I watched the election results roll in on Tuesday night and was shocked when I woke up this morning.
It took me all morning to figure out why and to process my thoughts, so here’s my attempt to put it into words on short notice. Last night, must have been about 7 pm, ABC News called Vermont for Clinton and Kentucky and Indiana for Donald Trump. So early in the contest Trump was up 14-3 in electoral votes. Anxious as could be I couldn’t wait to see the West Coast voting, I had voted for Gary Johnson and was confident he would get the 5% needed to garner matching federal funds for the 2020 election. Maybe even take New Mexico and throw the election to Congress. Wishful thinking. The point is, I went over to a reputable news site on my laptop while watching ABC News. The website, which I don’t remember (which is important later in the story), had a table of 15 different news sites. All left leaning in nature, but not obscure, you would recognize all sources. 14 news sites had Clinton winning 290-350 electoral votes and the 15th had neither candidate garnering enough votes due to toss up states. I wanted to take a screen shot, but I didn’t. So for hours I’m running through websites with the TV on in the background.
Around 10 p.m. I’m still watching election results on ABC while scrolling the web when an older female, about 60, started to tear up and was nearly crying that America couldn’t elect Trump. That’s not very unbiased. Oh well. By 11:30 the election was closer than anyone anticipated and it was time for bed. Because I’ve been at my new job less than a year, the last thing I wanted to do was be late for work and tell my boss I was watching election coverage (especially since my candidate had already lost).
I turn on my computer at 5:30 a.m. to the headline IT’S TRUMP on CNN. How could that be? How could everyone be wrong? I am a surly blogger, I have a day job and digest the news, but how could CNN, USA Today, Huffington Post, Daily Beast, FiveThirtyEight, etc. ALL be wrong? Multinational News Conglomerates, who spend millions of dollars on polling and research, ALL WRONG about the electoral vote. So I went back on my browser list from Election Night and I was going to screen shot all the wrong predictions. Guess what? Page after page from my history, either Page Not Found or Page Updated. I guess if there’s no proof, they were never wrong.
Which brings us back to my guy Gary Johnson. He finished with 3% of the popular vote in the nation. 3% in my county, 3% in my state, and 3% in the nation. I went to New Mexico, his home state, and he pulled in around 10% there, I didn’t see a better showing by him in any other states. This was the year the third party candidate was going to make some noise and stick it to the Democrat and Republican Machines. Deeply disappointed, I start to look for Gary Johnson stories. What I found was stories about Clinton supporters savaging Johnson and Jill Stein.
Put on your listening ears Clinton supporters (like that lady crying on ABC): Your candidate couldn’t win with the media in her back pocket. Your candidate couldn’t win, even with Sanders supporters lined up behind her. And your candidate couldn’t win with the sitting president campaigning hard for her. Don’t take your anger out on third party candidates. Many Americans who didn’t pay attention didn’t even know there was a third option. I don’t know how, but I kept meeting ‘em, right up to election day. You didn’t lose because of Gary Johnson, I would argue that your allies in the media kept his vote tallies down to below 5% by not covering Johnson until his Aleppo Moment.
So Trump the Maniac is now Trump the President and the Democrats are sore losers. What explains what happened yesterday? Believe it or not, I came across this little blog post at Reason.com. I don’t how much money Robby Soave makes a year, but he deserves a raise, because I think he nailed what happened yesterday better any Newscaster, Election Analyst, or Strategist that I have read.
Please take a minute from my blog to check out this article:
Thanks