Final election predictions

[Adam54]

He'll be too busy implementing his ban on British trolls!

[Dalty]

He loves us - or maybe just our Northern golf courses.

Give me a hug you little Finnish muffin, you know I don't mean it!!!

[Adam54]

You know I can't ever really be mad at you, you English trifle pie you! <3

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I'm nowhere near as confident with this kind of prediction as I am with box office prediction, but I have a feeling it will be closer than a lot of people think. It wouldn't surprise me to see something like 279 to 259, and I think both candidates have a shot at having the higher number.

I continue to wonder if we'll be seeing any faithless electors. Things are pretty contentious. It could happen.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Speaking of things being contentious:

So far, only one fatal polling place shooting!

[Space Tycoon]

Only one?! C'mon America, you must be slipping.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

It wouldn't surprise me to see something like 279 to 259, and I think both candidates have a shot at having the higher number.

It's looking more and more like these numbers won't be that far off. Projections are also leaning Trump-ward at the moment, even with California factored in.

[Adam54]

I don't know anything about anything.

Dalty, you were right. Don't believe in Adam Skoglund

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

The popular vote's probably going to be pretty close.

[Adam54]

The Democratic Party should cease to exist after this. My God.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I imagine Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight will lose a considerable amount of face, too.

[Adam54]

They were the only ones who were saying "No. It's not a cakewalk. Tread lightly."

You know who actually got one thing consistently right?

Me. National polls do not mean shit. She's going to win the popular vote by 1-2% and it's not going to mean a thing.

[Dalty]

Holy fucking shit.

I did not expect to wake up to this. Honestly.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

They were the only ones who were saying "No. It's not a cakewalk. Tread lightly."

That's not really how it looked with this:

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/201 ... -forecast/

Or this:

Final Election Update: There’s A Wide Range Of Outcomes, And Most Of Them Come Up Clinton

* * *

I don't think many of us were contesting your assertion about national polls. Dalty came in a bit uninformed in that regard, maybe, but it's understandable when one considers that he's not a US citizen.

[Dalty]

AP just called it - Trump win.

[Dalty]

Bloomberg called the same.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Some on the left are looking for answers as to "what happened." I think a lot of what happened was this: the two major parties played chicken with poor candidates who, in many ways, highlighted the worst of their respective parties. It looks like the candidate with fewer direct ties to government (i.e., "everything that's wrong with this country," according to the layman [misled though this layman may be]) won out.

I'm not surprised that people are surprised, but I also don't think they should be surprised. A few pointed to Brexit early on as a cautionary tale, but I don't think many on the left ever committed fully to the possibility of a Trump presidency.

It still seems to me as though Sanders probably would have fared better against Trump in a national election. Sanders was a stronger, more consistent candidate with a less spotty record, and he was, despite being a third-party convert, arguably more aligned with the Democrats' purported ideals (outside of some gun control stuff, some lack of clarity on his Israel stance, and some late-to-the-party shuffling on foreign policy in general).

Clinton had tons of baggage going in, and her supporters (both behind the scenes and on the national level) downplayed a lot of this baggage and attempted to prop her up as a stronger candidate than she actually was. Some of the baggage she brought on herself, some of it was invented, and some of it we'll never know the truth about one way or another.

It seems wrong to place all blame with Trump voters, third-party voters, and/or left-leaning voters who didn't get out and vote. At least some of the blame should be placed with Clinton's having not been the strongest candidate the Democrats could have put forward. The baggage (earned or not) hurt her chances, as did her tendencies toward opportunistic platform shifting.

A Trump presidency may not be as drastic a thing as people on the left are making it out to be, just as a Clinton presidency wouldn't have been as drastic a thing as people on the right would likely have made it out to be. There's still a system of checks and balances at play, there are a bunch of Democrats and Republicans who absolutely loathe Trump and will probably seek to impeach him pretty quickly--thanks, most likely, to impending lawsuits--and Trump, himself, will likely not be long for the position once he realizes it's real work that requires tons of reading and infringed-upon free time the likes of which he's never known. (I've said before that Trump seems to want the title more than the actual job and that I could see him being the first president to outright quit. I still think this is a possibility.)

Some degree of dismantling will probably begin with both parties. They've both shifted too far right, and this shift is sustainable for neither of them.

As long as we're a country of hardcore capitalists by design, and as long as religion plays a significant, undivorced-from-policy role for a huge chunk of Americans within that capitalist framework, the same thing will probably keep happening to the two major parties. They'll dismantle/reboot every now and then, they'll become simultaneously more focused on their specific policies and more reasonable, and then they'll both slowly creep back to where they are now.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

You can probably rest assured, at least, that the wall will never happen. We can't afford it, we won't build it, and no one will build it for us. If the project is even started--and I highly doubt it will be--it will likely end up a huge humiliation for Trump. He'll tweet like a motherfucker about it, blaming outward all the while. (Note: you can probably rest assured, but only probably. The wall could still happen. And Russia could still bomb us, despite our having as president the person we've been led to believe Putin wanted as president. For all we know, that was some inspired trickery on Russia's part.)

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

In other big news, the Republicans have both the House and Senate. The Supreme Court is sure to follow.

[Dalty]

According to my Twitter feed and Facebook the world is now an awful and evil place and nobody can understand what has happened. The collective ejection of toys from prams is as it was after Brexit as their cosy echo chambers are smashed open.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Has anyone blamed the pot smokers, yet? Pot was a big deal this election cycle, and a lot of pot-focused sites were telling its readers that Trump was the best bet for broader pot legalization. (Johnson, of course, has actual ties to the pot industry, but the pot-focused sites were getting behind Trump as the Big Two candidate they believed would be the best choice for real policy change on a federal level.)

I've seen some black voters complaining that there were too few black voters turning up to vote. I've seen some people blaming a large number of Latinos in Florida for voting Trump. (I've also seen some people saying it's insulting that the Democrats take the black and Latino votes for granted.) I imagine there will be a lot of blaming over the course the next few days.

[Dalty]

Also not a great referendum on Obama's 8 years if Clinton was the continuation candidate.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Looks like Clinton may have won the popular vote. Looks like we're doing *this* again.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Unfortunately, if/when Trump steps down/is made to step down, the person who will step up will be Pence.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

A stronger running mate might have helped Clinton. I'm still a little perplexed by the choice they made on that front. It's almost like they went out of their way to find someone less charismatic than Clinton. Actually, that's probably exactly what they did.

I guess now we get to see if the right winds up actually liking the government it built.

One downside to this is that Clinton's failure may scare the left off of female presidential candidates for a while. It may not matter that another female candidate might have succeeded where Clinton failed. For many on the left, it will just look like women can't win presidential elections. The right, on the other hand, might give it a shot in the relatively near future.