From a longtime cherished reader …
Now we get to test if the press is really free and if American institutions are truly robust. I’m starting to organize today to put in my bit to help retake the House or the Senate in two years. I am going to finally get my US citizenship as an act of defiance and resistance. I have refused to get it so far – I have lived here 20 years. I have even entertained leaving. But no. I do not have the luxury of bailing out, or of despairing. My kid is growing up here. This is where I live. These are my friends. I care about my community. So I will become a US citizen.
Hillary Clinton has conceded the presidential race to Donald Trump.
CNN has just reported that Clinton called Trump a short while ago.
A very telling, interesting conversation right now on CNN between Corey Lewandowski, Jeffrey Lord, Van Jones and David Axelrod. I think it’s a close call whether or not Clinton should concede tonight. It’s very hard to see any viable path to victory. That said, it’s hardly unprecedented for this to happen. It happened just a dozen years ago, in 2004 – the last time we had a really close election, one that went super late into the night. It was pretty clear that John Kerry had lost in the early morning the day after the election. But he waited until the morning to concede. But here you have Lewandowski railing against Clinton for not conceding immediately while Axelrod says in so many words to him and to Trump: You won. Start acting like it. Don’t relive every slight and anger from the election. What’s worrisome about Trump, in addition to his being Trump, is that he’s got very, very few steadying people around him. That’s very worrisome.
Let’s accept what looks very likely: Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States. This doesn’t just change key policy choices like taxes, Obamacare, environment and climate policy. Those would be a bummer. This is quite a bit more. I really wish all the talk about Trump being temperamentally unfit to be president was just talk. It wasn’t. This is not someone who has the steadiness, knowledge, emotional maturity to be president. The markets are clearly figuring this in. But a big part of what they’re figuring in is dramatic changes in global trade policy.
This is a chart of the betting markets over the last 24 hours. It looks painfully like the betting markets did over the course of the UK’s EU referendum.
In my previous post I noted Nate Cohn’s comments about about non-college educated whites voting as a minority. There’s an article Nate wrote back in June which I think is very prescient. There are two issues in the article – one is a technical discussion about voting demographics. Are the exit polls which we take as gospel really accurate? There’s a good reason to think they make the electorate look less white and younger than it actually is. Not dramatically so – but significantly.
Thinking over this very stunning and bleak night, the best summation I’ve seen is from Nate Cohn of the Times who said this: “How to think about this election: white working class voters just decided to vote like a minority group. They’re >40% of the electorate.” ‘Like a minority’ might strike some people as a bit off. But I know what he means. And I think he’s right: non-college educated whites thinking of themselves as cut off from the centers of power and needing to vote as a group to secure its political and social interests.
10:44 PM: If you’re looking for something to hold on to, the Detroit Free Press called Michigan for Clinton and is so far sticking with that call. I don’t know any other number crunchers who see it that way. That doesn’t mean they don’t think she can win. But there’s a big difference between thinking something is possible and that it’s all but assured. So much has been upended tonight who knows what to think.
10:31 PM: One of the most surreal things about this election night is the betting markets. The rapid whipsaw against expectations is looks very similar to what betting markets did during the Brexit election in the UK.
10:19 PM: Just so we’re all clear on this, Florida isn’t the issue or Ohio or even North Carolina. It’s in the Great Lakes states. Michigan and Wisconsin are where this is at. And it looks pretty challenging.
10:08 PM: One thing to keep in mind is that I think that if Trump wins, there’s still a good chance that Clinton will win the popular vote. In fact, I think I’d say that even it’s more likely than not that if Trump wins, Clinton will win the popular vote. He only has a very slight lead in the national popular vote. And she’ll get a ton of votes in the West. Obviously, the national popular vote doesn’t matter. But I don’t think it’s ever good for the country when the electoral college and the popular vote go different ways.
10:06 PM: I think this is very on the mark.
How to think about this election: white working class voters just decided to vote like a minority group. They’re >40% of the electorate.
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 9, 2016
9:56 PM: We didn’t expect Virginia to be close. It was really close. It now looks like the Northern Virginia is coming in for Clinton. That will probably come together for Clinton. Probably. The real issue is Michigan and perhaps Wisconsin.
9:36 PM: I mentioned earlier that we’ve clearly had a pretty substantial polling failure. One thought occurs to me. One of the most oft-repeated stories in the history of polling was one of FDR’s races – I think 1936. The polls of the day completely got it wrong. If I recall the reason was that the pollsters didn’t figure in that a lot of poorer voters didn’t have phones. So phone polls had a very Republican skewed sample of voters. Now, that seems obvious. But it hadn’t shown up in the few earlier elections that had been polled because they hadn’t been as clearly polarized by class. In other words, you had a way of predicting elections that seemed to work. But it was based on a certain kind of political configuration, a certain social basis for divisions between the parties. That system worked in the pre-New Deal politics. But it failed miserably in the different politics of the New Deal. And it only became clear that the old model was based on a certain kind of politics when it failed. We need some explanation for why this result is so different from what was expected.
9:30 PM: In case you’re having a difficulty putting all these moving pieces together, this is now extremely close nationwide. Trump is running strong in many blue states. He could definitely win the presidency. I’m not saying that’s going to happen. But he’s competing in a lot of places that Clinton needs to win.
9:24 PM: We’ve had many conversations about polling failures. It seems like we’ve definitely had one here. We had lots of reporting about a big Latino vote surge. It’s still not clear what happened there. I’m not sure that reporting was incorrect. It may simply have been matched and overcome by a surge of conservative white voters. But a lot of polls and a lot ‘models’ were significantly off. There’s no getting around that.
9:14 PM: I haven’t been doing much blogging here because I’m mainly looking at the map and trying to see what’s happening. It is definitely not what we expected. Trump is outperforming recent Republican candidates in rural America. And it’s putting him ahead or close in a lot of states. For the moment he’s ahead in Virginia. You always have Northern Virginia reporting late. But Virginia shouldn’t be with Trump in a lead with this much of the vote reporting.
9:05 PM: There are a lot of states that we thought Clinton would take early that Trump is running really close.
8:53 PM: We don’t know how this will play out. But the big story right now in Florida is that Trump is really outperforming Romney in the Republican counties.
8:51 PM: This could go really long in Florida.