Trump Hyperdrive: Sifting Through the Election Results

I think it is quite clear that Trump comes to office with a powerful mandate for change even though he narrowly lost the popular vote to Hillary. Looking at the big picture, I see powerful evidence of a repudiation of Obama and his policies in the fact that Republicans now control the White House, Senate, House and – in the long-run – the Supreme Court.

Republicans also dominate with 35 governors and a majority of state legislatures. See, http://www.governing.com/topics/elections/gov-republicans-add-dominance-state-legislatures.html The bottom line is that The Tea Party movement took away Obama's control of Congress in 2010. Now, Trump has taken away his fragile legacy.

I am also confident in predicting great changes will soon take place. Elections definitely have consequences. Withing a few months, Trump will reverse Obama’s numerous executive orders, change his foreign policy, and dramatically alter immigration patterns into the U.S. This is good news because, as I have argued for a long time, Obama came into office with a radical socialist agenda. See, http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/08/when_exactly_did_barack_obama_renounce_communism.html#.UBwxfAzIFng.google_plusone_share

Moreover, I think it is say to say this new nationalist, populous realignment will be locked in for a long-time once people experience the good things and great improvements that will take place under a skillful Trump administration.

While I am pleased that I called Trump's win correctly, I am disappointed that I completely missed the magnitude of his victory. I relied too heavily on polls. To set things straight, here is a great article that lays out how the Trump data team was looking at the numbers right before the election.

See, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/trump-s-data-team-saw-a-different-america-and-they-were-right

Nevertheless, I think the results illustrate something I have thought for a long-time. It never made sense to me that liberals could get away with blaming rural whites for the problems experienced by inner city minorities.

Finally, I remained startled at how bad the polling was for this election. I suspected that all these media outlets were producing inaccurate polls on purpose in order to actively discourage Trump’s nationalist, populist voter turnout. In retrospect, Nate Silver’s wildly wrong prediction of a Hillary victory will do a lot to sully his reputation. Silver, after all, was consistently wrong about Trump’s chances at every step of the process. Now, Silver appears to be blaming the pollsters without asking whether or not their liberal bias impacted their findings.

See, http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/

Silver’s current argument seems to be that there were a lot of shy Trump voters who failed to signal their support for Trump. This was a possibility, however, that the so-called experts dismissed prior to the election. See, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/donald-trump-bradley-effect

I called the election correctly, in part, because I knew enough Republicans who were shy about their support for Trump and I was convinced that the third party vote would eventually decline and that most of those voters would go to Trump rather than Hillary. I think I was also right to assume a Hillary bias among pollsters and to discount their predictions accordingly. I have had enough exposure to academia, the media and journalists to be confident that anti-Trump bias impacts their behavior.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.