Here We Go Again

This election reminds me of the 2000 election, at least in the aftermath.  Not just that the winner of the Electoral College did not win the popular vote.  But both victors overcompensated in the same way.  After all, since rural areas tended to go Republican and urban areas tended to go Democrat, both Trump supporters and Bush supporters have used the electoral map to create the impression of a landslide where none existed.  Both times we were assured that Authentic Real Americans in the Heartland voted for the Republican and only a handful of Out of Touch Liberal Elitists in coastal enclaves voted for the Democrat.  Somehow, though, the out-of-touch elitists outnumbered the Authentic Real Americans.  Every attempt was made to conceal this awkward fact.

This time it goes even further.  Because journalists predicted a Clinton victory, this was taken as evidence of just how out of touch they were with Real America.  Comparison was sometimes made to Pauline Kael in 1972 who couldn't believe that Nixon would win because everyone she knew was voting for McGovern.

Look, Nixon won in 1972 by nearly a 2-1 margin.  He carried every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.  Clearly anyone who didn't foresee a Nixon win really was seriously out of touch with the country as a whole.

This time, on the other hand, the winner of the election received fewer votes than the loser, so clearly it was not out of touch with Real America to support Clinton -- unless Real Americans are outnumbered by liberal imposters.

Furthermore journalists were not just predicting a Clinton win because everyone they knew was voting for her.  They predicted a Clinton win because that was what the polls showed.  And not only did the polls show it, in the previously election Republicans had dismissed the polls as a mere artifact of liberal bias and insisted that they knew better.  The polls turned out to be right after all.  It was not unreasonable to expect the same thing to happen the next time around.

So spare us any comparisons to 1972 (the outcome, that is, underhanded behavior by the winner, maybe).  The better point of comparison is 2000, when the electoral winner was not the popular winner and kept creating the illusion of a landslide where none existed.