Initial Election Thoughts

I was absolutely shocked and devastated by the election results on Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, but now it's clear that we all should have seen it coming. It was Brexit all over again--the same divisive, angry rhetoric on both sides, the same class and race dividing lines, and of course, the same result.

I've been reading a lot of pieces that try to explain it, try to make sense of what happened, why the pollsters got it wrong again, and what happens next. I don't claim to understand it all, and I'm sure there isn't one single, simple explanation. Class, race and education seem to play a huge part in the new alt-right populist politics.  The media tends to focus on the working class, uneducated voters who support Trump and have certain lower socio-economic indicators--even the "Make America Great Again" hat is a class marker--it's a so-called "trucker hat". For Brexit, we saw the same type of media portrayal--voters who lived near closed-down factories and industries, like Stoke or Wales for instance, where there was high unemployment, went for Leave. But in both cases, there was a gap between the media portrayal and the reality as shown in exit polling. The majority of Americans who earned less than $50,000 a year voted for Clinton, and many Brexit supporters were retirees living in rural areas and villages in detached homes--not exactly poor or working class.

Many people have noted that these two elections have exposed an undercurrent of racism and bigotry in society. In the aftermath of Brexit, there was a spike in hate crimes and in the days leading up to the U.S. election, I feared a repeat of that--no matter who won. There have already been stories circulating on social media about racist and anti-Semitic vandalism, harrassment, verbal abuse, sexual assault, and other forms of hate crimes.

I'm not quite ready to make peace with this new reality. I'm disappointed that Clinton won the popular vote and lost the electoral college--it's like 2000 Gore v. Bush all over again, but without the Supreme Court decision. I'm going to struggle explaining it to my students. I can't picture Inauguration Day, or a State of the Union address with Trump not just taking part, but playing the starring role. I never watched The Apprentice and I don't want to watch him on C-Span, either.