The election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States is a hugely consequential and, to my mind, hugely negative event. But I want to say a few things about how we interpret this election and particularly why we shouldn’t over interpret it.
Going into Tuesday many Democrats believed that the rapid growth of the non-white voting population – and the deep liberalism of millennials – made it increasingly difficult if not impossible for Republicans to win national elections if they continued to pursue a politics that had little traction beyond white people. That was one basis of the confidence that Donald Trump would have an extremely hard time beating Hillary Clinton. Clearly that was wrong.
For the last several months I’ve been planning next year at TPM. That involves a mix of editorial goals, how to deploy our resources, what new things to do and build, business strategies, hiring. It runs the gamut. One of my jobs here is to figure out how to match each of those things together so they all come off in an effective and durable way. While I knew the election could have a range of outcomes, I have mainly been making those plans on the basis of a very different set of assumptions about what 2017 would bring. Last night was as shocking as it was disappointing, together making for a shattering experience. But as I made my way through the day today, trying to catch bits of sleep I’d missed the night before, I started to think about what TPM’s role is, should be in this coming now suddenly very different year.
This is something that should get a lot of attention. The Trump campaign is apparently having lots of trouble finding first tier people to fill scores of national security jobs.
Here’s a new piece from The Daily Beast saying this continues ..
Team Trump is struggling to fill numerous key slots or even attract many candidates because hundreds have either sworn they’d never work in a Trump administration or have directly turned down requests to join, multiple current and former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the transition efforts told The Daily Beast
According to this report Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) and John Bolton are both under consideration for Secretary of State under Donald Trump. I think this is first of many of such choices we’re going to see. Corker is a knowledge, sensible, temperate person, albeit someone who I disagree with on most issues. Bolton is a wild far-right ideologue, basically the Michele Bachmann of the foreign policy world. That might understate who he is. We’re going to see many instances like this where Trump is choosing between reasonably qualified people and extremists. It will be a bumpy ride.
As I try to pore over the details and not just be shocked by the result, I’m struck by one thing about last night’s results. We know the national popular vote can diverge from the electoral college. It happened as recently as 2000. Last night it happened again. But what’s surprising is the degree of the divergence. It now looks like Trump will win the electoral college 306 to 232. That’s not final but that’s pretty sure to be the result. But he will likely lose the popular vote by as much as 1 to 2 percentage points – perhaps two or three times the size of Gore’s margin. (At the moment it’s only about 200,000+ votes. But it will certainly grow as lots of additional votes on the West Coast get counted.)
#BREAKING: Police respond to swastika painted on building in South Philly: https://t.co/RidblnTIlV pic.twitter.com/ljFbiqy5Xe
— PhillyVoice (@thephillyvoice) November 9, 2016
I know many of you came to TPM last night to see live election results. As many of you saw in real time, a short while after we started reporting results we had a major tech failure which required us to take down the scoreboard. We ended up not being able to fix it before the results were close to done. Obviously, by mid-evening this mortifying and very disappointing development was being overshadowed by the … let’s just say, shattering election results.
I take full responsibility. I’m sorry we let you down.
A bit after 3:30 am the three of us, the three remaining members of the editorial team in New York, closed up our New York office and headed home. As I was walking up 6th Avenue a man with an iPhone and a headset came up to me asking me, pointing at his iPhone, asking some question. I was bewildered enough by the events of the evening that I had a hard time making sense of anything. He was an immigrant from some African country, not a native English speaker and speaking broken but mainly understandable English.