Humility

The election of November 8, 2016 was a grinding experience for everyone.  A lot of people think Hillary is an awful person but Trump is worse, and voted accordingly.  A lot of other people think Trump is an awful person but Hillary is worse, and voted accordingly.  I don't see anyone actually celebrating the outcome.  At best, some people are feeling relieved.  Others are feeling an impending dread.  None of this is good. 

Worst of all, there are some vicious, malicious people rubbing salt into the national wound.  They are advancing their hatred of the American people by promoting the idea that Donald Trump stole the election and is, therefore, an illegitimate president.  It is important to understand why they are wrong.

Looked at narrowly, there appears to be an injustice done.  If you look only at the votes cast for Trump and Clinton, it appears that Hillary won the popular vote but the presidency is unjustly awarded to Trump.  There are several ways to think about this.

As of 10 am, 11/12/2016, four days after the election, the NY Times reports that Hillary leads Trump by 574,000 votes.  This does sound like a lot.  The entire state of Wyoming has a population of only 586,000 people, and a lead of 574,000 votes in any state-wide election, in any state, would be decisive.  But, in a country of 323 million people, in a national election that saw 127 million votes cast, a lead of 574,000 votes is about 0.46% of all votes cast.  It is far more meaningful to say that our nation is divided, than to suggest that the election was thrown to the undeserving candidate.

Another measure of the popular resistance to the blandishments of Hillary Clinton is campaign spending.  For many years people, especially on the political Left, have bemoaned the connection between money and politics.  The idea is that money too easily influences the weak minded.  This connection is still valid.  And yet, Hillary spent actually twice the money of Trump, to produce her 0.46% lead in the popular vote.  And her vaunted "ground game" came to nothing.  Well, not exactly nothing;  imagine the election outcome if the spending pattern were reversed or, at least, more even.  There is the distinct possibility that Trump would have garnered a dramatic advantage over Hillary.

Along this line, you must also consider that Donald Trump ran into unprecedented head winds.  He ran against the ENTIRE political establishment.  Obviously, he ran against the Democrats.  He also ran against the Republicans.  And he ran against the pundit class and against the entire Fourth Estate.  That the entire political establishment worked against him, and still he won, has to tell you something about the deep well of support that Donald Trump enjoys among the American people.

Finally, a broader view of the political landscape suggests there is no injustice, in the first place.  While votes for the presidency suggest an exactly divided nation, the results of elections for the  House of Representatives, for the U.S. Senate, and for state governments, reveal a more coherent electorate.  The American people have clearly rejected the Democratic Party.  As Vox.com reports, eight years of Barack Obama have reduced the Democratic party to “a smoking pile of rubble.”  We can reasonably infer that the American people also rejected Hillary Clinton.

To believe otherwise is to believe that the same people who installed so many Republican state legislators, governors, congressmen, and senators, would have looked upon the standard bearer of the Democratic Party that they had just roundly rejected and exclaimed, "Yeah!  That's our gal." 

I don't think so.  The American people rejected Hillary Clinton. Period.  Their acceptance of Donald Trump is another, more complicated, matter. 

People on my side of the political divide are entitled to feel some relief at the outcome of November 8.  People on the other side of the political divide should be feeling some humility.  Nobody has anything to celebrate.  Introspection, on all sides, should be the order of the day.  And what certainly should not be tolerated, is this small, vicious, malicious element in our society already working diligently to “rub raw the resentments of the people.”