Misconceptions

Let's clear up some misconceptions about the election.

First, this wasn't a great Republican victory.  Yes, the party may have won the election, but that was a byproduct of Trump winning it, and he's not a Republican no matter what label he was running under.  Trump shares few if any of the values the GOP has championed in the past thirty years - he's a sleazebag, not a religious conservative; he's a populist protectionist who wants to "renegotiate" or get rid of NAFTA, not a proponent of free trade; he's... well his foreign policy is dangerously incoherent, but he's pro-Putin and anti-NATO, instead of someone who wants to stand with our democratic allies.

At any rate, Trump won without the support of Republican bigwigs.  Former presidents couldn't bring themselves to vote for him - something you might want to pay better attention to next time, voters - and even House leader Ryan ended up cutting Trump lose and avoided even mentioning the candidate while campaigning for Congressional seats, because the man who is unfortunately our president-elect is absolutely toxic.  After Trump bombed the final debate, the GOP was in "check Hillary" mode, not "we're gonna win in a landside."

So the Republican win was a byproduct of Trump's win, when enough voters jumped ship from the Democrats, or independent moderates, or sane individuals, to gamble on a gibbering idiot because they felt he best represented a chance for change.  And to give that idiot the best chance of getting his policies through, they voted for the other people with little (R)s next to their name.  Which means that after eight years of obstructing the president and crippling Congress' ability to function, the GOP was rewarded for its behavior by voters who were tired of Congressional deadlock.  This country.

And let's not pretend this is the map flipping red, Fox News.  Trump lost the popular vote.  He only won the electoral vote thanks to razor-thin majorities in key states that are given artificial importance thanks to our stupid electoral system.  If we say Michigan or Florida or the like is now a red state because the Republicans barely won them, we should say the USA as a whole is a blue country because more people in it voted for Hillary.

Second, let's not pretend Trump is, despite all appearances, some sort of political genius for tapping into something nobody else saw.  Because while the pollsters may have made some extremely misleading assumptions about the loyalty of blue-collar workers in previously-Democratic states, and said workers were what gave Trump his win, they were not his target audience.

Yes, Trump made "you'll have so many jobs, you won't believe it" all part of his platform, but this was because he didn't have any other qualifications.  This is a candidate with absolutely zero political experience, who only joined his party right before the election he participated in.  The only argument Trump could make to show that he was even capable of running a country was claiming that his status as a yugely successful businessman  - but no, you can't look at his tax returns - meant he had the organizational skills and savvy to be president.  And only him, because all those other economic "experts" in Washington, they're all corrupt!  They passed NAFTA even though they knew it would suck jobs out of the country!  Only he has the patented negotiating skills to re-do NAFTA and take out the "export jobs" clause, or however it's supposed to work.  And that's what won over enough people to elect him, because - after the defeat of Bernie in the Democratic primaries - he was the candidate most paying attention to the blue collar worker's woes.

But no, these desperate uneducated workers are not the core of Trump's campaign.  Because he didn't get interested in politics after NAFTA was passed.  He didn't run for president to fix the economy after the Great Recession.  What started this sad tale is the election of President Obama, and Donald Trump simply could not believe or tolerate that.

So Trump started ranting about fake birth certificates and stolen elections, and other people who thought there was something wrong with the country if a black man could lead it took notice.  And when Trump barged onto the stage at the GOP primaries, bullying his rivals and frothing about what a terrible president Obama was, he won over some equally vocal supporters who felt that the other candidates were just too moderate for their alt-right tastes.  And these are the guys Trump spent his campaign pandering to, the people who feel threatened when their neighbors don't look like them, who feel like they've lost if minorities are making gains, who feel like the economic is rigged not to favor the rich but people of color, who will believe it when he talks about Mexican rapists infiltrating our country to steal our jobs or Muslim terrorists disguising themselves as refugees fleeing Syria, who are also nostalgic when Trump talks about police putting black protesters in the hospital. 

A lot of the people who voted for Trump don't like him, and are in fact alarmed when he talks like that.  But they voted for him anyway because they felt he had the best chance of changing the status quo and improving their condition, and were willing to gamble that our government's checks and balances could keep Trump from acting on all the hate and stupidity he was spewing on the campaign trail to placate his most fervent supporters.

For the sake of our country, let's hope that they're right.