Update 5:
Ok, I am going to start drinking.
— (((Roland Dodds))) (@RolandDodds) November 9, 2016
Update 4:
I voted @Evan_McMullin for President. I appreciate his views on a strong America and the need to rebuild our military. #3 — Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) November 8, 2016
We know that George H.W. Bush voted for Clinton, but his son W appears to have abstained from voting for Trump as well.
Update 3:
From Gene:
I’m an Orthodox Jewish Immigrant My vote is private. Dedicated in honor of US CPT Khan, his devotion makes (religious) freedom possible pic.twitter.com/httaaUspeM — Yosef Rapaport (@YosefRapaport) November 8, 2016
In addition, a Nevada Judge threw out Trump’s lawsuit aimed at disregarding votes from those who waited hours in line at the polls and voted after they technically were supposed to close.
Clark County judge Gloria Sturman tore into Trump’s lawyers on Tuesday afternoon. “Are [the votes] not to be counted?” she asked, exasperated, to Trump’s lawyer during a hearing on Tuesday. “What are you saying? Why are we here? You want to preserve the poll data? That is offensive to me. Why don’t we wait to see if the secretary of state wants to do this?” “I am not going to expose people doing their civic duty helping their fellow citizens vote, that they are taking their personal time to preserve … to public attention, ridicule, and harassment,” Sturman continued, before commanding Trump’s lawyer: “Thank you, sit down.”
Update 2: Alan Johnson has an excellent Op-Ed in the New York Times today that echoes my previous post here at HP. He writes:
Everyone noticed Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark, but few paid attention to what she said next. Most Trump supporters, she said, are not deplorables. Rather, they “feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.” These are people, Mrs. Clinton said, who “hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with, as well.” Constructing a new politics of the vital center after this tumultuous period will require so much more than understanding and empathy. It will take trusted governments, democratic social movements and a reforming zeal to give “radically different arrangements” a stable institutional form. We need to give people a reason to believe again that, in Bruce Springsteen’s words, “Wherever this flag’s flown, we take care of our own.”
The Washington Examiner asks if the surge in Latino voters might break for Trump. They note:
The Hispanic support for Hillary Clinton suddenly shifted downward from the 54 to 61 percent level shown between the end of the two parties’ national conventions until Oct. 30. During that period, Donald Trump‘s Hispanic percentages were in the range of 24 to 34 percent, with one brief spike upward to 39 percent. That’s higher than the numbers Trump is getting from Hispanics in other polls, just as LAT/USC has been showing Trump running better than just about any other poll. But it’s not totally implausible and it held pretty steady. … Does this represent a surge of Hispanics toward Trump or away from Clinton? Probably not, in my view. But if it does, the big surges of Hispanic early voting in Nevada and Florida may not be as good a sign for Clinton as every analyst has assumed.
Update 1: Susan B. Anthon’y grave is getting some extra traffic today.
The scene at Susan B. Anthony’s grave. And it’s a scene. pic.twitter.com/mgQNwmsB9f — Sarah Maslin Nir (@SarahMaslinNir) November 8, 2016
Original Post
We are being told that today’s election is the most important in our lifetime. Mind you, this is something I happen to hear every election. None-the-less, more than a single pundit has put today’s Trump/Clinton race in rather existential terms.
The Huffington Post made their position abundantly clear.
A group of political scientists says Trump’s attacks on our democracy are unprecedented and dangerous – Washington Post:
The alarm among many political scientists is acute. We have seen other countries where democratic institutions have come under assault. Venezuela had a stable two-party system for decades but was thrown off-kilter by a leader who weakened the courts and placed controls on the press. Russia had an emerging, competitive multi-party system and at least the promise of a balanced system of government. This emergence of democracy was stopped cold by an authoritarian leader and his inner circle, who has made steady incursions on the opposition, the press, and leaders in civil society.
2016: The most important election since 1932 – Brookings Institute:
The next president will preside over critical decisions relating to health care policy, Social Security, and environmental policy, and will shape the character of the Supreme Court for the next generation. Profound differences distinguish the two major parties on these and many other issues. A recent survey of members of the House of Representatives found that on a scale of ‘liberal to conservative’ the most conservative Democrat was more liberal than the least conservative Republican. Whatever their source, these divisions are real. The examples cited here are sufficient to show that the 2016 election richly merits the overworked term ‘watershed’—it will be the most consequential presidential election in a very long time.
How Donald Trump Could Change the World – The Atlantic:
Trump’s isolationist ideology has three components, according to Wright: 1) opposition to U.S. alliances; 2) opposition to free trade; and 3) support for authoritarianism. In Wright’s view, these three beliefs, if translated into policy in a Trump administration, could do away with the liberal international order that the United States helped design after World War II and has led ever since. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is a more conventional U.S. presidential candidate committed to preserving that order. Hence why, days before the election, Wright is casting his gaze back to the 1930s.
The right has already started to plant the seeds of “the election was rigged” and is actively looking for voting irregularities. Activist James O’Keefe said the following on Twitter:
I imagine he didn’t have anyone at the various locations across the country that saw voters waiting for hours in line to vote.
Whether this is the most important election of my lifetime is beside the point (I still happen to think the 2004 race was the most significant). This election has exposed a great deal of friction and division in American society that we will need to address in the years to come, regardless of who wins at the polls tonight.
