war within the next ten years because you can bet your ass that Donald is going to try to make good on his promises of banana republic style post-election vendettas, should the republic survive through the incredibly dark times ahead the only particular chance is an anti-Trumpist coalition clean sweeping both houses and the presidency in 2020. And there is no way you can get enough poor white votes to flip to antifascists in that time. These are the people who are gonna spend the next four years with their grandkids marching in Trumpist Youth camps and getting their media from network TVs bullied by the Trump administration to be even more sycophantic than they've been for the last year, they are not gonna vote for Trotsky 2.0. They just fucking aren't.

Trump has shown that by doubling down on the white power hatred the Republicans can get the white people vote no matter how fucking insane their policies are. That's it. There's no solidarity. There's no working class movement. Neo-Confederates are way more powerful and common than anyone dared to fucking admit in polite company, and it's going to get really fucking bad.

Civil society is broken. The norms of peaceful transitions of power and peaceful elections are fucking over. And if you think you can get white people to notice that they have more in common with black people than they do with rich people, you are fucking wrong.

-Username17

[Mask_De_H]

That's the thing about foreign observers and the US: they think massive global failures will teach us humility or contrition. No, it just makes us dig in harder.

Thanks to physical isolationism and the continued (though increasingly borrowed) time as a superpower, that probably won't change until another country successfully imposes it's will on our soil.

[Mistborn]

Yeah Lago is a deluded idiot. The white working class is never going to "awaken to it's economic interest" That is not a thing that's ever going to happen. The "white working class" is a basket of fucking deplorables who care more about having their boot on someones face then being able to eat, as horrifying as that is to contemplate.

If you want a plan that might actually work for combating the rise of orange Mussolini and his fascist fellow travelers look at the people the Democrats are actually winning with. Hispanic turnout set records this year and next go around they will be an even larger share of the electorate Hillary also made inroads with collage educated whites. The party of trump isn't going to be more appealing to either of those groups in 2020.

Step 1 is getting minorities and millennials to actually show up in 2018, but step 2 is finding a message that expands the margins in groups that are actually reachable to liberalism, rather than chasing the votes of bigots out of fucktarded leftist ideology.

[DSMatticus]

Donald Trump is probably going to lose the popular vote. Arizona, North Carolina, and Florida are potentially close enough that the Voting Rights Act could have flipped some of them. The midwest portion of the Clinton firewall was close enough that, say, had Comey not come out swinging for Trump, Clinton could have held on to a path to victory that ran through some of those states.

A significant part of the Democratic weaknesses are structural. The Electoral College is structured against them. The House is structured against them. The Senate is structured against them. And now, the Supreme Court will be conservative. And with full control of the government by the Republicans who benefit from those structures, they are going to be further cemented instead of revised. Even Hillary Clinton - a politician who has been fucking savaged by the media and the government (thanks to the FBI) - is probably going to turn out to win the popularity contest and not be president anyway. I don't think there is a lesson to learn here. "Get a time machine, write a better electoral system?"

There's certainly no real path forward off this. The Supreme Court will be Republican until 2030-2040+, so there will be no oversight on voting restrictions for a generation. The 2020 census will be heavily Republican-controlled, so Republicans will almost certainly continue to hold the House until 2030. The Senate is harder to say, but holy shit does it not look good if this is a new coalition. Democrats are already simply too concentrated to translate their popularity into victory, and the game can and will be further rigged against them now that Republicans get to set the rules. This is going to be a lost generation for democracy - end of story.

[Red_Rob]

There's certainly no real path forward off this. The Supreme Court will be Republican until 2030-2040+, so there will be no oversight on voting restrictions for a generation. The 2020 census will be heavily Republican-controlled, so Republicans will almost certainly continue to hold the House until 2030. The Senate is harder to say, but holy shit does it not look good if this is a new coalition. Democrats are already simply too concentrated to translate their popularity into victory, and the game can and will be further rigged against them now that Republicans get to set the rules. This is going to be a lost generation for democracy - end of story.

So after the Roaring Nineties/Noughties we have hit our Great Depression and subsequent massive swing to the right? Historically after the 30's there was greater discrimination of minorities, loss of rights for homosexuals and women, along with the excesses of Mccarthyism that lasted until at least the 60's. Now, this was with a global war to help fuel nationalist fervor, but given Putin basically now has carte blanche to throw his weight around in Europe that might be on the table.

If things play out this way again I'd say 2030's/40's is a decent estimate to get back to the current level of social progressiveness being acceptable to push politically.

[PhoneLobster]

My take home is exactly the opposite. I don't think we can win the white working class because it does not matter what we say or do for them.

There is a good idea. Shit on and abandon everyone who voted for Trump (or didn't vote for you) as white racists.

Because here is the thing fucking bullshit it was white racists who won it for Trump. Oh they exist. It's a BIG thing, and without them he probably wouldn't have won, without them the entire Republican party would probably be an after thought.

But the Democrats fucking beat the shit out of the white racist voting block and elected a black president twice. You should remember that, it was fairly recent history.

The Democrats can and DO build coalitions of voters, INCLUDING parts of the the fucking white working class you elitist twat, that can and very recently HAVE defeated the white racist voting block.

The problem isn't just that Trump won the election with white racists, he also clearly brought in other voters and Hillary FAILED to bring in other voters.

And how did the democrats pull together a large coalition and defeat the republicans with Obama. OH THATS RIGHT he was the "outsider" candidate who wasn't Hillary or any similar widely hated "insider" representing everything that multiple voting blocks in the broader public hate about their own political system.

Civil society is broken. The norms of peaceful transitions of power and peaceful elections are fucking over.

You are sounding a lot like Trump when he was hedging for a loss by not so dog whistling for a violent revolution.

You know when you aren't sounding like someone desperately looking for anyone to blame other than yourself and the incompetent party establishment you bought into 110%.

Political realism time since Clinton fans were so keen to say that was THEIR domain. They knew Clinton would be hounded by political scandal beat ups. AND THEY CLEARLY HAD NO PLAN TO DEAL WITH THAT. They knew that the media is shallow, stupid and often even biased and corrupt. THEY HAD NO PLAN TO DEAL WITH THAT. They knew Hillary was unpopular. THEY HAD NO PLAN TO DEAL WITH THAT. They knew there was a big white racist voting block they will basically NEVER win again for at least a generation of kissing its ass and they needed to beat it by appealing to a sufficiently large number of other voters. THEY HAD NO PLAN FOR THAT. They have always known the realities of voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other structural obstacles they face, and they STILL have NO PLAN FOR THAT.

These are obstacles. These are not new obstacles. They are old familiar ones that have proven surmountable in the recent past and Hillary, the democratic party establishment and everyone who supported Hillary over alternatives fell flat on their fucking face at the first sign of ANY of those obstacles.

And these guys are the "experienced" politicians and aristocrats YOU trusted to win this for you. Oddly they failed. It's kind of like... maybe neoliberal centrist aristocrats are actually as bad at winning elections as they are at running governments.

A lame reality TV star beat your chosen super skilled career centrist political savior that you internet attacked dogged for like a chump. Not even a big star. Hell. I'm not even sure he was trying. I'm STILL not even sure he wasn't actually trying to fucking lose for at least part of it.

Trump certainly won. But the bigger story is that Hillary lost.

[Mechalich]

As much as I feel the gloom - and as an guy with a long-term dual-citizen girlfriend I have 'move to Canada' as a fucking serious life choice to think about - I'm not sure the long term outlook is quite that bleak.

Bush II tanked the country hard and faced a very real backlash, loosing hard in Congress in 2006. Republican policies don't actually work and Trumpism is even worse off in that regard. Insofar as Trump won on new or irregular voters who are not traditional Republicans - which represents a non-zero fraction of his base, those people may turn on him. Also the non-zero percentage of the voting public who voted for Trump not because they like him but because they firmly believe Clinton to be a criminal (or because she's a woman, let's not discount that bit) could easily abandon Trump if he engages in massive scandals and the democrats manage to nominate a lily-clean white dude.

The US political system is a lot less responsive than it should be, maybe an order of magnitude less responsive, but even if it takes a 10% level screw up to reduce support by 1% Trump is absolutely capable of achieving the 20-30% screw up necessary to flip this thing in four years or eight years. The key question is whether or not the country will functionally survive until then.

[DSMatticus]

If things play out this way again I'd say 2030's/40's is a decent estimate to get back to the current level of social progressiveness being acceptable to push politically.

Emphasis on "current level." 2030's/2040's is about the earliest we can wrest control of the Supreme Court away from the Trump bench, so it is the earliest we can begin reinstating the rights and protections eroded during his tenure and begin making up the ground we've lost. It could be much longer; I wouldn't count on the 2020 or 2024 elections being favorable to Democrats, and if they aren't, this shit gets way the fuck worse.

Insofar as Trump won on new or irregular voters who are not traditional Republicans - which represents a non-zero fraction of his base, those people may turn on him.

The problem is that there are no longer any checks on Republican election rigging. You have a bunch of Republican-controlled swing states and a Republican supreme court. The only limits are the Republican's own balls and the possibility of fucking revolution (HAH, YEAH RIGHT), because there is no arm of government that can stop them from doing whatever the fuck they want. Also: even if Trump is a one-term president (the best case scenario), he still almost certainly secures the Supreme Court for conservatives until sometime in the 2030's.

There's no gold lining here. We just have a Republican Supreme Court until sometime 2030, and as such the progressive agenda is on hold until then, because they won't let us do fuck all or jack shit.

You're expecting a level of restraint that I don't think you're going to find. Have you seen the last eight years under Obama? There is no pretense of reasonable governance here. The goal is to take over the country and go full plutocrat, any means necessary. They now have the means.

[maglag]

My take home is exactly the opposite. I don't think we can win the white working class because it does not matter what we say or do for them.

There is a good idea. Shit on and abandon everyone who voted for Trump (or didn't vote for you) as white racists.

Because here is the thing fucking bullshit it was white racists who won it for Trump. Oh they exist. It's a BIG thing, and without them he probably wouldn't have won, without them the entire Republican party would probably be an after thought.

But the Democrats fucking beat the shit out of the white racist voting block and elected a black president twice. You should remember that, it was fairly recent history.

The Democrats can and DO build coalitions of voters, INCLUDING parts of the the fucking white working class you elitist twat, that can and very recently HAVE defeated the white racist voting block.

The problem isn't just that Trump won the election with white racists, he also clearly brought in other voters and Hillary FAILED to bring in other voters.

And how did the democrats pull together a large coalition and defeat the republicans with Obama. OH THATS RIGHT he was the "outsider" candidate who wasn't Hillary or any similar widely hated "insider" representing everything that multiple voting blocks in the broader public hate about their own political system.

Indeed, after a black dude won two two elections in a row, putting the blame on the (shrinking) white racists is nothing short of delusional.

Trump certainly won. But the bigger story is that Hillary lost.

I would say the combination is greater than the sum of the parts. Hillary lost against a blond clown that indeed didn't seem to be even trying.

As much as I feel the gloom - and as an guy with a long-term dual-citizen girlfriend I have 'move to Canada' as a fucking serious life choice to think about - I'm not sure the long term outlook is quite that bleak.

Bush II tanked the country hard and faced a very real backlash, loosing hard in Congress in 2006. Republican policies don't actually work and Trumpism is even worse off in that regard. Insofar as Trump won on new or irregular voters who are not traditional Republicans - which represents a non-zero fraction of his base, those people may turn on him. Also the non-zero percentage of the voting public who voted for Trump not because they like him but because they firmly believe Clinton to be a criminal (or because she's a woman, let's not discount that bit) could easily abandon Trump if he engages in massive scandals and the democrats manage to nominate a lily-clean white dude.

The US political system is a lot less responsive than it should be, maybe an order of magnitude less responsive, but even if it takes a 10% level screw up to reduce support by 1% Trump is absolutely capable of achieving the 20-30% screw up necessary to flip this thing in four years or eight years. The key question is whether or not the country will functionally survive until then.

King Bush the Second got re-crowned after letting planes being high-jacked and used to explode two iconic buildings, followed by failing to catch the supposed mastermind despite having the most expensive army in the world. Or finding any weapons of mass destruction. He pretty much failed to keep any of his promises while thousands of his sujects died directly because of his incompetence.

I shudder to think just how bad Trump would need to fail to don't get re-elected.

[Prak]

Trump is pulling ahead...

I don't know what to say.

I think the appropriate words are "I am going outside to vomit from terror."

Actually, I believe the appropriate words are "I'm just going outside and may be some time"

My take home is exactly the opposite. I don't think we can win the white working class because it does not matter what we say or do for them.

There is a good idea. Shit on and abandon everyone who voted for Trump (or didn't vote for you) as white racists.

Well, it's better than what I want to do to those racist fucks...


Anyway, polls have been closed for roughly 4 hours. I don't know how vote counting is done, and have only a very basic idea of how the electoral college works. What's the chance that we find out Trump was a presumptuous fucker and actually lost in the next few days?

[Red_Rob]

I wouldn't get your hopes up.

After the Florida debacle I think the networks are pretty cagey about awarding it until it becomes clear. That was the BBC's take last night anyway on why so many states were reporting "too early to call" for quite a while.

[Stahlseele]

You could have had the nice grandpa.(Bernie Sanders)
And you instead made your choice between the frail and gossipy aunt and the racist uncle.
Well done america . .*slow clap*

[Ancient History]

Wonderful. I wake up to find that the candidate of white supremacy, misogyny, and xenophobia; a small-minded me-first asshole who talks big and acts like a petulant child, is the president-elect. Given a choice between voting for a woman that appealed to our better nature, and a man who represented our worst, we made the wrong choice. Because of that, the Republicans are going to keep pushing the same terrible ideology for at least a generation.