Posts Tagged ‘Jill Stein’

LinkSwarm for December 2, 2016

Friday, December 2nd, 2016

Welcome to the last month of the year! (Insert standard “where has the time gone” lament here.)

Enjoy the traditional Friday LinkSwarm:

  • Kevin D. Williamson brings the wood:

    The Democratic party is an odd apparatus in which most of the power is held by sanctimonious little old liberal white ladies with graduate degrees and very high incomes — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Randi Weingarten — while the manpower, the vote-power, and the money-power (often in the form of union dues) comes from a disproportionately young and non-white base made up of people who, if they are doing well, might earn one-tenth of the half-million dollars a year Weingarten was paid as the boss of the teachers’ union. They are more likely to be cutting the grass in front of Elizabeth Warren’s multi-million-dollar mansion than moving into one of their own. They roll their eyes at Hillary Rodham Clinton’s risible “abuela” act, having actual abuelas of their own.

    As in the Republican party, the Democrats have a restive base that is more radical than its leadership, more aggressive, and in search of signs of tribal affiliation. The Democratic base is not made up of little old liberal white ladies with seven-, eight-, and nine-figure bank balances, but the party’s leadership is.

  • Alan Derschowitz is not a fan of Rep. Keith Ellison’s DNC Chairman bid:

    What should a political party that has just lost its white working-class, blue-collar base to a “make America great again” nationalist do to try to regain these voters? Why not appoint as the new head of the party a radical left-wing ideologue who has a long history of supporting an anti-American, anti-white, anti-Semitic Nation of Islam racist? Such an appointment will surely bring back rust-belt voters who have lost their jobs to globalization and free trade! Is this really the thinking of those Democratic leaders who are pushing for Keith Ellison to head the Democratic National Committee?

    Keith Ellison is, by all accounts, a decent guy, who is well liked by his congressional colleagues. But it is hard to imagine a worse candidate to take over the DNC at this time. Ellison represents the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party, just when the party — if it is to win again — must move to the center in order to bring back the voters it lost to Trump. The Democrats didn’t lose because their candidates weren’t left enough. They won the votes of liberals. The radical voters they lost to Jill Stein were small in number and are not likely to be influenced by the appointment of Ellison. The centrist voters they lost to Trump will only be further alienated by the appointment of a left-wing ideologue, who seems to care more about global issues than jobs in Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan. Ellison’s selection certainly wouldn’t help among Jewish voters in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania or pro-Israel Christian voters around the country.

    Also, Derschowitz is not buying the “friend of Israel” blather put forth by Ellison defenders:

    Ellison’s voting record also does not support his claim that he has become a “friend” of Israel. He was one of only 8 Congressmen who voted against funding the Iron Dome program, developed jointly by the U.S. and Israel, which helps protect Israeli civilians from Hamas rockets. In 2009, Ellison was one of only two dozen Congressmen to vote “present” rather than vote for a non-binding resolution “recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from, reaffirming the United States’ strong support for Israel, and supporting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.” And in 2010, Ellison co‐authored a letter to President Obama, calling on him to pressure Israel into opening the border with Gaza. The letter describes the blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip as “de facto collective punishment of the Palestinian residents.”

  • Five Thirty Eight asserts that education levels one of the primary determinants of which counties voted for Trump.
  • More electorate analysis: “This is a case where the simplest explanation is the correct one: Donald Trump won because he did exceptionally (indeed, historically) well with the white working class, a bloc that until 2016 was resistant north of the Mason-Dixon line to voting Republican en masse.”
  • Fidel Castro’s murders by the numbers. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Could Marine Le Pen be the leftmost candidate in France’s presidential election?
  • Your government in action: health inspectors deny the homeless a free BBQ meal.
  • Rotherham, post-truth and the “alt-right”:

    Some on the left in the West see certain ideas and even some easily verifiable truths, as plain dangerous, much like the totalitarian communists of yesteryear. Dangerous to public order. Dangerous to the ‘common good’.

    Whilst this section of the left has always existed, it now seems to have become more ‘mainstream’. It seethes and obsesses within carefully-policed ideological echo-chambers. It dominates in universities, trade unions and the public sector. And whereas it was once mainly prevalent in fringe far-left outfits, it has now effectively co-opted the Labour party through its membership and leadership.

    Anyone who has ever tried to engage with this section of the left will know that it doesn’t ‘do debate’ with conservatives on issues like immigration, multiculturalism and identity politics. For it, “the debate is settled”. Opposing views are intrinsically wicked. Such ideas are to be ignored. Muted. Blocked. Banned. Disrupted. Drowned out with fog-horns.

    It does not feel it needs to win the argument nor does it see any reason to engage in one. Where it can apply ‘No Platform’ or ‘Safe Space’ schemes to stymie debate, it will do so assiduously. Where it can’t, it’s adept at innovating campaigns such as #StopFundingHate to help promote the censorship it craves.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Still more on How Trump got elected:

    The privileged worked hard for Trump. Every time they described his people as uneducated white males, implicit dregs, they drove votes to Donald. And they so described the working class unceasingly.

    It made him President. Good, bad, or indifferent, it is how he got in.

    The privileged denigrated all whites unlike themselves. Then Hillary made her “deplorables” speech, confirming her contempt for half of America–those uneducated, shapeless, dull-witted proles in Flyover Land, obese, farting and belching, swilling Bud, watching NASCAR for god’s sake in awful trailers. And why not not sneer at them? Why did Hillary need their votes? Did not Rachel Maddow love her?

    For Trump it was gold, pure gold. If he had written her speech, he could not have come up with a better line to destroy her. It was the purest product of the establishment’s hubris. She did it to herself. Sweet.

    It made him President.

    Black Lives Matter also did yeoman work for the Donald. As they and snowflake Brown Shirts and excited millennials blocked highways and beat Trump’s supporters and shut down rallies, and vandalized cars, and of course looted, they presumably thought they were working against the Trump Monster. Not a chance. Out there in the uncharted barbarian lands between Manhattan and Hollywood, in dark primeval forests where Cro-Magnons are still a rarity, people were sick of lawlessness, and of an establishment that tolerated it. It produced more votes, perhaps not for Trump or even against Hillary but against the class that she represented.

    Immigration. Here Hillary and Obama did great work for Donald. As Obama frantically brought in as many “refugees” as possible from everywhere, anywhere that might not be compatible with the people upon whom he would force them, Hillary promised to import huge numbers of Muslims. It was luminously stupid politics, but politically she was luminously stupid, so it fit.

    It is why she is not President.

    She knew that the backward peoples of Flyover Land ought to want hundreds of thousands of Somalis and Pakistanis and who-knew-what to live with, and if they didn’t, she would force them and it didn’t matter because she had big donors and everybody in the media loved her.

    However incoherent and ignorant Trump was, the Establishment was determined to elect him. Elect him it did.

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • The end of identity politics? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • You know those sacred medicare funds? Obama has raided them to help take care of illegal aliens.
  • Germany’s security agency infiltrated by a jihadist. (Hat tip: Ace.)
  • The pension fund for Dallas policeman and firefighters is teetering on insolvency thanks to risky investments.
  • Don’t agree with everything in this John Gray essay on the closing of the liberal mind, published right before Trump’s election, but there’s a lot to chew over concerning the post-liberal world order, and especially the Labour Party’s relation to it. “Labour has become unelectable in any foreseeable future.”
  • Banks in India run out of money thanks to the idiot currency ban:

    Many in north India who slept outside banks in freezing conditions woke up in the morning to be told only that no cash had arrived.

    “I have been doing the rounds of banks for the past 20 days and have been unable to withdraw my own money,” said Balbir Singh, a junior executive in a private firm in New Delhi. “Even on payday the story was the same: the bank said it simply had no money to disburse, even though I have ample credit in my account.”

  • Turkish Lira collapses.
  • Global warming: “Since 1940 the sea level off of northern Washington has dropped about 15 cm. (6 inches).”
  • How Gary Taubes overcame the severe backlash over his famous expose of how low fat diets fail compared to low carb diets like Atkins.
  • Chicago’s real estate market expect to rank dead last. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Will Wallace Hall have the last laugh on his UT records request? (Hat tip: Cahman’s Musings.)
  • Smoking marijuana inhibits blood flow to the brain.
  • The science of the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Nothing says “class” like wearing an ascot, sipping a glass of wine, and spray-painting “Fuck Trump” on a supermarket wall.
  • The wit and wisdom of Robert Stacy McCain.
  • A startling factoid:

  • Less startling, still interesting:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • A concise definition of the issue:

  • Jill Stein’s Scam Recount

    Tuesday, November 29th, 2016

    Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein is raising money for a recount in three states Donald Trump won: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

    Funny thing, through: Stein is not only raising far more money than the recount actually requires, but she keeps raising the amount she’s requesting:

    November 24, 2016 at 3:46AM – In the beginning, Stein figured she needed a total of $2.5mm to fund her recount efforts. That figure included $2.2mm for the actual filing fees and presumably another $0.3mm for legal fees and other costs.

    November 24, 2016 at 1:20PM – Then, just 12 hours later, after the cash just kept flowing in, Stein figured she needed at least another $2mm as her fundraising goal was raised to $4.5mm in total. Of course, the filing fees of $2.2mm didn’t change but the “attorney’s fees” apparently surged by about 300% and the total costs of the effort skyrocketed to $6-7mm.

    November 25, 2016 at 6:11AM – Now, just this morning as Stein approaches $5mm in total donations, her overall fundraising goal has surged once again and now stands at $7mm.

    And that’s on total filing fees of $2.1 million for recounts in those three states. As Zero Hedge puts it, “So, with nearly $5mm raised so far, the question is no longer whether recounts will occur in WI, MI and PA but just how much Jill Stein will be able to drain from the pockets of disaffected Hillary supporters to fund her long-shot efforts.”

    Indeed, Stein has raised more money for the recount than she did for her actual Presidential campaign. It’s also garnered 12 times the press coverage her actual campaign did.

    And all this for a recount that experts say has no chance of changing the actual results:

    Recounts typically don’t swing enough votes to change the winner. Out of 4,687 statewide general elections between 2000 and 2015, just 27 were followed by recounts, according to data compiled by FairVote, a nonpartisan group that researches elections and promotes electoral reform. Just three of those 27 recounts resulted in a change in the outcome, all leading to wins for Democrats: Al Franken’s win in Minnesota’s 2008 U.S. Senate race, Thomas M. Salmon’s win in Vermont’s 2006 auditor election and Christine Gregoire’s win in Washington’s 2004 gubernatorial race.

    Recounts also typically don’t change the margin by an amount that would be large enough to affect the result of this year’s presidential election. The mean swing between the top two candidates in the 27 recounts was 282 votes, with a median of 219. The biggest swing came in Florida’s 2000 presidential election recount, when Al Gore cut 1,247 votes off George W. Bush’s lead, ultimately not enough to flip the state to his column. In each state Trump won or leads in, his advantage is more than 10,000 votes.

    Indeed, Trump’s victory margins in those three states are:

  • Michigan: 10,704 votes.
  • Pennsylvania: 70,638 votes.
  • Wisconsin: 22,177 votes.
  • Even Democrats are calling Stein’s recount a waste of time.

    “It’s a waste of time and money. It is not going to change anything,” said Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, who served as campaign manager for former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign.

    “I think it probably was the Stein people looking for a way to stay relevant, raise some money and take the stink off of them. Instead of everybody screaming, ‘You made Trump happen,’ she is counting the votes to change that whole narrative.”

    Even the Clinton team thinks it’s a waste of time:

    In a Medium post on Saturday, Clinton lawyer Marc Elias wrote, “Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves.”

    The Clinton team’s involvement will likely be limited to having lawyers or other experts at recount sites to watch over the proceedings.

    “My sense is that the Clinton people would have preferred this not to happen and are going to be involved only in a monitoring capacity,” said Robert Shrum, a Democratic strategist and a veteran of several presidential campaigns, including that of 2004 nominee John Kerry.

    Shrum added that he believed “people are way over-excited about the thing.” There is, he added, “no chance” that it will change the election’s outcome.

    But Stein missed Pennsylvania recount deadline. So now Stein’s not only suing, she’s asking her supporters to file precinct-by-precinct recount requests. “Further complicating the effort, the Pennsylvania Department of State noted that some of the precincts are in counties that had finished certifying their election results, closing the five-day window for petitioning precincts to hold recounts.”

    Wisconsin has denied Stein’s request to do a time-consuming hand-recount. So naturally she’s suing there as well.

    Michigan has already certified its election results for Trump.

    There’s been speculation that the entire strategy is to delay official electors from casting their votes for Trump in order to cast the election into the House, but that seems equally unlikely. All electoral votes must be finalized December 13 so they can be cast December 19. Michigan and Wisconsin both have Republican governors (and Michigan a Republican Secretary of State), so the chances they would play along in this Hail Mary charade by not certifying electors is nil. Nor do I see three separate federal judges (Michigan is in the Sixth Circuit, Pennsylvania in the Third, and Wisconsin in the Seventh) all moving to block electors from voting.

    Stein’s play is a scam to extract money from gullible liberals, and will not prevent Donald Trump from being certified as the 45th President of the United States of America.

    2016 Election Roundup Part 2: Reactions and Analysis

    Wednesday, November 16th, 2016

    I wanted to do a comprehensive roundup of analysis of last week’s election, so this post just grew and grew to its current Brobdingnagian size. So tuck in! There’s a lot to chew over.

    Let me first note that all the pundits were wrong about this race, save two not normally regarded as pundits. Scott Adams said early on that Trump was going to win the nomination and the race through persuasion techniques (and also that human beings are fundamentally not rational, which gives me no joy at night), and Michael Moore said that Trump was going to sweep the rust belt due to blue collar anger. So props to them for getting the fundamentals right when so many others (myself included) got them wrong.

  • First, this lengthy Washington Post semi-insider look back at the race is unavoidable. (I say “semi” because many of the big names for Hillary Clinton’s Permanent Traveling Circus of Corruption (for example, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills) are missing.) The piece confirms the impression that Hillary Clinton is the Æthelred the Unready of American politics. One big difference between the camps that struck me: The Trump side of the story includes lots of interaction between the candidate and his staff. Clinton? No back and forth interaction recounted at all. It’s like she was a ghost in her own campaign.

    Also this:

    It was like looking at the lottery ticket and saying, “I think these are the winning numbers, but I’m going to go confirm them again.” . . . “Anthony Weiner.” “Underage sexting scandal.” “Hillary Clinton.” “FBI investigation.” There is no combination in which that word jumble comes up net politically positive.

  • Trump added to Romney’s totals in several key states, while Clinton generally lost votes compared to Obama in 2012:

    Iowa: Trump by 148,000 votes (9.6 points)
    Trump: 68,000 more votes than Romney
    Clinton: 172,000 fewer votes than Obama

    Michigan: Trump by 12,000 votes (0.3 points)
    Trump: 164,000 more votes than Romney
    Clinton 297,000 fewer votes than Obama

    Ohio: Trump by 455,000 votes (8.6 points)
    Trump: 111,000 more votes than Romney
    Clinton: 511,000 fewer votes than Obama

    Pennsylvania: Trump by 68,000 (1.2 points)
    Trump: 223,000 more votes than Romney
    Clinton: 155,000 fewer votes fewer than Obama

    Wisconsin: Trump by 27,000 votes (1.0 points)
    Trump: 1,500 more votes than Romney
    Clinton 238,000 fewer votes than Obama

    There were also states where Trump won votes, but not enough to win the state, where both lost votes, etc. Interesting wonky stuff.

  • County by county results in Texas. Trump lost Fort Bend (which has to be worrisome to the state GOP) but picked up Jefferson, where Beaumont features one of the few significant concentrations of black voters outside the major cities. Also, Libertarian Gary Johnson beat Green Party candidate Jill Stein in every county but one: Loving county, the least populated in both Texas and the nation, where she beat him 2 votes to 1. On the other hand, Stein didn’t receive a single vote in Hall, Kenedy, Kent, King, Roberts, Shackelford and Terrell counties.
  • Even in California, Stein only beat Johnson in three counties: Humboldt, Mendocino and San Francisco. If the Greens can’t do better than in a safely blue state with the most corrupt Democratic Party candidate ever, and the most corrupt DNC ever rigging the race against Bernie Sanders, their outlook would appear grim.
  • The epic, historic nature of Hillary’s collapse:

    Most devastating electoral defeats in United States history at least had some mitigating circumstances. In 1984, Walter Mondale got blown out by Ronald Reagan, a popular incumbent President presiding over an improving economy. Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 election by a large margin, but his opponent was another incumbent President with extensive resources to marshal.

    Hillary Clinton’s stunning collapse is different. It’s hard to think of a historical analog that could come close to resembling the magnitude and depth of the failure. She had a popular incumbent President campaigning for her furiously; the popular First Lady did likewise. The economy is far healthier than it was eight or even four years ago.

    The elite media almost universally loathed her rival — a conformity of opinion that we’ve never seen before in modern American politics. Wall Street was 99% behind her. The polling industry put out a constant deluge of bogus data pronouncing Donald Trump’s certain defeat.

    With all these massive advantages, Hillary still somehow managed to lose to the guy from “The Apprentice.”

  • A majority of white women voted for Trump. (Exit poll caveats apply.) Evidently those years of “war on women” blather were all for naught… (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Despite what some of her supporters are asserting, Clinton didn’t get a majority of the popular vote:

    Six million, seventy-thousand, eight-hundred and two people voted for one of the many third-party candidates running for President. To put it into perspective, that’s more than the combined population of Houston and Chicago.

    That means that the total number of people who voted against Hillary Clinton was 65,682,480 people.

    In other words, Hillary Clinton received 47.6% of the popular vote.

    For those keeping score, that means the majority of votes cast did not, in fact, go to Hillary Clinton.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • From election eve: Bernie supporter trashes Hillary at her own rally.
  • Dear Alec MacGillis: How dare you commit actual journalism rather than prop up Democratic talking points???

    Back in Dayton, where Clinton never visited during the entire campaign, I had run into two more former Obama voters after Trump’s March rally there. Both Heath Bowling and Alex Jones admitted to having been swept up in the Obama wave, but had since grown somewhat disenchanted. Bowling, 36, a burly man with a big smile, managed a small siding and insulation business, and as he’d grown older he’d had gotten more bothered about the dependency on food stamps he saw around him, especially among members of his own generation, and demoralized by the many overdose deaths in his circle.

    Jones, 30, who worked part-time at a pizza shop and delivering medicines to nursing homes, joked at first that his vote for Obama might have had to do with his having been doing a lot of drugs at the time. He grew serious when he talked about how much the Black Lives Matter protests against shootings by police officers grated on him. Chicago was experiencing soaring homicide rates, he said — why weren’t more people talking about that? He was upset that when he went out on the town in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine bar district, he had to worry about getting jumped if he was on the street past a certain hour — and that he felt constrained against complaining against it. “If I say anything about that, I’m a racist,” he said. “I can’t stand that politically correct bullshit.” He had, he said, taken great solace in confiding recently in an older black man at a bar who had agreed with his musing on race and crime. “It was like a big burden lifted from me — here was this black man agreeing with me!”

    Also this:

    A few days after the release of the tape, which was followed by a string of accusations from women saying they had been sexually harassed and assaulted by Trump, I checked back in with Tracie St. Martin to see if she still supported him. She was working on a new gas plant in Middletown, a working-class town near Dayton that was the setting of the recent best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” Here’s what she wrote back in a text message: “I still appreciate the honesty in some of his comments. Most of his comments. I still favor what he says he may be able to do. I am voting against Hillary, come what may with Trump. It’s important to me that ‘we the people’ actually have political power. And electing Trump will prove that. I am AMAZED at the number of people voting for him. The corruption is disgusting in the press. Yes, as of right now I am voting FOR Trump.” She was sure he would win, she said: “His support is crazy! The polls have to be wrong. Have to be fixed.”

    And she shared an anecdote that reflected how differently Trump’s comments had been received in some places than others. “I’m setting steel for this new gas plant…I’m operating a rough terrain forklift,” she wrote. “So today, I kept thinking about the debate and the audio was released…And I got underneath a load of steel and was moving it…I was laughing and laughing and one of the iron workers asked ‘what are u laughing at.’ I said ‘I grabbed that load right by the pussy’ and laughed some more…And said ‘when you’re an operator you can do that ya know’, laughed all fucking day.”

  • Mark Steyn:

    The problem for the left is that, when everyone’s Hitler, nobody’s Hitler.

    At which point, enter the Teflon Pussygrabber.

    As for the “divisive” policy positions – a wall to keep out Mexicans, a moratorium on Muslim immigration – “divisive” appears to be elite-speak for “remarkably popular”. As with Brexit, in any functioning party system the political establishment can ignore issues that command widespread public support only for so long. In that sense, the rise of a Trump figure was entirely predictable. Indeed, I see an old quote of mine has been making the rounds on the Internet in the last couple of days. I wrote it over twelve years ago in The Daily Telegraph:

    In much of western Europe, on all the issues that matter, competitive politics decayed to a rotation of arrogant co-regents of an insular elite, with predictable consequences: if the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain issues, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones.

    At which point – all together now – enter the Pussygrabber. His supporters didn’t care about his personal foibles (anymore than Rob Ford’s did) because he was raising issues nobody else wanted to talk about.

  • Victor Davis Hanson on why Trump won:

    What was forgotten in all this hysteria was that Trump had brought to the race unique advantages, some of his own making, some from finessing naturally occurring phenomena. His advocacy for fair rather than free trade, his insistence on enforcement of federal immigration law, and promises to bring back jobs to the United States brought back formerly disaffected Reagan Democrats, white working-class union members, and blue-dog Democrats—the “missing Romney voters”—into the party. Because of that, the formidable wall of rich electoral blue states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina crumbled.

    Beyond that, even Trump’s admitted crudity was seen by many as evidence of a street-fighting spirit sorely lacking in Republican candidates that had lost too magnanimously in 1992, 2008, and 2016 to vicious Democratic hit machines. Whatever Trump was, he would not lose nobly, but perhaps pull down the rotten walls of the Philistines with him. That Hillary Clinton never got beyond her email scandals, the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation wrongdoing, and the Wikileaks and Guccifer hackings reminded the electorate that whatever Trump was or had done, he at least had not brazenly broken federal law as a public servant, or colluded with the media and the Republican National Committee to undermine the integrity of the primaries and sabotage his Republican rivals.

    Finally, the more Clinton Inc. talked about the Latino vote, the black vote, the gay vote, the woman vote, the more Americans tired of the same old identity politics pandering. What if minority bloc voters who had turned out for Obama might not be as sympathetic to a middle-aged, multimillionaire white woman? And what if the working white classes might flock to the politically incorrect populist Trump in a way that they would not to a leftist elitist like Hillary Clinton? In other words, the more Clinton played the identity politics card, the more she earned fewer returns for herself and more voters for Trump.

    Snip.

    The Democratic Party is now neither a centrist nor a coalition party. Instead, it finds itself at a dead-end: had Hillary Clinton emulated her husband’s pragmatic politics of the 1990s, she would have never won the nomination—even though she would have had a far better chance of winning the general election.

    Wikileaks reminded us that the party is run by rich, snobbish, and often ethically bankrupt grandees. In John Podesta’s world, it’s normal and acceptable for Democratic apparatchiks to talk about their stock portfolios and name-drop the Hamptons, while making cruel asides about “needy” Latinos, medieval Catholics, and African-Americans with silly names—who are nonetheless expected to keep them in power. Such paradoxes are not sustainable. Nor is the liberal nexus of colluding journalists, compromised lobbyists, narcissistic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, family dynasties, and Clintonian get-rich ethics.

    The old blue-collar middle class was bewildered by the leftwing social agenda in which gay marriage, women in combat units, and transgendered restrooms went from possible to mandatory party positions in an eye blink. In a party in which “white privilege” was pro forma disparagement, those who were both white and without it grew furious that the elites with such privilege massaged the allegation to provide cover for their own entitlement.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Michael Barone ponders why the polls failed. A variety of reasons, including this one:

    3. Clinton campaign targeting: staggering incompetence. In an excellent Washington Post article, Jim Tankersley points out that in the closing weeks of the campaign, the Clinton campaign put more ads on the air in the Omaha market (aiming, presumably, at the 1 electoral vote of Nebraska 2, since Iowa’s 6 votes were clearly already lost) than in Michigan and Wisconsin combined (26 electoral votes). By one metric, during one period Republicans ran 405 ads in Michigan and 2,319 in Wisconsin while Democrats ran only 31 in Michigan and 255 in Michigan. This, despite the fact that the Clinton campaign had lots more money than the Trump campaign.

    This wasn’t the only example of campaign malpractice. The Clinton campaign spent time and money on winning Arizona and Georgia, and while it performed better there than Obama had, it was not by enough to carry their 11 and 16 electoral votes, respectively. At the same time, Clinton didn’t set foot in Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) after its April 5 primary. In effect, Clinton was aiming for her 340th electoral vote and ignored the need to campaign for her 270th, which is the one that counts.

    The 70-year-old Bill Clinton apparently repeatedly advised Clinton campaign chairman Robby Mook and others to campaign in white working class areas. The 36-year-old Mook spurned — perhaps ridiculed — his advice. None of this going after men who wear trucker hats unironically; let’s show Brooklyn-type Millennials that supporting Hillary is really cool.

    Isn’t it just a little too pat that a guy named “Robby Mook” is being set up as the scapegoat for the Clinton campaign? Are we sure they didn’t just invent him last week just to take the fall?

  • Another explanation, the polls weren’t wrong, they were fixed. “They did not get it wrong. They chose to lie to you the American electorate.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Why Clinton lost: “The ‘conspiracies’ were true, and the mainstream media lied to you to about everything.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • How the Democratic Party has been more than decimated under Obama:
    “Since 2008, by our estimates, the party has shed 870 legislators and leaders at the state and federal levels — and that estimate may be on the low side. As Donald Trump might put it, that’s decimation times 50.”

  • Stephen Green: “For now then the Democratic Party is a wounded beast, and it will lash out ferociously. The interior fights will be ugly; the desperate attacks on the GOP will be uglier. Try not to get too near.”
  • The Trump wave clobbered Democrats in Ohio.
  • People in West Virginia supported Trump, but thought he was going to lose, and were overjoyed when he won:

    “I had faith that the country had to change. It was about working-class people that rose up against the system—against both parties. I had hoped for something that would immediately bring jobs, or at least stop the bleeding, and overregulation can be stopped with a stroke of the pen. I’m excited that Obamacare could change—that’ll be a big benefit to us if we get a better health system. I’m excited about the Supreme Court. I don’t think Roe v. Wade needs overturning, but I think there are reasonable restrictions that could be put in place. This is the biggest political event in my lifetime, and I’ve lived through a lot of elections. I couldn’t be happier.”

  • Not only do celebrity endorsements not help, they actually hurt:

    That increase in middle-income households meant a mere $2,798 extra in annual income, and was 1.6 percent less than in 2007. The top 5 percent of earners saw a stratospheric jump of 21.8 percent in income, while the poorest Americans, a cohort of 46.7 million, are poorer than they were in 1989.

    Four days before the Census Bureau’s report was released, Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables” — something J.D. Vance, author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” told The Post was “incredibly reductionist.”

    “Like a lot of people on the left, Hillary seems to want to put the Trump phenomenon on racial anxiety,” he said. “It’s a really oversimplified way to address the concerns of millions of people who feel invisible to elites.”

    Plus celebrity election reactions that, once again, make them sound like smug, entitled pricks.

  • Speaking of smug, entitled pricks, how the New York Times blew it:

    Had the paper actually been fair to both candidates, it wouldn’t need to rededicate itself to honest reporting. And it wouldn’t have been totally blindsided by Trump’s victory.

    Instead, because it demonized Trump from start to finish, it failed to realize he was onto something. And because the paper decided that Trump’s supporters were a rabble of racist rednecks and homophobes, it didn’t have a clue about what was happening in the lives of the Americans who elected the new president.

    Snip.

    Trump indeed was challenging, but it was [executive editor Dean] Baquet who changed journalism. He’s the one who decided that the standards of fairness and nonpartisanship could be broken without consequence.

    After that, the floodgates opened, and virtually every so-called news article reflected a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton. Stories, photos, headlines, placement in the paper — all the tools were used to pick a president, the facts be damned.

    Now the bill is coming due. Shocked by Trump’s victory and mocked even by liberals for its bias, the paper is also apparently bleeding readers — and money.

    I’ve gotten letters from people who say they canceled their Times subscriptions and, to judge from a cryptic line in a Thursday article, the problem is more than anecdotal.

    Citing reader anger over election coverage, Rutenberg wrote, “Most ominously, it came in the form of canceled subscriptions.”

  • More on the same subject:

    For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”

    It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.

    Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”

    The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”

    Having lived at one time or another in small-town Pennsylvania, some lower-rung Detroit suburbs, San Francisco, Oakland, Tulsa and, now, Santa Monica, I could only think, well, “Wow.” This is a very large country. I couldn’t even find a copy of the Times on a stop in college town Durham, N.C. To believe the national agenda was being set in a conference room in a headquarters on Manhattan’s Times Square required a very special mind-set indeed.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Samples from the liberal media meltdown. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • CNN offers 24 different explanations for Trump’s victory, none of which include “because the American voter was tried of lying outlets like CNN acting as extensions of the Democratic Party.”
  • Another look at how Democrats screwed themselves:

    Too many of my progressive friends seem to have forgotten how to make actual arguments, and have become expert instead at condemnation, derision and mockery. On issue after issue, they’re very good at explaining why no one could oppose their policy positions except for the basest of motives. As to those positions themselves, they are too often announced with a zealous solemnity suggesting that their views are Holy Writ — and those who disagree are cast into the outer political darkness. In short, the left has lately been dripping with hubris, which in classic literature always portends a fall.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

  • More on the same theme: “Dems didn’t seem to like many of the people who they expected to vote for them. Do not expect this to get better anytime soon, as Dems trot out their continued hatred for flyover country, along with calling all the Trump voters racists, sexists, xenophobes, and so forth.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • In fact, the Clinton campaign colluded with the media to give Trump the GOP nomination. Well, that didn’t work out so well for her, did it?
  • Saturday Night Live’s cold opening treats Hillary’s loss like it was 9/11. Evidently they were mourning the death of their own self-importance…
  • Erik Erickson admits he was wrong, wrong, totally wrong:

    Donald Trump is going to be the President of the United States.

    In July I wrote the piece I put up this morning acknowledging a Hillary Clinton win. It is fitting that it is the ultimate bit of being wrong after a year of being wrong about the election. I genuinely presumed Donald Trump could not win. All of the data agreed. And I and the data were wrong as were so many others.

    Snip.

    Democrats overplayed their hand on cultural issues. They had a Supreme Court impose gay marriage on the country and then tried to force men into women’s bathrooms. On top of that, they ruined healthcare for many Americans and drove up premiums. Then they nominated the worst politician in American history. Within the next 12 hours they will take off the mask and show just how much contempt they have for the very white working class that just kicked their ass.

    This piece was published the day after the election and, boy, did he get that one right.

    I have never seen anything like this election. The disdain for Hillary Clinton is obvious, but the real struggles and hurt of many voters went unregistered. The data that I have long relied on to help shape my opinions is no longer reliable and, frankly, a lot of people I thought were full of crap turned out to be as right as I was wrong. There are really two Americas and I have to do better relating to one I thought I knew already.

    I’m still a conservative. I still believe limited government is best and a strong man in Washington is a dangerous thing. I think protectionism is a bad idea. But I think the #NeverTrump Republicans need to do a reset and give Donald Trump the chance we did not give him up to now. There clearly were voters who would not admit to supporting Trump and they have sent a strong signal that they should be listened to.

    I was wrong about so much about this election and so were so many others. The sooner we get over our pride, eat some crow, and realize we missed the mood of the country, the sooner we can move on. The Brexit polling was more accurate than the American election polling this year. That is stunning. But it is also somewhat exciting to be flying blind into the future knowing the gauges we’ve always used to see where we are going no longer work.

  • Bill Mitchell’s revenge:

    The media mocked him ruthlessly for putting undue weight behind rallies over polling — a fatal error, according to Mitchell. “Rallies equal newly engaged voters,” he said. In 2008 Obama had tens of thousands who stand in line for six hours because they want to experience and taste and feel all this.” Mitchell refers to them as the “monster vote” and suggests that it’s these perhaps previously disenfranchised voters who aren’t on pollster call lists. “And so the big question was, will the 20 million who didn’t vote in 2012 come out for Trump? I kept saying it’s going to happen, no question — it’ll be something like 2008 where the previously quiet black vote came out for Obama. And it did.” It’s also worth noting — while his predictions were overly enthusiastic — that Trump would do better with Latino and black voters, and there’d be a low black voter turnout.

  • Instapundit on the great campus freakout that followed Trump’s victory.
  • Matt Walsh: “Liberals, it’s clear that you wish to continue losing.”

    You found the taste of defeat so novel and exciting that you’ve become intoxicated by it. Indeed, you’ve done everything you possibly could over these past few days to ensure that your losses are magnified and replicated in the future. Not satisfied to simply lose in 2016, you’ve now begun the project of losing in 2020 and beyond.

    Truly, your performance since Tuesday has been astounding in its tone deafness. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone could paint such a masterpiece of ineptitude and self-destruction by accident. I can only conclude that you’re doing it on purpose because, for whatever reason, you are not satiated by just one stunning, historic loss. You want more. And if that is in fact your aim, I would like to make a few suggestions to help you accomplish the goal.

    Including this:

    5. Continue calling everyone who disagrees with you racist.

    It’s a settled fact on the Left that Trump won because 60 million people are slobbering, inbred racists. On that point, I’d like to arrogantly quote myself from a piece I wrote last week:

    It turns out that white people don’t like being called racists every second of the day. It seems that guilt, shame, and self-loathing are not the best ways to generate electoral turnout. Evidently, “Repent, you bigots!” is not the most effective rallying cry.

    On a related note, it’s not true that all white people are racist. Of course it isn’t true. Again: stop being ridiculous. You can’t take some random sin or vice and assign it to an entire group of people based solely on their skin color. In fact, do you know what it’s called when you accuse everyone in a certain racial group of possessing some negative characteristic? Racism, by definition.

    The other problem with writing off all of your political opponents as racist is that, if you come to believe your own propaganda, you’ll quickly develop a deep hatred for the half of the country that disagrees with you. And if you hate people, you tend to alienate them. For example, take the Democrat strategist on CNN who sarcastically blurted out, “Oh, poor white people” when she was asked about the white Trump voter who’d been savagely beaten by a group of black protesters.

    If you really believe that all white people are despicable racists — or at least the white people who don’t vote Democrat — you will not be able to muster even the pretense of empathy or concern when white people are attacked. White middle class voters have taken note of this, understandably. And now they are a bit hesitant to vote into a power an ideology that detests them.

    Plus this great line about the perpetually clue-deprived Lena Dunham: “A regular woman doesn’t wake up the morning after an election and declare that the results made her vagina hurt.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Michelle Malkin on Trump and the end of victimhood identity politics:

    Beltway chin-pullers expediently focused on Trump’s white and conservative supporters who are rightly sick and tired of social justice double standards. But they ignored the increasingly vocal constituency of hyphen-free, label-rejecting American People Against Political Correctness who don’t fit old narratives and boxes.

    And the same “Never Trump” pundits and establishment political strategists who gabbed endlessly about the need for “minority outreach” after 2012 were flummoxed by the blacks, gays, Latinos, women and Democrats who rallied behind the GOP candidate.

    The most important speech of the 2016 election cycle wasn’t delivered by one of the presidential candidates. It came from iconoclastic Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel who best explained the historically significant backlash against the intolerant tolerance mob and phony diversity-mongers.

    “Louder voices have sent a message that they do not intend to tolerate the views of one half of the country,” he observed at the National Press Club last week. He recounted how the gay magazine The Advocate, which had once praised him as a “gay innovator,” declared he was “not a gay man” anymore because of his libertarian, limited-government politics.

    “The lie behind the buzzword of diversity could not be made more clear,” Thiel noted. “If you don’t conform, then you don’t count as diverse, no matter what your personal background.”

    Trump’s eclectic coalition was bound by that common thread: disaffected individuals tired of being told they don’t count and discounted because their views do not properly “match” their gender, chromosomes, skin color or ethnicity. That is exactly why the more they and their nominee were demonized, the stronger their support grew.

  • Ann Althouse isn’t impressed with Peggy Noonan’s analysis:

    Trump needs help, she says. And these people need jobs and power, she doesn’t say. The elite, her people, lost the election, but they should have the victory anyway, because a “young man” and a “beautiful lady” spoke of fear. Throughout the whole political season, Trump was battered with the fear of fear, and now he’s won and he’s told to pander to the people who said whatever they could to oppose him, the people who stoked the fear that he needs to prioritize calming. As if it could ever be calmed, as if his opponents will ever stop stoking it.

  • Behind the scenes at Team Trump as the victory results came in.
  • Trump’s victory will set union workers free by ushering in more right-to-work states.
  • Why OPEC fears Donald Trump. (Hat tip: Instapundit.
  • Did Clinton get violent with her staff election night? No hard proof, but I wouldn’t put it past her…
  • Saving this image in case I need to troll my lefty Europhile Brit friends:

  • Slate commentator says that the Democratic Party establishment is finished:

    The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level. Donald Trump will be president. We are going to be unpacking this night for the rest of our lives, and lives beyond that. We can’t comprehend even 1 percent of what’s just happened. But one aspect of it, minor in the overall sweep, that I’m pretty sure we can comprehend well enough right now: The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished.

    However, he also says that those rebuilding the party “have to do so in a way that doesn’t erode the anti-racist or anti-sexist planks of the modern party, which are non-negotiable.” So, in other words: Though Shalt Not Question the Holy Social Justice Warriors, and we’re going to keep calling our political opponents racist, sexist bigots, because that worked out so well this year. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Liberals rioting in the streets might want to heed Dionne Alexander’s message:

    “You are the exact reason Donald Trump won the election. We’re tired of you crybabies!”

  • Speaking of tantrums, Trump calls on supporters not to attack anyone (not that they actually were)…and CBS refuses to air the clip. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The actual headline here should be “Liberals Act Like Total Douchebags to Their Relatives.”
  • Washington Post runs a piece declaring states “a relic of the past.” I’m betting most Americans are far more likely to see the Washington Post as a relic of the past…
  • CEO of data security company PacketSled fired for threatening to kill Donald Trump.
  • Garbage in, garbage out. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • About those communists rioting in the street:

    From reading the various mainstream media accounts of these events, one comes away with the distinct impression that they are grassroots actions that began organically among ordinary, concerned, well-meaning citizens.

    But alas, if one were to think that, one would be wrong.

    Contrary to media misrepresentations, many of the supposedly spontaneous, organic, anti-Trump protests we have witnessed in cities from coast to coast were in fact carefully planned and orchestrated, in advance, by a pro-Communist organization called the ANSWER Coalition, which draws its name from the acronym for “Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.” ANSWER was established in 2001 by Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, a group staffed in large part by members of the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party. In 2002, the libertarian author Stephen Suleyman Schwartz described ANSWER as an “ultra-Stalinist network” whose members served as “active propaganda agents for Serbia, Iraq, and North Korea, as well as Cuba, countries they repeatedly visit and acclaim.”

    Since its inception, ANSWER has consistently depicted the United States as a racist, sexist, imperialistic, militaristic nation guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity—in other words, a wellspring of pure evil. When ANSWER became a leading organizer of the massive post-9/11 demonstrations against the Patriot Act and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it formed alliances with other likeminded entities such as Not In Our Name (a project of the Revolutionary Communist Party) and United For Peace and Justice (a pro-Castro group devoted to smearing America as a cesspool of bigotry and oppression).

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Moe than half of those arrested in Portland’s anti-Trump riots didn’t vote in Oregon elections. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Trump reiterates that the United States will indeed be building a border wall.
  • Indeed, the fund have already been allocated. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Immigration enforcement agents are thrilled at Trump’s victory. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Hillary’s post-election speech strikes one observer as less of a concession than repositioning Clinton Inc. 2.0.
  • Chelsea Clinton being groomed for congress. Does anyone, anyone, outside the corrupt Clinton machine think this is a good idea?
  • Indian Americans voted for Trump in significant numbers.” Caveat: No statistics offered, so take it with a grain (or more) of salt.
  • Why Democrats lost, in a Tweet:

  • Donald Trump will never be President supercut:

  • Election Roundup Part 1: Just the Facts, Ma’am

    Friday, November 11th, 2016

    Time, finally, for something vaguely resembling a comprehensive post-election roundup.

    As this keeps threatening to turn into a very long and unwieldy post, I’m going to break it up into chunks, with this installment centered on vote totals, race outcomes, and statistical facts about the election. We’ll save analysis, implications, and the saltiest examples of liberal tears for another time.

  • Assuming the current results hold, Trump flipped six states Romney lost (Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan), plus Maine’s second congressional district, which gives Trump 306 electoral votes.
  • That’s the highest electoral vote totals for a Republican since Bush41 blew out Dukakis in 1988 (426).
  • Hillary might still edge Trump in the popular vote (right now she’s up by 3/10ths of 1%).
  • Clinton lost over 5 million votes from Obama’s 2012 totals. Trump was down less than a million from Romney’s totals.
  • Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson pulled in over 4 million votes, triple his 2012 showing. Green Party candidate Jill Stein pulled in over 1.2 million votes, which was almost triple her 2012 showing as well.
  • Evan McMullin (or, as Ace of Spades refers to him, “Egg McMuffin”) pulled in less than half a million votes, about a third of which came from his native Utah, where he beat Johnson and Stein. He did not win any counties in Utah, though he did beat Clinton in a few.
  • 1996 was the last time West Virginia (formerly a reliable Democratic state) went for the Democratic presidential candidate. This year they went for Trump by nearly 69%, including every county in the state. Despite that, WV Democratic Senator Joe Manchin says he’s not switching to the Republican Party. Machin, 69, is up for reelection in 2018.
  • Republicans lost two seats (in Illinois and New Hampshire) but maintain control of the Senate. Louisiana will have it’s top two runoff December 9, where Republican John Kennedy will be heavily favored, likely giving Republicans a 53-47 edge.
  • Senators Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania) and Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) both won reelection is historically blue states.
  • Republicans only lost six House seats, easily maintaining control. Three Dem pickups were in Florida (where Republicans flipped two sets themselves), two in Nevada, one in New Hampshire, one in Virginia, and one in New Jersey. Republicans also picked up one House seat in Nebraska. Republicans are guaranteed to retain control of Louisiana’s third congressional district (two Republicans in the runoff) and likely to retain control of the 4th as well.
  • Not a single U.S. House seat in Texas flipped parties, which means that incumbent Republican Will Hurd retained the 23rd Congressional District over Democrat Pete Gallego. CD23 is the only true swing U.S. House district in Texas these days, and Gallego had been the incumbent when Hurd ousted him in 2014.
  • Senator Tim Scott was reelected to a full term. Scott still remains the first black Senator from the South since reconstruction.
  • Republicans control the House, Senate and White House for the first time since 1928.
  • Republicans also picked up three governorships, in Missouri, Vermont and New Hampshire, giving them 33 to the Democrats 15.
  • The North Carolina Governor’s race may not be decided until November 18. If Democrat Roy Cooper’s razor thin lead over Republican incumbent Pat McCrory holds, that will be the Democrats’ only gubernatorial pickup this year.
  • “Eastern Kentucky voters rejected [Democrat] House Speaker Greg Stumbo on Tuesday as Republicans appeared poised to take control of the Kentucky House of Representatives for the first time since 1921.”
  • Democrats pick up four seats in the Texas House.
  • Texas county-by-county Presidential race results. Clinton taking Fort Bend county is a surprise to me; Romney won that by six points in 2012, and Clinton beat Trump by about that much this year.
  • Libertarians maintained automatic ballot access in Texas because their railroad commission candidate pulled in 5.3% of the vote, over the 5% threshold. The Green Party, however, did not, and will have to submit 50,000 petition signatures to make the ballot in 2018.
  • National Review (ad blocker blocker warning) notes that the “Trump won because of racism” talking point is demonstrably wrong:

    Mitt Romney won a greater percentage of the white vote than Donald Trump. Mitt took 59 percent while Trump won 58 percent. Would you believe that Trump improved the GOP’s position with black and Hispanic voters? Obama won 93 percent of the black vote. Hillary won 88 percent. Obama won 71 percent of the Latino vote. Hillary won 65 percent. Critically, millions of minority voters apparently stayed home. Trump’s total vote is likely to land somewhere between John McCain’s and Romney’s (and well short of George W. Bush’s 2004 total), while the Democrats have lost almost 10 million voters since 2008.

    And all this happened even as Democrats doubled-down on their own identity politics.

    But all this is based on exit polls. How do we know they’re any more accurate at capturing the electorate than those other faulty polls?

  • More exit poll analysis from Oren Cass. The thrust is that Trump did better among nonwhites than Romney. But when he gets down to differences of less than 2%, he’s counting angels on the heads of pins.
  • Remember all that MSM talk about Trump turning Texas into a swing state? Instead he turned Michigan and Wisconsin into swing states.

    Here’s a Tweet that encapsulates a New York Times interactive map indicating which areas of the country voted notably more Republican or more Democratic in the Presidential race than in 2012. Note the strong surge of Trump voters in the rust belt.

    As far as the senate, things don’t get any easier for Democrats in 2018: