There’s a cold hard fact that Republicans are going to have to deal with as Donald Trump assumes the office of president: he didn’t win the election — Hillary Clinton lost it. Trump seems to be proof positive that all the Republican party needed to win against a candidate as inept, unappealing and deeply flawed as Hillary Clinton was someone with a pulse, a few brain cells to rub together, and an (R) in the chyron after their name.
There were a series of moments along the campaign trail where it seemed that — if you paid attention to the now discredited polls — Hillary had probably clinched the nomination and may have turned some red states blue. But whether due to pressure exerted from the Sanders wing of the Democrat party or her own deeply held convictions, she just couldn’t hold her nose and say the words that might have made her president.
Provoking Second Amendment Supporters
One of the biggest pieces of political baggage that Hillary was dragging around was the Clinton legacy, and I’m not talking about the Foundation.
President Bill Clinton, together with a Democrat-controlled Congress, signed the first Federal Assault Weapon Ban into law in 1994…and promptly lost control of Congress to the Republicans. Conventional wisdom is that the “Republican Revolt” of 1994 was a direct result of the gun control measure. Gun owners haven’t forgotten, and have only gotten more ardent in their support for the Second Amendment and defense against a recent wave of anti-gun legislation in recent years.
All Hillary needed to do was to simply side-step the issue. Maybe pay a little lip service to “common sense gun reform,” but stay mum on actual proposals. That’s the approach that Barack Obama took in 2012. We all knew from his first term what his opinions on gun control were, but because he didn’t make that a campaign issue there was always the thought that “maybe he won’t be so bad” among the less fervent gun rights supporters.
He didn’t give the NRA much real ammunition to work against him, and didn’t say much that would inflame the passions of the average American gun owner. Over the last few years some in the predominantly pro-Dem news media have tried to re-write history and claim that angry gun owners didn’t have anything to do with that 1994 election. They downplayed the role that gun owners play in politics, writing off the NRA as nothing more than an industry lobby group instead of an organization of millions of motivated American voters.
During the Democrat primary campaign Hillary found herself in an unexpectedly tough race with Bernie Sanders. She needed to find a way to differentiate herself from Bernie’s harder left policies. One of her strategies: go anti-gun. The Senator from Vermont, she claimed, was “weak” on guns, being from a heavily pro-gun state, she said he had a track record of voting the “wrong way” on gun issues. Hillary saw this as an opening and went strong for increased gun control.
If she dropped the issue after the primaries, we might be talking about President-elect Hillary Clinton today But she doubled down in during the general. She used Trayvon Martin’s mother at the Democratic National Convention to illustrate why we need stricter gun control. She continued to harp on it even as late as November 2nd. But while that may have played well in the mainstream media and with the emotion-driven voters, it revealed Clinton’s true feeling about the Second Amendment. And enflamed gun owners.
The only reason to keep harping on that long-settled case was to try to convince Americans that concealed carry is dangerous, and that concealed carry holders are proto-murderers. That’s a message which resonates well with plenty of Dems, but Hillary’s professed belief in the Second Amendment didn’t give gun owners any comfort at all. Also not helping was Hillary’s claim that the Supreme Court’s Heller decision is wrong. Hillary laughably claimed that her entire reason for opposing Heller was that it put toddlers in danger.
Second Amendment supporters — as they’ve proved time and again — are a force to be reckoned with. If Hillary had the slightest respect for that track record, she could have side-stepped the issue as Obama did in 2008 and 2012. Instead, Hillary decided to grab that electoral third rail and make gun control one of the building blocks of her campaign. What Democrat analysts will have to ask themselves is whether the strategy sufficiently mobilized enough of their base to get out and vote in large enough numbers to offset the angry gun owners who opposed her in droves. Based on last night’s performance it seems the answer is no.
Guns weren’t the whole story
Of course, going anti-gun, was hardly the only factor that caused her campaign to plummet in flames. She was widely seen by the electorate as an elite and an insider in an election year that valued change and outsiders. She famously alienated working class voters. She divided the country by branding Republicans as her enemies and Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Given the chance to make the race about the issues, she consistently chose a different road.
And none of that even begins to address the electorate’s view of her as less than truthful, untrustworthy, and — after the FBI’s on-again-off-again investigations, above the law.
The result
Even with all of these factors holding her down, Hillary Clinton still almost won the election. The results in the key swing states were so close that if a single one of these issues had been avoided she may very well have sailed into the White House. But the accumulated weight of her accumulated baggage and many mis-steps ultimately brought her down.
For gun owners then, Donald Trump was the candidate of choice. In the estimation of most, as a candidate he didn’t measure up to either a Mitt Romney or a John McCain. He just happened to be up against a politician who couldn’t seem to get out of her own way.
It seems highly ignorant to me to claim that Trump didn’t win, Hillery lost. Certainly that played into it some, but also the anti-establishment nature of Trump had a lot to do with it. People are sick and tired of getting screwed no matter what party is in the White House and on the Hill, and Donald Trump was at least campaigning against the same old tired tricks of the dominant parties.
Seriously. Fucking ignorant. By default he WON the election. Still with the nonsense post election.
All this stuff is theory and personal opinion anyway.
My opinion is that if the Rs were running an “establishment” politician, that person would have lost to Hillary.
Nick’s opinion has more backing among those in the know, and that opinion was shared by me for most of the campaign season (“anybody other than Trump would be ahead in the polls by a mile” etc). But those in the know were wrong about everything this election cycle. The polls were totally wrong. I believe people came out in high numbers to vote against the system, against politics as usual, against the establishment. A vote for Trump did that. The numbers even make it look like Trump got a surprising portion of the Bernie voters (exit polling of voters showing that ~17% believe the government should be more liberal, yet 22% of those people voted for Trump).
IMHO he didn’t win because people were voting for Trump OR against Hillary, but against government as usual. Down with the establishment, down with politicians’ self-serving interests, down with corruption, up with transparency. Most of the country thinks the Gov is a broken mess and wants to go in a new direction. Trump represented that, Hillary represented the opposite of that. But I think the portion of the vote that put him over the top was voting for that new direction and against the establishment, not for Trump the person.
I saw an insightful tweet that sums this election up:
What if, instead of the GOP running the only candidate who couldn’t beat Hillary, the DNC ran the only candidate who couldn’t beat Trump?
Make no mistake, this wasn’t about anything but an incredibly unpopular, corrupt politician not getting access to the highest office of the land. Most people I know who finally voted Trump did so because they wanted to stop Hillary, not because they thought he was a great guy.
Guy, that “the only one who couldn’t beat” meme was just a cute bit of wishful thinking by the punditry. Wishful? Yes, almost every TV commentator and newspaper editorial writer had a preference for, and higher opinion of, one of the other candidates on the Republican side. This applies to commentators of both political stripes. It even applies to this blog, wherein the early support by RF, Taylor, and others was for Perry or Cruz. Since these same thought so little of (and knew so little about, in life) Trump, they cannot bear to admit that it was Trump who won, not Trump who merely was there as Clinton lost.
I agree with those who point to Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania…as evidence that unusual force of personality, Trump’s, was at work. I’m sure that was the case in Pennsylvania. Trump and Toomey won, but the Republican down ticket candidates got wiped. Voters split their ticket to go with Trump for President.
I’ll await the final numbers, but it looks as though Trump’s greater Latino vote in Florida (and even Black vote in PA) demonstrates a voter differentiation that transcends a mere “distrust of Hillary.”
It’s actually completely accurate because she took the popular vote…Make no mistake I’m glad for 2a but this is a very weak win in the long term
She only got the popular vote because of Commiefornia. He was ahead in that until that rainbow land of a state was counted. Plus, California want to secede now. I say let them, even though every time Texas Secession is brought up they call us traitors and so on. Secession is like a divorce, sometimes, you just can not get along. The US is so polarized it can not be fixed. The only answer is to split up.
Only reason she was even close in this election was due to voter fraud. Even with voter fraud, all the money of the elites, the support of countless celebrity clowns, the unified support and propaganda of the media, Hillary still couldn’t pull out a win.
Nick you didn’t even mention wikileaks, the primary reason she got rekt.
I tend to agree. The red and blue states are increasingly divergent and dissatisfied with attempts to impose a one size fits all solution from DC.
Over the long haul, I see three options:
1. Separation, voluntary and peaceful, into a half dozen or more nation states.
2. A reduced federal role with significant powers devolved to the states (my preference)
3. Violence by the left or the right (or both) straining against a federal government that they see as oppressive/unjust
Agree in principle, as always, the devil is in the details. Clearly the coastal cities and counties have a certain mind-set which is relatively uniform and completely different from the more rural areas of their states. Consider: New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and Northern Virginia are relatively similar in their unrelenting Democrat support, gun control support, tax-and-spend support etc. Upstate New York, Western Pennsylvania, Western Maryland and Western and Southern Virginia are solid red-state territory. They are hunting, fishing and outdoor supporters who simply want to live and let live with their fellow citizens. Their problems and concerns are simply not the same as big-city problems.
A similar situation can be found in Central and Southern California, Western Oregon and Western Washington states. They’re all solid Democrat areas. Eastern parts of the states, not so much.
We should simply re-draw state lines and – this is important – federal judicial districts as well to more accurately reflect the peoples’ actual inclinations and natural allegiances rather than let one part of a state try to dominate the rest of the state.
Google “US Political Map By County” to see the full picture.
The Nation is a sea of red with blue islands at every large metropolis. Even California, New York and Illinois have strong rural conservative populations. The big corrupt cities are the problem, they are full of entitlement leeches and perverts who are bringing the rest of us down. Any vote to split up should be by COUNTY, not state.
“Any vote to split up should be by COUNTY, not state.”
You need enough geographic upland to prevent a slave caste from working in one sovereign while being stuck living in a different one. At least unless the two are 100% sovereign, with separate currencies and zero respect for property and contract of the other.
She got the popular vote because of how many voted for Johnson. He got about 3 million more votes this election than he did in 2012. That tells me that many voters who were unsure of Trump swung their votes over to the Libertarians.
Maybe a weak win in the actual final vote tally, but what Trump did against what was projected for him was very strong. Hillary had double digit leads in many polls in the final weeks. He beat the spread quite nicely.
Hillary had double digit leads, and those polls were completely bogus.
They tried to flim-flam us into staying home. They failed.
Look at the final polls, all the swing states were within the margin of error of the polls. Also, the national polls at the end at hillary up by an average of 2.5%, probably what she’ll win by nationally.
A poll is a snapshot in time, not what it will be in a month. The polls tightened a lot, look at real clear politics and see the final polls, they were close and within the margin of error.
Only an inept fool believes any of those biased media polls! Ron Paul was winning in 2008 until the media started rigging the polls and eventually just stopped reporting on him. Trump won and Hil-LIAR-y lost, it’s that simple!
As far as secession of Commiefornia, I say let them, with the provision that none of those individuals or businesses that go with Commiefornia will be allowed to return to the US and that ALL commerce with them will be heavily taxed to make up for the massive debt they are responsible for. Hollyweird must be banned from ALL production within the remaining states, and any movies they want to show within our reformed borders will be heavily taxed! As a country/nation state they will implode in a very short time!
Weak win? You forget that the demtards have a MINIMUM of 5 points of fraudulent registrations in any precinct. Much more in many states. It is rigged.
Exactly. Until we fix our easily rigged voting system, we really can’t trust any result. It’s possible he crushed her and the numbers were manipulated to make it close. Who fing knows.
As Alinsky points out in the post above mine, the divide in this country really is urban vs rural. Big city life breeds dependence on government while rural life breed dependence on self and neighbors. In the big city I depend on the government to protect me (police), to get me around (public transportation) and to do a myriad of other things for me. In a rural setting, I’m my own protection, I get my self from point A to point B, if I need something done I do it or rely on my neighbor’s help to do it. Outside of government, in the big city I go buy all my food, whereas in rural areas I may grow and/or hunt part of my food. So in the city if things go south and the grocery store runs out of food, I depend on the government to feed me. In the rural area I would rely on me to feed me. A simplistic generalization of why cities vote for those who promise more government and rural areas vote for those who promise (but never deliver) less government
^this^
CNN projects Trump will win the popular vote (http://www.cnn.com/election/results – click the popular vote tab)
The uncounted vote is mainly from CA and liberal areas, hillary’s lead will grow but none of it even matters.
Trump barely got 1/3 of the vote in California. 2.5 million surplus votes for Hillary. 1.5 million surplus in NY state. 900,000 Massholes. 800,000 over trump in Illinois. Over 300,000 surplus votes in Washington state. She won the popular vote by less than 300,000. Hillary had huge leads in select urban islands. Trump lead everywhere else.
She got the popular vote because of dominating numbers in ONLY the bluest of blue states.
The truly sad part is that so many people know what a corrupt, lying, cheating sack of excrement she really is, yet voted for her anyway.
no. Hillary is the ONLY person Trump could ever beat in this election. this article is spot on. It’s Hillarys fault Trump won. As dismissive as that sounds, its true.
Totally incorrect. There is a thing called data analytics and Trump would have beat Obama in 2012.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/442059/dont-blame-clinton-trump-2016-wouldve-beaten-obama-2012
Trump won this election, he beat 16 primary challengers, the Cucks within his own party and the state run media.
The ignorance of the writers on this site is appalling, but then again they are mostly moderates or liberals.
It appears that Nick put his own spin on a article posted on Politico… check it out.
Read the new Ann Coulter book “In Trump We Trust”–Trump absolutely won the election & this book explains why–to win over this demon possessed sociopath with the full backing of evil, organized crime, voter fraud and backing of idiot celebrities was an amazing feat–gun owners, the common person, rural Americans & others were fed up with Washington–Trump NOT willing to be PC was his strong suit; he did not pander to press (which infuriated them) & said what he believed needed to be done to start to repair the U.S.A. before it was too far gone–the evil witch HellDog would have pushed us down the road to absolute destruction–now the ENTIRE Clinton klan needs to have all off the crap dumped on them that they have very well earned–let them rot
Politico? Would be Wikipedia if it has an legitimacy. How about using demundergroung next as a ref. of “Southern Poverty Law Center”. Politico snort/guffaw.
He revised that piece at national review, the numbers used were wrong. trump would have lost to obama based on the numbers.
But the whole thing is stupid anyway since it was never obama vs trump.
trump got less votes than Romney, less votes than mccain. Romney got 70,000 more votes than trump in Wisconsin.
Look at the vote totals for ’04, 08, 12 and 16. R votes tended to stay the same, Obama got 69 mil in ’08, 66 mil in ’12 and hillary this yr got around 60 mil
trump did not find new voters, the same people who voted for romney voted for trump. Hillary lost 6 mil obama voters from ’12 who didn’t vote.
So yeah, hillary lost by not turning out the obama voters.
Thank you for being a sea of reason amongst the crazy on here.
Those of you who keep screaming voter fraud….TRUMP WON. Do you think there is much value in the Dems ballot box stuffing in California??? The candidate you wanted WON and you still claim fraud despite massive evidence to the contrary. Grow up. You’re ignorance rivals that of the gun grabbers.
Voter fraud needs to be a capital crime. Just because Trump won does not make criminal activity attempting to steal the presidency all fine and dandy. That just promises that the criminal activity will be at a higher level next time. When its extreme enough to deliver a win, everyone involved will get away with it because the loser was handed the office, who is going to investigate? The time to stop it is when it did not work.
Voter fraud IS a serious crime…and it’s essentially a non-factor, and it’s bi-partisan. Voter fraud usually is some jackass thinking he can pull some nonsense, and then gets caught. There’s been ZERO proven widespread voter fraud in any modern election.
Right. No one has proven that the Clintons have been engaging in pay-to-play for 30 years, or that Hillary committed security crimes which approach treason, and on, and on, either, but we all know the truth.
So long as Dems refuse to require photo ID to vote, it is obvious they are anxious to retain their dead voter base.
I am thrilled that I do not have to listen to her voice for the next four years…her policies are even worse…I was talking to my foreman today about the election, he hunts; I shoot, collect, teach and train… he told me his reason for voting TRUMP is 2nd Amendment…LOVE IT!
Trump dared reach out to working class white people and tailor his message to them. That is why Hillary lost. In the end, she was a “woman” of the elite, and grievance mongering minorities, not the little guy.
“Trump dared reach out to working class white people”
Precisely. And no matter what the so-called “pundits” might think or say, I’m not sure that any other Republican could have done so and been so appealing to white working class men and women.
I recall a few years back someone was asking a Progressive something, and the Prog basically replied they didn’t need the middle-class working people vote anymore.
That surprised me as I always thought that was their core constituency.
Progressives, your chickens have come home to roost…
And as important, appealed to the fed up people that actually WORK (leaves out all those employed by gov’t, any not for profit/NGO types, lawyers, artsy/fartsy types etc). Those that PAY for the lifestyle of the takers.
It if had been virtually any other Republican, a lot of the voters that Trump got would have seen it as a choice between two brands of the same establishment and two slightly different paths toward the same abyss. Enough of them would have said “fuck it, whats the point?” and stayed home to give Hillary the election. Many might have written off the entire prospect of a political solution to the problems America faces and either resigned themselves to the inevitability of America’s decline or to the necessity of a much darker path of resistance.
He tailored to the working class period. Race had nothing to do with it.
You said “working class”. That’s racist hate speech. /snickers
Most might say he didn’t measure up to RINO bastards like McCain, but I wouldn’t.
I’d say McCain the Senator isn’t fit to shine Trump’s shoes, or mine for that matter.
Michael Moore said it best. The great horde of disenfranchised voters voted for Trump because he wasn’t one of their known enemies, and he threatened to upturn the whole festering apple cart known as the District of Criminals.
“There’s a cold hard fact that Republicans are going to have to deal with as Donald Trump assumes the office of president: he didn’t win the election — Hillary Clinton lost it.”
“For gun owners then, Donald Trump was the candidate of choice. In the estimation of most, as a candidate he didn’t measure up to either a Mitt Romney or a John McCain. He just happened to be up against a politician who couldn’t seem to get out of her own way.”
Nick, you’ve written the two biggest howlers I’ve come across since Trump was declared the winner. Stunning. You’ll find that Trump not only one the electoral majority, but that he won every state Romney did in 2012, and gained more votes than Obama in each of the key swing states, including Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina. In other words in a not-quite-apples-to-apples match up, Trump would have beat Obama in 2012.
As a candidate Trump made McCain look impotent and (though he backed Romney) gave a performance of pure guts in the 2016 race that showed Romney for what he was, a nice clean pretty boy afraid to admit that he was in an alley with a street-fighter (obama and team). Trump would have eaten Candy Crawley for breakfast if she’d tried to do to Trump what she did in the debate to Romney.
Most analysts are concluding that Trump gave the virtuoso political performance of the last 100 years. But you? No, you think he just got lucky. Absurd.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/442059/dont-blame-clinton-trump-2016-wouldve-beaten-obama-2012
McCain was one of the worst candidates in history — whether he was lazy, stupid , ignorant or all three, he didn’t contest the election against Obama. He gave it to Obama on a silver platter.
” You’ll find that Trump not only one the electoral majority, but that he won every state Romney did in 2012, and gained more votes than Obama in each of the key swing states, including Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina. In other words in a not-quite-apples-to-apples match up, Trump would have beat Obama in 2012.”
The conclusion is invalid: Obama was a well-liked candidate, while Hillary wasn’t trusted by nearly half of all Democrats, so using Trump’s votes versus Hillary gives no indication of how he would have done against Obama.
Recheck the story, it has been updated witha Mea Culpa. The data he used was wrong and admits obama would have beaten trump.
“In the estimation of most, as a candidate he didn’t measure up to either a Mitt Romney or a John McCain. . .”
You’ve got to be kidding, Leghorn. Both Romney and McCain are empty suits. in case you hadn’t noticed this campaign was dominated by an alt.conservative insurrection that is in the process of remaking the Republican Party. Neither Romney or McCain would have been chosen by the insurgency. Trump was.
Agreed, I was much more enthusiastic voting for Trump than Romney and McCain combined! They were both polished fake politicians that didn’t say much of anything but flashed a great smile and didn’t say anything wrong…
trump got fewer votes than mcccain and romney. What happened was obama got 66 mil votes in ’12, hillary got 60 mil in ’16. She didn’t get obama voters to show up. Check the numbers, trump won because he went against hillary, if the D nominee were Biden, he would have lost badly.
There was a time I respected McCain. That ended when he turned into the misshapen thing he is now. Palin was not the disease, she was just a symptom of selloutitis.
I want my bucket of liberal tears. Students protested and I smiled. The dems cried when Hillary gave her concession speech and I smiled. Most of all I smiled because we saw through the BS that was supposed to discourage us from voting. Not bad for a basket of deplorables.
The MSM TV drones attempting introspection about how they could have been SO wrong was just hilarious. That’s life in a reality distortion bubble.
The look on that face…..Priceless
I say, The look on that mugg… priceless.
Would be better if she was dressed in a orange jumpsuit!
I find it immensely amusing that the silly political pundits are already claiming that Trump won’t know the first thing about running the country… Since when did a bunch of alternate job class journalism and law majors know anything about running the country when they’re the ones that put us into the 20 trillion dollar mess in the first place? Trump will be a good injection of _real_ diversity into Washington DC, and we need _much_ more.
To be fair (and honest) the $20T mess we’re in started with Reagan. He started the new tradition of “double the National Debt” by the time you leave office. Mind you with Bonzo it was from $1T to $2T, but that was real money back then. Now people can’t even visualize the money involved, so when The Shrub did it, and Obozo did it from $10T to $20T it’s just an abstract to regular folks.
God help us all if Trump tries to take it from $20T to $40T. I have no idea if he will, but I’m afraid it’s time for the market to crash and the economy to take a dump again. Everything looks far worse than ’08, and we’ve been on an 8-year boom-bust cycle for the last quite a while. There was a small part of me that wanted 12 years of Dems to prove that they ain’t helpin’ none, but alas, there was too much important stuff to allow said luxury.
Liberals when chastising Reagan for the deficit (when all of a sudden they are concerned about it) keep leaving Congress out of the equation. Democrat controlled Congress kept sending him huge budgets that busted the bank, and Reagan even resorting to “shutting down the government” with vetoes in response. But if you keep getting crappy budgets, you either have to keep vetoing it and get negative press or accept some of it it in the end.
So no you can’t just blame Reagan, it’s like blaming Obama without chastising the Democrat controlled and then Republican controlled Congress.
I say this mainly to be polemical, but there is an idea being floated around that is based on the Austrian School of economics which posits that the idea of “intrinsic value” is false and that real value is subjective and fundamentally based on attitudes that are socially constructed. Put another way, what people define as “real” is real in it’s consequences. This is essentially what the idea of fiat money is based on. Therefore . . . why couldn’t we simply start issuing billion and trillion dollar coins? If fiat money is subjectively defined as real, then a trillion-dollar coin would be real. Just sayin’ . . .
Aside from the life-long deceit and corruption by her and her husband, she was a weak candidate and always has been. A “Being There” type candidate with no resume of her own to point to. What little there is, is bad.
Even when she moved to NY for the first time in her life, just weeks before the deadline for residency to be eligible for the Senate, it was the only place in the country where she could possibly win without pushing out another Dem. Even at that, she was only ahead by single digits early in the campaign when Rick Lazio self-imploded in the debate. Until then, many were giving him a good chance to win.
She has always been a weak political candidate.
Strongly agreed. She contributed a lot to her own loss. “Self-inflicted”.
1. The private server fiasco. Dereliction of duty to protect classified information; evasion of FOIA responsibilities;
2. Benghazi. Dereliction of duty – went to bed while fine Americans were dying without help; evasion of accountability, “What does it matter at this point?”
3. No Democrat can be trusted to honor anything in the Constitution, e.g., the Second Amendment, except as it serves them at a given moment. They are statists to the core.
Folks, just wise up and take the pledge:
“I will never ever again vote for any Democrat for any office, as long as I live.”
I have.
And,
4. Clinton Global Initiative/Foundation shenanegans. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
None of this diminishes what Trump pulled off. But it’s real.
She claims to have a vagina and thought that would be enough to get her elected.
It wasn’t. White women never bought into her bullsh!t.
RD, it really is that simple, isn’t it, provided you throw in the extra AA and Latino votes Trump managed to draw. The pollsters were so hard at work over-sampling to skew their results….that they missed it, blinded by their own hopes. If they’d just polled the women on my Mainline street, they would have had their eyes opened. If they understood the feelings of Florida Latinos in reaction to being swamped by Mexicans and Hondurans in recent years, that would also have helped them see the light. No?
Thank god, the creator, whomever… I’ve never been more afraid for the third branch, SCOTUS, in my adult life.
And, per the London Evening Standard (picked up from AP?), when it was time to do a hard thing (make a concession speech, which, if handled well, might have been her finest hour, she was locked in her hotel bedroom, too distraught to do it.
This is just not the stuff of which a President should be made. If that is chauvinistic, make the most of it.
God help, God help, God help our country if we ever need our President to make a crucial national survival decision — now — and she is locked in a room crying. Maggie Thatcher … Hillary is not.
You say “crying”, but from what I’ve seen of her, I doubt it. I would suspect, instead, an hours-long screaming fit, a tantrum, throwing things and calling people names. Possibly with drugs involved.
“A ‘Being There’ type candidate”
Insert slow clap here.
Well played. I’m certain that’s going to sail over most heads here.
Personally, I’ve always seen her as a politician that made Nixon look wholesome with little of his political acumen.
“Smart power”, my dying ass…
“Well played. I’m certain that’s going to sail over most heads here.”
If you like to watch, should I call Warren? 🙂
(There’s a local guy down here I saw on the police bookings page. His name? Chauncey Gardener. I sh!t you not. His birthday was right about when that movie came out…)
I am surprised by how relieved I am by the results of the election. I am not a fan of Trump. I didn’t vote for him (or anyone else), but I find myself feeling lighter and more positive. I believe this is because I have hope that the Supreme Court will potentially pro-gun for a long time to come and that could lead to major victories for the Second Amendment. Maybe. I have hope now.
I could not bring myself to vote for the lunatic or the liar. But I voted. And I encouraged everyone I talked to yesterday to go vote. Our votes matter from top to bottom. And the presidential election was only one of many contests last night.
I am also hopeful. The SCOTUS nomination will matter long after the president has come and gone.
To clarify, I didn’t vote for anyone for President, but I voted for the down ticket against the Democrats and against the various dumb ballot measures here in Washington.
Yes, in WA it doesn’t matter how you vote for president, solidly blue.
Unfortunately at the state level we got the wonderful new “please confiscate my guns” protection order law. Also, the 3.2 trillion dollar Sound Transit plan got passed – the one that won’t help traffic. OK, I think it was 58 billion, but it will feel like 3.2 trillion when you have to pay for it.
Also, I live in King county, but I didn’t get to vote against it. I live just outside the zone, but guess where all the businesses are that will be charging the new higher sales tax? Yeah, inside the 10% sales tax zone. So I get to help pay for trains and buses that I will never use. What a privilege.
CarlosT, you were so concerned about SCOTUS that you did not bother to cast a vote for the person who gets to decide who is on SCOTUS? Do you really think that makes some kind of sense?
You seem to be dismissing or ignoring the role Comey played in her loss.
Pervert Weiner’s laptop was a present dropped in our laps.
I’m inclined at this point to believe the initial ‘e-mailgate’ was Comey trying not to influence an election, but as the personal repercussions in his decision became apparent, he elected to indict her without actually indicting her.
Feeling the backlash of that move, he was compelled to at least acknowledge the Wiener discovery.
Not that I’m complaining, mind you.
We lucked out on multiple levels with the timing of the whole thing.
Interesting enough, two days ago Assange claimed Trump wasn’t going to be allowed to win the election.
He botched that prediction…
I agree with the sentiment of the article, but feel compelled to point out that she actually did win the popular vote. If you think she was condescending to the right wing, you should have the experience of being a Sanders supporter. If I had a dollar for every time someone on line told me to just get in line and stop being childish, I’d be out of debt.
I would have voted for Sanders, in spite him being pushed into gun control (and hoping it would be a secondary issue) because things like solving the college debt crisis weighed more on my scale – and we still have the 2nd and Heller. But nothing could make me vote for Hillary.
“she actually did win the popular vote”
So what?
I got a way to solve the college debt crisis:
Don’t go to college unless it’s a good investment. Higher education is not a fundamental right.
If someone feels compelled to spend the rest of their life paying off their propaganda-infused education in gender studies, then let them make that decision – but don’t make me pay for it. Otherwise, they can get a real degree.
Agree 100%! People these days treat college education like a human right or something. Heck, if you’re an idiot with zero work ethic a college education isn’t worth anything. In fact among my circle of friends I know more poor college grads than non-college grads…
Agreed. There’s something to be said for using public money to invest in helping highly talented individuals to realize their potential, since society can expect a return on their investment. However, let’s face it – being able to waste years of your life dabbling in something you have no aptitude for that is never going to lead to a paying career is a luxury of the rich, always has been. There is nothing morally righteous in convincing the poor to go deeply in to debt for the sole purpose of pretending to be rich.
The popular vote is skewed by California. There, 3.5m more people voted blue than red. That means, for the other 49 states, about 3.3m more people voted red than blue. That’s the entire reason that the system was set up the way that it was, so that one state (or region) could not sweep to outright power for eternity by frenzied breeding (or immigration!!).
Despite this, California gets 55 electoral college seats so still wields huge influence during elections, so consideration is made of their large population.
Both parties have experienced losing the presidency whilst winning the popular vote and it always leads to hand wringing and wailing after the fact.
No one forced those people to go to college. Just like no one forces them to buy a car or buy a house.
I agree, and commented above, but this reminded me of one thing. While I’m usually not for govt hand holding the one thing I think should be added is that some of these college loans are damn near criminal. They prey on young kids/adults to sign on the dotted line and NEVER list the estimated monthly payment once out of college. To get a car/home loan there’s all kinds of crap you need to sign stating you understand the repayment plan. No such thing to my knowledge in college, unless it’s changed in the last ~15 years…
Many, of not most, gun owners who voted for Donald Trump did it because he is a successful man of integrity who will make a good President. His support for the RKBA was frosting on the cake. Hillary’s anti-gun zeal was just poison. Guns, the 21st Century third rail of Americam politics.
I’ll bet bernie is looking good to the dems about now. If the folks in the liberal bay area couldn’t work up any love for hillary what did she expect in the heartland?
Trump won. Hillary lost. End of discussion.
Yeah, it’s highly disingenuous to discount the fact that Trump actually put together a winning coalition of voters. He deserves credit for this achievement. Anyone who’s read anything I’ve written here during this election knows I didn’t believe he couldn’t do it. I thought he was running a shambles of a campaign and was going to get wiped out.
What’s interesting to me is national results are within margin of error of polling, but what won the election for Trump is distribution. Clinton won a lot of votes in heavily blue states such as California, but you can only win those electoral votes once. In toss-up states, her support was lukewarm at best.
There’s going to be a lot of complaining about the electoral college. People are going to moan that it’s anti-democratic. Well, yes, exactly, that’s the idea. We’re a republic, and the intent is that the States elect the President, not the People. Here’s Article II, Section 2, Paragraph 2 of the US Constitution:
The terms “States” and “People” are used very advisedly in the Constitution. If the intent was for direct democracy in the election of Presidents, then it would be phrased that way.
The guy turned Blue states Red and broke the dem firewall. He won and Clinton aka Dick Cheney in a pants suit lost.
No person other than Trump could have won. Jeb? Kasich? Rubio? Carson? Not even the brash Christy would have stuck in the fight. You are wrong. Devine provenance.
Or, maybe devine providence? Just sayin’
Or maybe divine providence. Just saying.
BTW, I’ve been to Providence. It’s far from divine.
I’m pretty sure the guy who pills the weeds outta the fence is named Jesus – he’s the de-viner.
Divine providence is a different thing. Just sayin’…
It was probably as much what he didn’t say (in the last two weeks) as what she said, and likely a rejection of more one than the other…although that whole sentiment is more or less split.
Don’t fall asleep. Don’t make excuses. Watch. For those so inclined, pray. And listen.
Donnie won…end of story. I was planning on spending my entire SS check on guns/ammo for months if the hildebeast won. My wife LOL’ed…GOD and guns won.Amen!
Provoking gun owners was tactically stupid, I agree. But, she had to shore up her base, so it’s to be expected.
The rest of your analysis, I whole-heartedly disagree.
1. She did not dismissing working-class voters. She just did not connect with them. She is who she is. The stiff corporate type with a law degree. No matter what came out of her mouth, only boardroom types could relate to her. To everyone else, she might as well be the adults and teachers in the Peanuts cartoon. “Wah wah waaah…”
2. Jill Stein. Gary Johnson. No explanation is needed here.
3. She simply had way too fucking much baggage. Whether it’s White Water, Benghazi, Clinton Foundation or the goddamn emails.
4. Wazzerman Shulz, who sidelined Bernie… the candidate who had a better chance of appealing to more than just Democratic voters.
5. Her choice of running mate. Tim Caine who??
What the DNC did to Bernie was absolutely disgusting.
And undemocratic.
Yes, what the DNC did to Bernie was disgusting. However, I don’t give a sh!t about that 60s hippy bernout.
Besides, he was a so-called “Independent” before the primaries, then changed his affiliation to “Democrat” so he could run as one, and now he’s back to being an Independent again.
He’s as loyal to the party as he was to his country.
Yes, she dismissed white working class voters.
Democrats in various midwest states were yelling at her campaign to get up into Wisconsin and Michigan for weeks now – because the operations people on the ground were sensing that these states were not going to be the slam-dunk, union-driven shoe-ins that they’d been in the past for the DNC.
She ignored the state operatives in WI and MI – and she lost those states. Narrowly, but she lost them. Those states, coupled with OH, PA and FL, are what put Trump over the top. The Clinton campaign went into PA, but they failed to connect or even visit western PA.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign was all about vaginas, skin color and various sexual preference cohorts. That’s it. She blew off the white working voters who had been union working stiffs for decades, and now have no jobs. She was told by all the supposedly very smart Ivy League graduates on her payroll that those people didn’t matter.
Well, now she knows otherwise.
Trump most certainly won and he started by beating the crap out of the establishment Republicans in the primary. If he is co-opted by the establishment Republicans, there will be no Hearing Protection Act, no national reciprocity, no import ban repeals, nada. Just more of the same. We shall see.
Trump won. He won it outright. Clinton didn’t “lose” it for him. Trump wasn’t my first choice nor even my third but Clinton didn’t even come close to getting my vote. She’s corrupt as hell. Her whole family is. The nation saw that and the good folks voted for Trump. Californicatia’s “popular” vote and the rest of the west coast “popular” votes put the Butcher Bitch of Benghazi over on the popular side.
That’s why we have the electoral vote, to keep the major population pockets from telling the rest of the country how to run our friggin’ lives.
Damn!
This is exactly Nick’s point: By your own admission Trump was nobody’s first choice. We cast our vote for the Republican candidate (it really didn’t matter who it ended up being) just to keep HRC from winning. So Trump won in spite of himself.
Trump won. His coat tails help retain both the Senate and the house. It was much more than Clinton losing.. Just look at the map of the country showing all counties that went for Trump. It amazing. And yes she only wins the popular vote because of California and New York.
I second the idea of Commiefornia seceding and forming their own little socialist state. Maybe take Washington and Oregon too.
“His coat tails help retain both the Senate and the house.”
And let’s not forget that Republicans flipped three governorships and finally took over the last legislative body in the South that was held by the Democrats.
The Kentucky House was Democrat. Republicans now own a supermajority after crushing the Dems. It’s the first time the Kentucky House has gone Republican in 100 years.
This was a sea change.
Trump had no coattails. Most Republicans ran ahead of him. If anything guys like Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson pulled him to victory.
Fine, but the left coast can pay for their own damn fence to keep people in until they have been bled dry.
Are we suggesting that Trump’s pro-business stance on tax-reform, his national security policies, his views on immigration and trade had little to do with his win?
He was better than Hillary on all of these issues.
Hillary lost because her policies were garbage and Trump motivated Republicans in a way not seen since Reagan.
She didn’t lose because of her policy proposals, she lost because she didn’t talk about them — she just talked about how bad Trump was. Independents were wanting to hear what she stood for, but for the last several weeks all she had to talk about was Trump being terrible — so she got rejected big time by independents. She also got rejected by a lot of Democrats for the same reason — she wasn’t standing up FOR anything, just against Trump.
I have to agree. As of right now, in fact, I have no idea what she proposed in the way of policy. The few times she mentioned anything besides what a horrible person Trump was, she let us in on the fact that under her rule, life would be milk and honey for everyone who obeyed her, but never a hint about how she would accomplish this, other than everybody “paying their fair share”, while refusing to even hint at what that meant. And I am certain that the 50% currently paying nothing at all, would find their fair share was still zero. When somebody actually pressed her, which was very rare, her answer was that you could look it up on her website, convincing me that she had no idea what the answer was, somebody else had made up some lie for the website.
I am sure Obama is sorely disappointed, she was his best hope to rid himself of “the worst president in history” label. Now she is likely to compete for “worst candidate for president in history”.
I can see the argument that she lost rather than DJT winning and I’m not going to bother arguing about that.
There’s a few other things going on here.
First, anyone with two brain cells to rub together knew that HRC’s economic policy was batshit crazy. We already have the highest taxes in the developed world. So high it’s worth it for a big company to hire and pay the salaries of an entire department to try to avoid them as much as possible. It’s literally cheaper to hire 200 tax-avoidance specialists than to pay the tax. On top of that regulatory compliance is insanely expensive and it’s virtually impossible to comply with every reg because you can’t know them all (even the government admits it can’t count them all). Violations of any of them can put you out of business with massive fines. HRC wanted to expand on this business crushing and job killing overhead cost created nonsense.
Secondly, immigration was a huge issue in this election. Sorry, it’s not racist or xenophobic to say that people should obey the law or that we shouldn’t take in hundreds of thousands of people we can’t vet when we know they come from “the religion of peace” in an area that’s prone to creating terrorists that hate us. It’s a simple and logical statement to say that we shouldn’t take in people by the truckload when we have no idea who the fuck they are. On top of that, it’s not wrong to say that illegals are illegal. They didn’t come here legally so by definition they are illegal. The Lefties can have all the feelz they want. Those feelz don’t change facts.
Third, and related to #1; HRC’s promises of free shit for everyone simply couldn’t be done no matter what her proposed tax rates were but, again, anyone with two brain cells to rub together could do the arithmetic and see that even increases in taxes on the “rich” to 100% wouldn’t pay for her grandiose schemes. No matter how you cut it, to pay for what she wanted to do would necessitate a massive tax increase on the middle class. Add the ACA and inflation with stagnant wages and salaries into that and she’d be putting people making $60K+ a year into the poor house. No one gives a fuck about helping the homeless or getting medical insurance when paying for those things makes them homeless.
This wasn’t just HRC losing, it was a complete repudiation of Leftist ideas. People are sick of the redistribution of wealth nonsense, the constantly growing government, the increased lawlessness of that government and the SJW bullshit.
All the analyses of Clinton’s policy proposals showed her very nearly balancing the budget.
Please produce links to these “analyses”.
I’m quite sure that Hillary’s balanced budget means higher taxes for every living person and corporation that can pay them.
You can’t tax your way to prosperity.
Yea, and the “analysis” of Obama’s stimulus plan showed it creating far more jobs and economic growth than it actually did.
See, this is the thing about economics as a field of pursuit: it’s mostly now mathematical fraud.
I’m regularly struck by the vast difference in economics research and papers from 80 to 100+ years ago vs. what we see now. When I read papers that analyze “what happened?” in the Great Depression, or the discovery of business cycles in the 1920’s, I’m struck by how much common sense and actual discussion of human behavior there is in these older papers. They make sense, and they hold up over time. A classic paper is Irving Fisher’s paper on debt deflations and depressions; it still hangs together quite well as a discussion of the general trends of bubbles and busts in a debt-fueled economy.
Contrast that to today’s economic research, which loads up papers with terrific amounts of abstruse mathematics, much of which I can understand because of my EE background. Still, lurking under all of this supposed mathematical rigor are some assumptions that are clearly and plainly crazy. A great example were some of the theories about housing debt being so much more special than auto, credit card or other debt, and this was why mortgage paper was so much safer as an investment (AAA, in fact) than regular consumer debt. Ah, but that theory seemed to ignore the fact that several states are “non-recourse” loan states (eg, California), and once the homeowner turns over the keys to the house, they can literally just walk away from their mortgage. That doesn’t sound like a foundation on which AAA-rated paper is built to me.
So any “analysis” of anyone’s economic proposal is now, at the very least, suspect, if not full-on BS. The field of macroeconomics has discredited themselves so many times in the last 20 years, they should just shove a bone through their noses, put on a grass skirt and start making animal sacrifices to let people know just how credible they are.
And now the crying about the electoral college commences. What these people do not understand is that the electoral college forces candidates to campaign in locations other than the coasts and major population centers. You have to go to the middle of America where the rural = stupid people live and listen to them (that’s the condescending view the leftists have of flyover country). Plus, they also don’t understand that we are a nation comprised of states which make up a representative republic. You have to win states, to win the presidency, not the total popular vote. In a perfect world we wouldn’t even keep track of the popular vote because it doesn’t matter.
You’re right – the popular vote only ‘sorta’ matters on a state-by-state basis for determining the votes of the Electors.
The thing is, the electors can do what ever the hell they want. If tomorrow they decided you or I was suddenly a better choice for the nation, they could very easily vote us in.
In the foot-to-the-floor-nuts-to-the-wall world of what is really written and what it means, the popular vote is, at most generous, window dressing….
The electors most certainly cannot “do whatever they want”; they are bound by law to vote according to the results in their state in 29 states, and in all cases there are party sanctions against failing to do so.
Though the Constitution does not make this requirement, the Supreme Court has ruled that states can legitimately require electors to vote according to the state’s election results (interestingly, I think an elector who voted for the losing candidate where that candidate did get significant votes in the elector’s state would be acting legitimately, because voters in the state did indeed cast ballots for that candidate).
Holy Shi-ite are you misinformed. The worst an elector has ever faced is a misdemeanor and a few grand in fines for not doing as “the law says”. The Supremes have long ago said those laws are unconstitutional anyway….
Regardless, it’s only 29 states with those supposed laws on the books, and laws only apply after someone has “broken” them. Doesn’t make the vote any less valid.
“The thing is, the electors can do what ever the hell they want”
Ya think? Why don’t you tell us when the electors are actually going to do anything? Ever? Trump is busy firming up connections and forming a cabinet, Hillary has STFU, at least for the moment, and you believe we are waiting for the electoral college to make their decision? If some state decided to vote for Hillary after the state voters went for Trump, they would have a recount next week, during which time all those electors would have met mysterious ends, we have some new ones now.
“..In a perfect world we wouldn’t even keep track of the popular vote because it doesn’t matter.”
True. But people like me would still ask for that information. I find it interesting to see the percentage of voter turnout. For instance, there are about 219 million eligible voters in the US and so far there are only about 126 million votes cast. Clinton received 59 Million votes total, so yes she one the majority vote, but with 242 million adults in the Country, 219 million of them eligible to vote, that ‘majority’ is anything but.
Can’t put the Trump vitriol down for a moment, can you TTAG?
And frankly, I call bullshit. I have and continue to maintain that no other candidate could have prosecuted such an effective campaign against a hostile media, and that was the true enemy. The legacy media carried every ounce of water they could for her with wall-to-wall propaganda that quite literally ignored nearly every character deficit and minimized every crime she had committed. Their polling numbers were skewed so radically on a daily basis that NYT projected her chances to win at 95% the day of the election. Trump wasn’t running against Hillary. Trump was running against the leftist machine shielding her.
Now in the interest of fairness, he didn’t do it alone. Wikileaks, Assange and Snowden were so timely they almost deserve a pardon, but even they weren’t being given the time of day by the legacy media. The maturing alt-right media pushed back, but that audience already knew the Clintons were less than kosher. In fact, you can look back and see the crushing blow to Hillary’s campaign on the 7th came from states, populations and demographics she should have won. I firmly believe the deciding factor was Trump and his disinclination to be the legacy media’s punching bag. He answered charges aggressively and directly, and swung back. Yes, Hillary was an amazingly easy mark… But she was protected by a deeply entrenched media apparatus that was entirely beholden to her coronation.
But what probably irks me the most here is that the TTAG staff once again thinks they’re the smartest person in the room, as if they know something the electorate that absolute decimated Hillary doesn’t. Let’s look at the track record: You were wrong in the primaries. You were wrong throughout his campaign concerning his chances even though you’re authoring this story about how easy Hillary is today. Hell, TTAG even went with the Trump = Hitler analogy. And while you were his devastating defeat, I went on record her with the opposite. I mean, you can keep rolling with the wild speculation and flawed conclusions, but your track record concerning Trump fails so hard that there is little reason to even take the conclusions of this article seriously.
So I’m going to go on the record again. Trump crushed Hillary, but not because she was such an easy target. The Lesser of Two Evils doesn’t gather such a massive base of support that he would have actually beat Obama in 2012. No, really. Look that up.
You’re selling Trump short. Way short. Again
I contend that the hostile media was his greatest asset in this race. If the msm hadn’t been so over the top and obvious in their corrupt, shrill, and hate filled treatment of Trump I don’t know if he could have raised enough money to buy all the ‘underdog” publicity they gave the man for free.
One of our commentors pre- election here on ttag was always on about the lack of “ground game” Trump had. He didn’t need it. Not with the msm constantly putting him in the spot light.
I’ll cop to that.
Before this election, there has been nothing to suggest that mere media exposure was sufficient to get people out to the polls. Then again, there has never been a candidate like him before, who has come into the campaign with 100% name recognition and several entrenched brands.
I still think the lack of on the ground organization was a risk that could potentially have bitten him in the butt, had other factors not broken his way. A better opponent, for example, or better responses from her campaign to the various scandals, and things could have gotten tight in those battleground states. Organizations in those states that coordinated getting the vote out might be the difference in those situations.
I completely agree. Your observation highlights the other side of the same coin, IMO. The media couldn’t take their eyes off him. They wanted the fiery wreck. They wanted to wanted to bear witness to that moment so badly they gave him free air time. It’s almost a chicken-egg argument.– Trump made comments the media couldn’t ignore, expecting the inevitable crash/burn. It gave him more publicity, which allowed him to make more comments they couldn’t ignore. I think the big thing there was that he didn’t waste that air time. His message, comments and non-pc character resonated with a huge chunk of the populace (the ones that TTAG has written off as populist drones), but the media was so blind and arrogant that they still gave him air time.
To be honest, I was looking pretty hard at Ted Cruz in the primaries. I’m sure he would have made an excellent leader, but I didn’t see the qualities in him necessary to fend off his own hostile party, let alone what he would actually be facing against Hillary and her loyalist machine. To butcher a movie, Trump isn’t necessarily the president everybody wanted, but I think a lot of people in the country realized he was the one we needed at this moment in history.
Yes, Trump is the Batman/Dark Knight candidate. Remember to credit me if you use that 😛
I think TTAG and the NRA wanted hillary to win for the same reason. Without a crisis there’s no money to be made in the anti gun control business.
Well, they don’t need to disband just yet, there are several laws dating back to 1934 which need to be repealed before the “anti gun grab” party is over.
The media helped Trump win, indeed some analysis says the media gave him the election by spending so much time on every little criticism he came up with about Clinton to the point that no one was actually telling voters what the policy differences were.
Okay, TTAG. Take a week, get all this bovine excrement out of your system, and then we can get back to normal.
This election was only close because of the idiots who threw their votes away on Gary Johnson. Trump swept most of the rust belt. He won Wisconsin (which Ryan couldn’t deliver in 2012). He won Michigan (which Romney couldn’t deliver in 2012). He won Ohio, and it wasn’t close. He won Pennsylvania, for Pete’s sake.
Protip: it had next to nothing to do with guns, though Trump was certainly and consistently on the right side of that issue.
I suggested a couple of weeks ago that if one of the candidates were to offer Johnson a cabinet position it could have swung enough votes to guarantee a win.
But perhaps oddly, of the people I know who voted for Johnson (a dozen), none would have voted for Trump if Johnson hadn’t been a choice — in fact half had been Sanders supporters.
Johnson pulled consistently from both sides across the polls, and often more from Clinton than Trump.
There was a significant enthusiasm gap between the Republican and Democratic tickets, and I suspect there was much more defections from the latter than the former.
Go to the Fox News website and look at the county by county maps of each state. California is somewhat of an anomaly because the poison has seeped so far inland from the coast. But if you look at other states like NY, MI, NC, VA, IL, PA, even MD (!) etc. the pattern is obvious. Almost all heavily urbanized counties and counties with large state universities went for Clinton. Almost all other counties went for Trump. We have a demographic/political split of urban vs. everywhere else as intense as the old North-South split. We have two countries, and splitting this mess would be worse than the 1861 war. It is not only about guns. It is about everything. Compromise is not likely. We would be far better off as a country acknowledging this split, and radically cutting taxes at the Federal and state levels. Let counties and groups of counties tax themselves as they see fit, and within an overlay of national concealed carry rights and rights to travel, even allow them to regulate guns differently for only those who choose to live there. Over time, the big cities would become even more socialist, and the rest of the country more traditionally American. It would not be abandoning large numbers of gun enthusiasts in the big cities. There just are not a lot of them, and unfortunately they will have to move if they don’t like the situation. Those who are wealthy enough will have a country property in a free area, and they will keep their guns and probably a lot of their money stashed there. Maybe, just maybe, if people in places like NYC had to directly pay for their liberal causes, they would re-think their positions. Nothing like bankruptcy to shake the tree if it is allowed to go all the way.
She lost big…the biggest electoral defeat in 28 years. Donalds mouth and “skeletons” prevented a literal landslide. Lastly democrats vote democrat.
Trump won?
In the end, I don’t give a flaming rat’s patootie who “won” or who “lost”. There are two things I care about: 1) the Supreme Court, and 2) not having Clinton as President.
I have three Democrat friends who say they are relieved that Hillary lost, and hope she will shut up and go away now — even though they despise Trump.
I voted for Trump. Who the hell wants Bill Clinton back in the White House as the “First Man”? Trump won because he spoke his mind and wasn’t worried about political correctness. Good for him. Hilary lost because she’s stupid. Stupid enough to tell American public that she would continue Obamacare when the entire country is suffering because of it. I think people were smart enough to realize that we don’t need a lying two face criminal as President.
Actually the biggest reason people are suffering from the ACA is that it was a sell-out to the insurance companies, who have made deductibles so high that people whose premiums are being paid by the government can’t afford to use their insurance.
The irony in calling it “Obamacare” is that it was designed by Republicans — Obama stole it.
Fucktard, why do you think premiums are so high? Do you think it might have something to do with the fact that insurance companies can’t turn away people whose medical care is guaranteed to cost more than they could possibly pay in premiums? Could it be because Obamacare forces insurance companies to cover elective surgery like “gender reassignment”?
Go home commie, you’re drunk.
I don’t know how this meme that the GOP came up with Obamacare got started, but it’s nonsense on stilts.
There were two policy wonks who came up with most of the ACA:
1. Jonathan Gruber, economist from MIT.
2. Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, brother of Rahm “Tiny Dancer” Emanuel.
And your little dog too, Dorothy
Ok, Nick, you don’t like Trump, we get it. However, your delusions are completely out of hand. Hillary ran on the straight DNC establishment platform. Trump won on issues, Not popularity.
Grow up and admit that you were ready to hop onto the #nevertrump train just because he offended your delicate sensibilities by daring to be a conservative leaning centrist.
This, this, this, this, THIS.
Hillary ran the playbook. She was no more or less (well, more) corrupt than any other leftist political leech. Take Obama– A diehard radical socialist with little to no real world experience in anything except “community organizing” (political money laundering), campaigning without any sort of agenda beyond the nebulous promise of ‘Hope and Change’.
If the media had done its job and vetted him, he would have been shit-canned. But they didn’t. They shielded him for two terms as they tried to turn him into their black John F Kennedy, all while ignoring his failing foreign policy and ineffectual leadership. But somehow, Trump did what Romney and McCain could not.
If you believe TTAG, it’s because Hillary sucked so badly and that Trump is the less of two evils… Except for the fact that Trump would have beat Obama in his 2012 run when you compare the election outcomes state to state. So lets turn this around– If McCain and Romney were the settle-for candidates that depressed conservative turnout in the last two elections, what happened here?
Whatever happened, TTAG obviously doesn’t have a goddamn clue.
Nick – stick whatever you do. You’re a washout at political analysis.
+1000. Get this shit out of your system Nick. He won. Get over it. Take some Midol, insert a couple of tampons, and get back to normal TTAG articles.
Read this. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/09/hillary-clintons-campaign-was-crippled-by-voters-who-stayed-home/
trump got fewer votes than romney, what happened is 6 mil obama ’12 voters stayed home.
Orly? Because if you compare the elections side by side, Trump beats 2012 Obama in the electoral college and only misses the popular vote by a cool million. the article goes into the crucial details, but the long and short of it is that Trump spanks Obama with turnout in the states that mattered.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/442059/dont-blame-clinton-trump-2016-wouldve-beaten-obama-2012
I am okay with Hillary losing and trump not winning. For me this election was only about one thing. The surpreme court. Trump will be able to get one justice confirmed, no questions asked. There is a possibility that he may have a chance at more than one, I believe this is a remote possibility because the others are going to wait at least 2 years and the senate could change and he may not get who he wants. But none the less I would rather have trump picking this one guaranteed justice instead of Hillary.
The other thing we need to look at is if trump will run again. He is not a spring chicken and being president is hard on the young guys let alone the old ones. Trump has money, he proved that he could win, and I could see him finding himself a sweetheart deal and throwing the keys to pence in 4 years and saying “good luck I’m retired”
If the Democrats are smart they will go to Trump and tell him they will approve any nominee who is strong on the Second Amendment so long as that nominee fits the rest of their wish list.
Uh, *I* would approve that, as well!
Trump’s supreme court list has been public for sometime now.
Go on. Research it. You might be surprised.
1.. Keith Blackwell
2. Charles Canady
3. Steven Colloton
4. Allison Eid
5. Neil Gorsuch
6. Raymond Gruender
7. Thomas Hardiman
8. Raymond Kethledge
9. Joan Larsen
10. Mike Lee
11. Thomas Lee
12. Edward Mansfield
13. Federico Moreno
14. William Pryor
15. Margaret A. Ryan
16. Amul Thapar
17. Timothy Tymkovich
18. David Stras
19. Diane Sykes
20. Don Willett
21. Robert Young
I would rank gun control as tbe third most important reason for her defeat. The #1 reason that she lost is that she is a despicable person. Wikileaks shows that her closest advisors knew that she was. I believe one of her most intimate advisors, most likely Cheryl Mills, was behind tbe leak.
Tbe second most important reason for her losing was ACA. If you were poor or rich you were largely unaffected but it raped the middle class.
But everybody is reading their own prejudices into why she went down to defeat. It’s simple — black voters didn’t show up and without a high turnout and almost 100% support of the black community the Democrats cannot win a national election. Trump polled no better than McCain and worse than Romney yet he still won. Hillary lost because voters who came out for Obama stayed home. They stayed home because she is despicable. If someone like Scott Walker was the nominee she would have lost by 10 points.
Remarkable that you can imagine Walker could have won the contest. He was even attractive to the blue collar national audience. The clearest evidence that Trump won on the power of his personality (and clear policy goals) is Pennsylvania. At 3;00 am we were waiting for a winner, MI or PA. PA came through. But Trump (and Toomey) won PA despite the Rep party. We republicans lost all the down ballot races. In other words, and clearly, PA went for Trump because of Trump, not because he was a Republican.
Several other states had a similar experience.
Walker took on the full weight of the National Democratic Party machine and beat them three times in four years He turned a blue state red. Walker is a regular guy who relates very well to wotking stiffs. Trump ran well behind Ron Johnson. Trump carried Wisconsin because nlack voters didn’t show up in Milwaukee. Same goes for Pennslyvania and Michigan. A lot of black voters saw the Clinton was a phony and didn’t come out and vote for her. If they did then Firearms Concierge would be racking up the sales, Winning the next time requires that you understand why you won in the first place. Many black voters are naturally conservative. The Republican Party needs to start getting their votes instead of just hoping they stay home.
Calm down everyone, Mr. Leghorn also writes about “tactical” things while having no such background. Another hurrah for internet “journalism”.
This is like an expose story on PTSD, just another way to somehow say we still lost the war that we won handily.
Yeah, check the voting map red all over with a slight smattering of Blue herpes here and there, but nothing that can’t be cured.
The true win for President Donald Trump, is all the little turds running away, the media, hollywood, the evil (D), the coat tails liberal (R), the UN, globalists, global warming-ites, Merkle-smirks, the muslim sisterhood of the traveling pseudo-homosexuals in man dresses for satan, isis (or soon to be daesh-ed), enemies of the US, enemies of NATO, N. Korea, China. . .
You have an interesting definition of “cold hard fact.” Apparently it means “very subjective and debatable opinion.”
trump got less votes than Romney, less votes than mccain. Romney got 70,000 more votes than trump in Wisconsin. The cold fact is trump didn’t create a movement or get new voters, he actually got less than mccain and romney who were viewed to have run bad campaigns. What trump had was running against hillary, a very very bad candidate (regardless of how she stands on issues). She had a huge lead in ’08, crashed, huge lead here and had to work to beat Bernie and crashed in Nov.
Look at the vote totals for ’04, 08, 12 and 16. R votes tended to stay the same, Obama got 69 mil in ’08, 66 mil in ’12 and hillary this yr got around 60 mil
trump did not find new voters, the same people who voted for romney voted for trump. Hillary lost 6 mil obama voters from ’12 who didn’t vote.
So yeah, hillary lost by not turning out the obama voters.
I have to wonder if Dems go anti gun/anti 2A just because the Reps are typically pro gun/pro 2A and then there is that statistic whether wrong or right that only 1/3 of the US even own guns. Let’s see do I want to appeal to 1/3 of the population or 2/3’s? The other poser is how handily Obama won 2 elections spouting the same rhetoric as Hillary of course he was not running against The Donald.
Trump won because anti Harridans flocked out to vote against her, and pro Harridans did not flock out to vote for her
Trump won because the pro Harridans believed the polls that gave her a 92 percent chance of winning, and did not bother to add their vote for Her Inevitability.
the cockiness and arrogance of Democrats lost the election for the democrats
obama got 66 mil votes in ’12, hillary got 60 mil in ’16. trump got less votes than romney. So no one flocked to vote for trump, 6 mil obama voters didn’t show up to vote for hillary.
Scott Adams (Dilbert) has another explanation as to why Trump won:
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/152955248046/i-answer-your-questions-about-predicting-president
Utter bullshit, from the first sentence. Worst analysis ever.
Look at the vote totals, trump got fewer votes than romney and mccain. What happened was 6 mil obama voters didn’t show up to vote for hillary. Yeah, she lost it more than trump won.
You’re equally absurd. Too many ways to explain now, let this suffice: it is not possible the Jeb or Rubio, say, win PA, OH, MI, and WI. Not possible. Un-possible. Look at how awful the map was for Romney to get an idea of how totally screwed we were.
John McCain is a warmongering neocon that likes to give tax payer money to the military-industrial complex waste in useless shit. Glad he didn’t run this time.
“All Hillary needed to do was to simply side-step the issue. Maybe pay a little lip service to “common sense gun reform,” but stay mum on actual proposals. That’s the approach that Barack Obama took in 2012. ”
+100
I’m in the industry. I have followed politics, including gun politics for 30+ years.I remember 1994 and I remember Obama’s avoidance of the issue during his campaigns.
Looking at how close the voting results were, I came to the same conclusion that Nick does above. All she had to do was to follow Obama’s approach. Instead, she doubled down on “loopholes” and “manufacturer immunity.” Whatever support, if any, that approach “won” her was exponentially countered by strengthening her opposition.
It was a very stupid political move and it did lose her the election. All the other things (historic Clinton baggage, Libya, emails, speaking fees, Clinton Foundation, etc.) were certainly part of the total package of her loss, but all she had to do was not talk much about guns. It was the easiest relatively recent thing she could have done or not done and won.
This says it all to me: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/11/sneering-response-trumps-victory-reveals-exactly-won/
trump won because his opponent was hillary. trump got less votes than romney or mccain. Hillary got 6 million less than obama ’12 and 9 mi less than obama ’08, that’s why trump won. trump did not find new voters or create a movement, which is obvious since he got less than mccain and romney. He went against a very weak candidate who blew it in ’08 and blew it in ’16.
Trump sure found new voters during the primaries, as he got more votes than any candidate in history.
TTAG’s readership is pretty good on gun issues. Not so good on analyzing political elections.
There are much better analysis elsewhere.
Here’s one: http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/11/both_the_politicians_and_the_pundits_were_caught_o.html
You are wrong, Clinton did not win the election, Trump did. The “election” is not a measure of popular votes but of electoral votes, the way the Founders designed it.
I didn’t even bother reading past the first paragraph because your premise is wrong from the first sentence.
Boy, aren’t you just so superior, so wise? If you check, you’ll discover that you read that first sentence completely wrong, making the rest of your post seriously stupid. He did not say Hillary won.
Guns were a factor, certainly. A gun control platform has historically been a losing proposition, and that trend continued. It more helped mobilize those who were more voting against Hillary than for anyone else in particular.
Hillary was insulting and dismissive of the working class, which is her natural tendency.
She didn’t motivate her base, Millennials were giving her the side-eye, the black vote was a no-show, and there weren’t enough environmentalists, feminists, and latinos to make up the difference. I know of more than a few who hated Trump but simply abstained or voted third party, because she was just Too Corrupt.
Hillary tried to repeat the successful strategies of Barack and Bill, but she has neither the likeability nor the charisma or pure political talent to do what they pulled off, using the same formula.
She got enough votes in the liberal strongholds, taking Left Coast, Chicago, New York more than 2 to 1, to put her over in the popular vote, but literally everywhere else she was behind.
I am betting that a LOT of working white people are fed up with these riots breaking out where the liberal governments just let them riot and seeing their property destroyed and so forth, and then being themselves called racist, and also the Democratic party cozying up to crazy groups like Black Lives Matter that hate America and want cops to die. Working class white Democrats may disagree with working class white Republicans on certain things, but both are very patriotic and generally respect the police.
This article is not a bad start, but there’s more to the story. The media wholly underestimated Donald Trump and they didn’t even try to understand his political strategy. They dismissed him out of hand as just some billionaire blowhard in the same way that they did with Reagan who was, after all, just some actor who once starred in a movie with a monkey.
Additionally, I think Brexit played a role as well because it allowed the American people the opportunity to see how the British elites were treating their citizens – calling them racist, fascist xenophobes – and make the obvious connection with the political elites in this country. People could also easily see the parallels between the British leftist press and press in this country who both showed their utter contempt for the people who actually make both countries work – those deplorable working stiffs.
Ridiculous article. Hillary lost for far more reasons than simply “she doesn’t like guns”.
Wikileaks dude thats why and Trump did win.
If ANY other Repulican candidate would have replaced Trump, I am certain we would be talking about President-elect Clinton. Only Trump had the guts and sense to play the type of hardball necessary to knock Clinton off her high-horse AND backhand the media simultaneously. Other candidates would have been burned and buried by the media months ago and we would have be been hearing a concession speech before bedtime on Wenesday. Trump didn’t play by the rules that generally lead to Republican failure in Pesidential elections and I’m quite certain he watched in disgust over previous election cycles as one dud after another lined up for the anticipated November beat down. Trump actually learned about how not to lose by doing things his own way and not following the advice of previous losers. Yeah, he ruffled feathers in the Party, but he gave them a victory that will benefit them for years and simultaneously derailed the Clintons (something no Republican could do for almost 35 years). Imagine the results if that stupid video never surfaced …
Imo it’s the opposite, it was trump’s election to lose. Obama and Hillary fcuked up the country so bad, all trump needed to do was stick to the issues. The election was close only because trump couldn’t contain himself.
And guns certainly were an issue. But imo that’s second to issue of security and jobs.
You know, it’s one thing to read analysis of why an election was won or lost by someone who is reading data and results on websites or from various Secretaries of State.
It’s quite another thing to work an election as an election judge, and listen to people’s comments as they’re coming into a precinct to vote. I was an election judge on Tuesday. Not an election observer – a judge. That means I was one of the people who had to get up at 0500, be down to the precinct at 0600, finish setting up, then open the polls at 0700, and then stay there, in the voting place, until the ballots were counted there by our crew of judges, until the sheriff’s deputy came to transport the ballots under lock and seal back to the county election office. Then we could finally leave – just a bit before 2100.
Here’s what I saw:
We had a line of people 20 deep outside the doors at 0700. It isn’t unusual to have maybe a dozen people waiting to vote at 0700 – but in past years, they were all registered. The early birds are there to vote and get on with their day.
This time, we had an early indication that something was different – a quarter of the people there at 0700 were not registered. Most had never, ever voted before. There were about seven of them, ranging in age from 18 up to 50. We didn’t think much of it, got them registered (it is legal and accepted to register and vote in the same day in Wyoming, as long as you have government-issued photo ID and a utility bill or bank statement verifying your address) and out the door.
We saw a steady, heavy stream of voters all morning long. Unlike past years, our lunch hour (1200 to 1300 local time) was actually fairly slack.
Then about 1400, we started seeing a substantial and constant number of people coming in who needed to register. In our state, we get voter registration forms from the county election office in pads of 50 sheets at a clip. We’re usually supplied with two pads per precinct (we had two precincts in our polling location) supplied to us with all the election materials that were brought in that morning.
By 1430, we were seeing the supplied registration forms running out. We kept seeing lots of young people, and mid-40’s to 60+ year old people who hadn’t voted in 20+ years coming in to register and vote. We kept looking up the same addresses – trailer courts, lower-cost manufactured housing developments tucked up in a box canyon here or there with 50 houses crammed into 20 acres, that sort of thing.
I called down to the election office to have them bring over more registration forms. They sent down a runner – who gave us one pad (50 forms) for each precinct.
By 1600, I called down to the election office again and said “You don’t understand – we need at least 100+ more forms. We just absolutely need more forms. I have a line nearly out the door of people who want to vote, but need to register.”
The full-time election workers at the county office told me “No, YOU don’t understand. We’re seeing this all over the county. We’re worried we won’t have enough in the county. We’re rationing the pads of forms so all precincts have a chance. We’ll send over two more pads to each of your districts, and then that’s all you can have.”
Usually, we have a crush of people coming in at 1830, 30 minutes before the polls close. This time, it was nothing but unregistered voters. Everyone was out the door by 1910 – which is unusual. We’ve had people voting until 1930 in most prior years. The flow of people who were already registered just dropped to almost nothing by 1830.
When it was all over, we had about 550+ voters vote in each of the two precincts at our polling location, out of a total of 800+ voters who could have possibly voted in each precinct. That doesn’t sound like much, until you’ve actually run an election to make sure that all these voters are legit, voting in the right precinct, etc. At the end of the day, we had nearly 200 newly registered voters in each precinct in our location. A whole lot of people turned up to vote in this election – and just the presidential election. When I pulled the ballots out of the mark-sense counting machine, I saw dozens of ballots with only Trump/Pence marked, and the rest of the ballot was empty.
The most common comments I heard the newly registered/voting people saying (young and old) was that “Trump is going to be my middle finger.”
I doubt any other GOPer could have broken through the “blue wall” like Donald Trump did. Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania all fell to the dragon slayer.
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