This was an interesting series of articles which crunched the numbers and sort of confirmed what I sort of believed already re Trump’s win - he didn’t so much win as Hillary lost - and another Republican, with a higher favorability rating, especially among urban voters and Hispanics, would likely have won too and by a wider margin. Who knows for sure - Trump was such an unusual candidate I don’t know if it’s possible to concretely quantify how that unusualness factored in. You’re looking at the confluence of various conditions and events that cumulatively get you to something that is a bit of a fluke - Hillary lost an election that she should have won even though she should have lost it, which she did - that’s what this amounted to. The left was [and still is] in denial about how bad a president Obama had been, in denial about how weak a candidate Hillary was - therefore the democrats we’re heading for a loss regardless - and then the GOP threw them a lifeline by nominating Trump - and Hillary dropped it - which should have surprised no one since a majority of people in her own party didn't particularly like or trust her. By the end of the campaign her ‘trust’ polling was worse than Trump’s - you’ve got some major problems if you can’t out poll Trump on that. It’s really quite amazing.
My inclination is to believe that historical flukes like this tend to be quite impactful - and I guess we’re sitting around now waiting to find out if that impact is gonna be positive or negative. Already it seems that Trump will be willing to say and do things that no other candidate would even have dreamt of - I mean, questioning the ‘one China’ policy? Can you imagine anyone else coming out of the gate and doing something like that? And indeed simply his win, never mind how his administration plays out, has been quite impactful already - how badly the media is compromised by bias has been completely exposed - and exposed too, by its insane overreaction to Trump’s win, is just how far left the left has swung and how much the Democratic party is increasingly being controlled by unhinged from reality radical elements - that someone like Keith Ellison is even being considered for DNC chair, never mind probably being the frontrunner, is testament aplenty to that disquieting fact. Partisanship is already bad in America - given the near hysterical overreaction to Trump’s win by the left, it looks to get much worse - and if Trump’s presidency does indeed prove ‘bad’, which will encourage the wacko left even more and lead to the mainstreaming of just flat out insane ideas and rhetoric, then watch out in 2020 - the partisan divide could truly get ugly.
