Hillary Clinton
Comment: Why should it baffle anyone? The majority of Americans are totally disgusted with the 1% and the status quo; Killary represented that and she made no effort to distance herself from it and find out what was really on the minds of the people. Probably the only real votes she got were from the 1% and those surrounding them who are so ponerized they can't think straight anymore. The rest of her votes were from rigged machines. But still, it wasn't enough.
Incumbent parties rarely hold on to power after eight years in office. George HW Bush, following Reagan, was an exception, but politics has become steadily more polarised since and pendulums have a habit of swinging.
Trump's defiance of expectations has itself also become somewhat of a golden rule in American politics in 2016. Written off repeatedly during the Republican primary, and only rarely taken seriously during the general election, he nonetheless epitomises the same anti-establishment mood that led Britain to vote to leave the European Union and Democrats in 22 US states to nominate Bernie Sanders. Fairly or not, it is an establishment with which Clinton could not have been more closely aligned in the minds of many voters if she tried.
Comment: Exactly. And that just went right over their heads?!
The economy
"It's the economy, stupid" was a phrase coined by her husband's adviser James Carville in the 1992 election and, in many ways, it ought to have helped Democrats again in 2016. Barack Obama helped rescue the US from the financial crash and presided over a record series of consecutive quarters of job growth.
Comment:All that nonsense about Obama creating jobs was just propaganda to keep people quiet while the wars went on and homelessness increased and cops tasered people. People know better. That's why; not because the pendulum swung the other way.
Unfortunately for Clinton, many Americans simply did not feel as positive.
Comment: Because they were figuring out it was all lies!
Stagnant wage levels and soaring inequality were symptoms of the malaise felt by many voters. Trump successfully convinced them to believe this was caused by bad trade deals and a rigged economy.
Comment: Soaring inequality is not a symptom of malaise... it was a direct cause of the anger at the 1%! What a slimy idiot this writer is. Trump didn't have to convince anyone that this was "caused by bad trade deals and a rigged economy"; everyone knows it. Plus they know that the rich are getting richer on wars and death and destruction.
Despite being pushed in this direction by Sanders in the Democratic primary, Clinton never really found a satisfactory response. Her volte-face on trade sounded - and was later proved by leaked emails - unconvincing at best; deeply cynical at worst.
Comment: Just say it: she's an elitist LIAR.
Neither socialism nor the proto-fascist homilies of Trump offered much in the way of coherent alternatives either, but the bottom line was that Clinton simply failed to articulate a convincing defence of modern American capitalism.
Comment: Notice the paramoralistic slur about "proto-fascist homilies". Clinton couldn't defend her oligarchy because, as a psychopath, she didn't think they needed defending and there is no defense for modern American capitalism.
Trust
One big problem which undermined many otherwise plausible policy positions was a lack of trust. Paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and a murky web of business connections to the family charity left many Americans doubting Clinton's sincerity on matters of money and much else.
Comment: Ummm.... that's almost the understatement of the year. It is obvious that Clinton is a criminal running a criminal operation.
That the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating the Democratic candidate until just two days before voting with a view to bring possible criminal charges for her flouting of data security laws was just the most extreme manifestation of the issue.
It was damaging not just that the FBI bungled its timing of what ultimately proved to be a dead-end investigation but because it played into the notion that the Clintons behaved as if the law did not apply to them.
Comment: This last remark is interesting: perhaps that was the real message? To emphasize to the voters that Clinton was obviously above the law and further anger them?
Message vacuum
It also did not help that what Clinton was selling was mainly herself.
Comment: And everybody hates her. That is the main thing that everyone in the Democratic party failed to grok: Hillary is just not a likeable person. Who wants to "buy" a woman who can bomb and maim and laugh about it? No redeeming qualities whatsoever.
The campaign's strongest message was that she was uniquely qualified to become president. This was largely true, especially when compared with the grotesquely inexperienced Donald Trump, but big ideas took a backstage role.
Comment: No, she is not "uniquely qualified" to be president; she's a failure at everything she has ever done. She has caused more chaos on this planet in the past ten years than anybody else we can think of. A rank amateur is preferable to Hillary's qualifications! At least a person who plays the odds is bound to get things right about half the time; Hillary never got anything right.
There was a cast of a thousand policy prescriptions, from tweaks to the healthcare system to a watered-down version of the Sanders college debt proposals. Few were memorable, even among supporters.
Campaign slogans are notoriously vacuous. Obama's "hope and change" turned out to be more of the former than the latter. Yet Clinton's "stronger together" only really began to take shape in response to Trump's divisiveness. It was attractive to many Democrats as a symbol of what they felt the campaign was about but it ensured the battle was fought on Trump's terms.
Broken polls
Amid the recriminations, special attention is likely to be reserved for the pollsters, who showed Clinton clinging to a comfortable three- or four-point lead in national opinion polls going into the election. Granted, some, such as Nate Silver's 538 website, flagged up the risk of an upset in key swing states, but even he had downgraded expectations of a Trump win to less than 30% on the eve of polling.
The failure partly reflects a broken industry. Reaching a vast audience no longer using landlines, or even mobile voice calls much, with a 20th-century modeling of statistical sampling has produced dangerously misleading results in elections around the world of late.
Comment: How about this: the polls were manipulated in the hope that they would influence voters and now they see that doesn't work anymore.
But the US fortune tellers were particularly confused by the scrambled demographics of the 2016 election. Trump in many ways ran to Clinton's left on some economic issues, with a populist appeal to a growing group of unaffiliated independent-minded voters, and yet analysts continued to assume that if registered Democrats were voting early, or telling pollsters they were going to vote, it meant a vote for Clinton.
That all changed in 2016, a ground zero for a political bombshell that will mean the US electoral map never looks the same again.
Reader Comments
Just imagine what the real numbers are.
It was comical watching the BBC on election night, still trying to convince itself that Killary would win but realising the votes weren't there
Their panel has repeated the same Brexit mantra - the "informed", more intelligent people voted as the state desired (Clinton / Pro-Europe) whereas the dissenters are all ignorant and intellectually challenged
An interesting word "informed" ... they mean absorbed in the MSM narrative and unable to see outside that reality tunnel
They label people as "uninformed" to belittle them - as they have used "conspiracy" terms ... but is it sensible to be informed by liars and cheats, that would be really stupid
Is it in your interest to believe all they inform you about ... and to compound that by believing there is nothing else to know, no information missing, no alternative realities ?
Do the French aristocracy still believe the peasants were ignorant and stupid for having a revolution ... probably, but the ignorant masses really don't care any more
Our interests and their interests are not the same
"Barack Obama helped rescue the US from the financial crash"
how am i supposed to take anything the author says seriously after that statement?
After this>. "Barack Obama helped rescue the US from the financial crash and presided over a record series of consecutive quarters of job growth."
You realize that this doorknob, and likely the whole organization, is under the table servicing the globalists
I bet these people believe the faux numbers put out in the labor reports, LOL!
LOVE the SOTT (Blue Box) Comments... Kudos.
R.C.
Will this start a movement, with upcoming elections in Europe, will this be a kind of crying call. After all, the US has done it, will they be able to turn the tide in there own countries.
The voice of the people has finally been heard and acknowledged with the only avenue that has been left open to us the VOTE.
It certainly has the elites running scared.
Here is an article from Bloomberg news, Europe in Crisis; The Elections to watch for Political Risk. Voters in Europe will determine the destiny of a continent in turmoil.
Well that says it all for me "Political Risk. I ask, risk for who? Will the voters voice be heard again.
[Link]
Again they give predictions, but as the US elections have shown, predictions count for nothing when the outcome on the ground shows an entirely different reality.
Again interesting times.
At the end of the day Rothschild won the election. Trump's patrons may not have expected him to win but in backing both parties they still won. In reference to the Alfred E. Smith fundraiser he clearly states that "we have to come together as a world community." This can be understood as the NWO but perhaps I misunderstand (and I'm feeling a pang of doubt here) he might actually be egalitarian in this statement... Lets find out, shall we.