NEW YORK — Supporters of Hillary Clinton were divided between despair and disbelief as they walked down the steps of the Democratic nominee’s election night event at Manhattan’s Jacob Javits Convention Center after midnight on Wednesday.
With Donald Trump on the brink of securing the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the presidency, Clinton’s backers appeared gobsmacked by the apparent historical upset. Many left in tears, tight-lipped and gripping onto the arms of relatives.
But others just weren’t ready to call the race yet.
“I still think she’s going to win because I think there’s been a lot of shenanigans,” Margot McMann, who came from Chicago with over a dozen family members to celebrate Clinton’s win, told TPM in the Javits Center lobby.
Pointing to the specter of voter fraud that Trump and his supporters raised time and again in recent months, McMann said that she had heard reports of missing votes and some electronic voting machines in states like Georgia automatically flipping Clinton votes to Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.
“There has to be a recount,” McMann declared, blinking away tears through plastic-rimmed glasses. “I absolutely think she’s going to win still. I don’t know how. I’m just being 100 percent optimistically hopeful because there’s too much on the line right now. We were already an oligarchy and now we’re a monarchy. And this freakin country voted him in.”
McMann’s son, Brendan, was less optimistic. Wearing a navy Chicago Cubs hat, he said he was maintaining the same doubtful outlook about the election that he did about his team winning the World Series—which it ultimately did.
“I was not hopeful about that and I’m not hopeful now because the odds are against us,” he said.
As of 1 a.m. on Wednesday, Clinton was staring down a very narrow path to victory, holding 215 electoral college votes to Trump’s 244. Networks were showing Trump leading in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, all states that the Democratic nominee needs to eke out a victory at this stage.
A middle-aged female Clinton volunteer who declined to give her name to TPM said she put too much into the race to leave the venue until the it was called.
“I worked very hard helping,” she said. “I took time off my work to help her with Hispanics in California, Nevada, Arizona on the ground, actually helping people to register to vote.”
As she spoke, dozens of other Clinton backers holding American flags and decked out in campaign paraphernalia streamed out of the venue. Their expressions were grim.
Others paced back and forth or huddled with relatives and friends in the corner, unprepared to accept defeat.
Brendan McMann said he thought a Trump win would have troubling effects both for his work in the non-profit sector, which is funded in part by the federal government, and for the country at large.
“I’m very pragmatic about this sort of stuff,” McMann said. “The president says a lot about who we are and what we believe in but I’m also very conscious of the real effects that a new executive branch has. The scope and size of the executive branch, it’s very discretionary.”
“It really throws my future into question,” he added. “What happens to the economy, what happens to federal government spending? I don’t know how that’s going to go.”
Can we admit now that we need a narrative, not just a list of policies, however enlightened they may be?
Don’t get me wrong. Profound institutional failures, in the media and the FBI and the Republican Party itself, led us to where we are.
But the Clinton campaign never acknowledged in a substantive way the populist nature of this election cycle. They played to not lose. Even in last night’s closing argument, Obama led with why Trump wasn’t fit to be president. The positive case for Clinton seemed tacked on.
Well, Republicans, you have it. You were willing to elect a child-raping, sociopathic, pathological liar and cheater to do it, but you’ve got it. You were willing to align yourselves with the most deplorable fascist, racist, sexist, and xenophobic neanderthals to make it happen, and it happened. You built an entire media empire to sell your lies and innuendos to a populace as “entertainment”, destroying the entire functional fourth estate in the process, and it worked. Congratulations.
Now let’s see it. We call your bluff. On the table, now: proposal to fix healthcare that works without having any negative effects for anyone anywhere; legislation to build a wall along the entire southern border along with the funding to build and maintain it; a program to deport 11 million residents of this country without disrupting the economy and sending us into a recession; “fix” trade imbalances with the rest of the world without raising the prices on the cheap shit we buy at Walmart or sending the dollar into an inflationary spiral leading to complete monetary collapse.
Any terrorist attack in the next two years? On your shoulders. Any setback in Syria? That’s you. Any mass shooting? You asked for it.
You have gone all out to win it, and you did it. Congratulations. You have the crown. And you have no excuses. You own the House. You own the Senate. You own the Presidency. You have successfully cheated your way to a free appointment to the Supreme Court (at least one) so that won’t be in your way either. It is all yours. No excuses.
Let’s see the “Republican Paradise” you have been promising.
If it isn’t here in two years, or clearly on its way, there will be hell to pay. This bill is coming due.
Whom will the blue collar workers blame when their jobs do not return?
The election is over. Trump won. The Breitbart conspiracy theorists and hate mongers won. We will soon have an alt-right extremist government in all branches. We now know that the majority of Americans do NOT learn. In a fact-free, conspiracy laden environment, they will ride their ideologies right over the cliff. The tragedy is that they will take all the rest of us with them.
I don’t know if Donald Trump is a psychopath, but his public persona certainly is. This outcome is an outright disaster - no matter what happens.
I have never understood the logic of Hillary as our candidate - in a change election - she represented continuity. Now, it looks like the entire federal govenment is being handed over to the Republicans. This is a massive disaster.
Hillary’s nomination was secured by her domination of the southern states in the primary process. How many of those states voted for Hillary? Was that predictable?
There were absolutely no reliable Democrats that would not have voted for Sanders and he would have attracted tons of change voters from the Midwest and Pennsylvania. Hillary’s nomination offered people who want change nothing.
To understand the motives behind the electorate, look at a graph of median hourly wage since 1972 - it is flat - vs GNP since 1972. I call that a crocodile jaws graph. The median worker has become ever more productive but has been awarded with nothing for that. When the great recession hit, Wall Street was restored, whom Hillary is tainted with, Main Street was left flat.
Obama created 10 million jobs but he also allowed in 10 million LEGAL (not illegal) immigrants - many of whom need jobs (During the Great Depression immigration was nil) and push down wages and make relative opportunity scarcer. The life style of the rust belt never recovered. The cake was baked in early 2009 when Obama did not press for a BIG STIMULUS when it was fairly clear that he was only going to take one bite of the apple. The small stimulus stopped the decline but did not fix main street. The public gave Obama a second term but, he was running against a big money type establishment Republican and so they gave him more time to see how his policies would work. The rust belt has given up waiting.
If Trump pushes for a big infrastructure bill to “make america great again” the economy will finally recover from the Great Recession and he’ll be out of control. This is exactly what happened in Germany during the 1930s. He implemented massive armaments work which put Germans back to work and secured his position. There’s no way that a Trump presidency works out well for the country of the world over all.
Now we are looking at a President totally unfit for office. God help the world. This is what things must have been like in fifth century Roman empire.