It happened.
We don’t know what it is that pollsters got wrong. We don’t know what it was that convinced voters — more voters than the entire population of Canada — to vote for him. But we do know that we will never underestimate the power of a political outsider again.
Donald Trump has won the 2016 general election. On January 20th, 2017, he will be inaugurated as the next President of the United States. Even though many polls gave him an abysmal chance at winning, he certainly made a comeback on Tuesday, winning a number of battleground states including Florida and North Carolina. At no point during the election did Clinton actually lead in electoral votes.
Was it sexism? Was it emails? Is Hillary Clinton that disliked? Was it repressive voting restrictions? Xenophobia? Third party support? A little bit of all of that?
We’ll probably be talking about it for decades. There will certainly be films, books, and plays written about this election. There will be academic papers published from sociological, political, psychological, historical and even scientific perspectives.
We don’t know what the next four years will hold. We don’t know what the world will look like in the year 2020. But we do know that we will not let Donald Trump have it easy. We can and we will continue to fight for progressive values, for the LGBTQ community, for the Black community, for the Latinx community, for the millions of poor Americans, for the Muslim population, for women, and for survivors of sexual abuse. And we will never overlook an outsider again.
The election may be over, but the world isn’t. We can vote during midterms to lessen the impact of his policies. We can prepare ourselves for 2020. We can protest, and we can make every Congressman and woman, every Senator, every Governor hear our voices. We can push them to make the right choices. We can continue to show each other kindness and compassion. The 2016 election is over, and while it might feel like it right now, but the world isn’t.
The country went low tonight… but we can still go high.
