I know, I know, I know, you are probably sick and tired of hearing about the man. But I can’t help it myself, it’s like trying to take your eyes away from a morning fire at a fireworks factory.
What can be said about that whole election that hasn’t been said before you might ask? Lots because like the fire at the fireworks factory, this will rage on for a while even after the blaze has been put down. And trust me, there will be a lot of smoke.
One of the takeaways from all this was how it was a failure of the mainstream media and the high priest of polling data. For months and months these people kept telling us what was going to happen and over and over again and like clockwork, the opposite happened.
They first promised this guy could never be the nominee. Well we saw how that turned out. It was like watching a methed out trucker plow his semi through an orphanage. The other candidates just had to stand there in futility as he insulted and bullied his way through the Republican primaries.
And during this process we watched pundit after pundit and talking head after talking head scramble to make sense of all this. So they can put us at ease and give some logical and formulaic gloss over what was happening. But anyone with a clear mind, could see something was happening here that no one has ever really seen before. There was a different kind of anger in the air and Trump’s antenna picked it up, unfortunately the media’s high tech satellites didn’t.
From here we watched this man say some of the most outrageous things one could ever conceive of, even by lunatic fringe standards. I could fill a blog just posting every crazy claim Trump had made during the election. And to drizzle some more goodies on that crazy cake, he pours a sweet salty caramel glaze of hate and bigotry to top it all off. And just when you are too full eat anymore he brings out a fine bottle of sexual assault and misogyny that’s been aged for over 30 years.
You would think after all of this, someone like him would of been down in the polls by over 30 points. Just some lunatic fringe character that will nominally split the vote for good measure.
Conventional wisdom would of told you this I admit. I reserved judgment until the general election because after all, the primaries are like playing exhibition games with your fellow teammates. It usually doesn’t have the same dynamic as the regular season games.
But with this we saw virtually every poll show Hillary Clinton winning. I remember at one point watching a CNN presenter playing with his virtual map and entertaining the idea of Texas going blue. Perhaps in a sane world this would of been a possibility, but we are talking about American politics here.
It seems that no one in those networks and polling companies could sense a different environment with their analysis and methodologies. It never seem to occur to them that despite insulting everyone on the planet and committing so many egregious acts, short of murder that something wasn’t quite right here. One thing that even for me as a casual observer worried about was the trump stigma and how this might affect the data.
In any other race, most people would be inclined to tell each other and pollsters who they are voting for without too many reservations. But when you have such a polarizing force like our candidate here, you are not dealing with the same behaviour. There’s no one else that could possibly kill a friendship, relationship or the mood like Donald J. Trump. In many circles it would be like picking up a loud ringing cellphone at an opera and having a conversation with your drug dealer.
People will lie to you in this case!
The media needs to do some serious soul searching after all this. I’ve never seen such a biased, ill informed, and misguided coverage in my life. I do admit it was an embarrassment of riches when it comes to my crusade against thought control. And if I hedge my bets correctly, the Trump administration will be the same. But probably just more on the embarrassing side.