WHAT DID WE LEARN FROM THE 2016 ELECTION?

…Trump may not move in here until early Summer

 

Gallup poll, says by 49%, more Americans think Trump will divide the country than unite it.

 

OK, it’s only been less than two weeks and the final numbers seem to be proving one basic fact.

 

“Donald Trump will take office as the most disliked, least trusted president in modern history.”

 

According to the latest poll numbers, the Politico/Morning Consult Poll shows him at 46% approval, while Gallup shows him at 42% approval. At this time in previous similar periods, the president-elect’s favorability was significantly higher.  At this time after the election, Bill Clinton was at 58% in 1992, George W. Bush was at 59% in 2000, and Barack Obama was at 68% in 2008. The idea that a new president would be taking office with the majority of Americans disliking him was unheard of before this election

 

Unless there’s a miracle, he will assume the office with the worst approval ever for a new president.

 

What is amazing is that Trump’s favorability has improved since the election.  But even with that, he is significantly below the norm for a newly elected president.

 

A new Pew Research Center poll shows 53% of Americans say Trump’s election makes them very “uneasy.” Pew also asked respondents to give the candidates a letter grade for how they conducted themselves during the campaign, and 43% gave Hillary Clinton an “A” or a “B”.  That’s consistent with what other losing candidates have gotten since they started asking the question in 1988. Only 30% gave Trump an “A” or a “B,” which was the worst ever since they started grading. The previous low mark for a winner was George H.W. Bush’s at 49%in 1988. In 2008, 75% gave high marks to Obama.

 

But this is not the worst part for Trump of the latest inouts from the voters.

 

In a separate Gallup poll, by 49%, more Americans say Trump will divide the country than unite it. This too, is much worse than what Americans had predicted for previous presidents.

 

To back this situation up is that Trump is only the 4^th US president to win the election, but to lose the popular vote.  And he is the first to lose the popular vote by what is expected to finally be over 2 million votes.  The count so far is already past 1.7 million votes for Hillary and as of this week California, which went mostly for Hillary, they had only finished counting 75% of the total votes.

 

The California Secretary of State’s office reported that the state still has 2.8 million ballots left to count, mostly because mail-in ballots take time to arrive and there are significant numbers of provisional ballots to examine as well. Clinton won California by an almost 2-1 margin, and if the remaining ballots reflect the same split, her final popular vote lead over Trump could reach 2.5 million. That’s five times as large as the margin by which Al Gore beat George W. Bush in the popular vote in 2000.

 

The voter turnout also shows that this election had the widest gender gap in election history

 

Hillary Clinton won the women’s vote by 12 points and lost men by 12 points: that’s a total 24 point gap.

 

But so far, Hillary received more votes than any presidential candidate in history except Barack Obama. And it’s not over yet.

 

The fact that a couple million more Americans chose Clinton to be their president is highly relevant to Trump’s legitimacy.

 

To govern with a real awareness that most Americans still need to be convinced that Trump’s presidency will be something other than a disaster, that means he should be moving carefully.  He should make some efforts to assure the people who voted against him that they won’t be victimized by his presidency.  That means not making the kind of sweeping changes that the public doesn’t support.

 

However, for someone like Donald Trump, he would like to believe that a win by any amount, even a negative one, constitutes a “mandate”.  He must then follow up on everything he proposed during the campaign.  And that was regardless of whether those proposals were popular or not.  You’d have to work hard to find someone less inclined to act this way than Donald J. Trump.

 

And let’s not forget that besides Mr. Trump, what about the Republican Congress?  High on their priority list was the slashing of taxes for the wealthy and the privatizing of Medicare.  Those were most certainly not what the public thought it was getting when it cast its ballots for Trump. (You will notice that “more jobs” are not part of the Congressional  priorities.)

 

The point is that even if Trump becomes a totally different person than the one that ran in the campaign, with this kind of Congress, it is very unlikely that how the new President Trump and his subsequent Congress will be considered in the first 100 days of his presidency, will not be much different from the way it is today.

 

Now it is time to say once again, “only time will tell”.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016