by Rush Limbaugh in the Limbaugh Letter, Dec 2016
"We must reject the failed elites from Washington, who've been wrong about virtually everything happening for decades." -- Donald Trump, rally speech in Charlotte, NC, 10/26/16
"You had your chance, it's our turn now." -- handwritten sign on U.S. Highway 62 near Sharon, PA, in support of Trump, quoted in The Washington Examiner, 11/6/16
Call it the Deplorables' revenge. The people scorned and sneered at by the smug Wizards of Smart, those rubes in "flyover country" routinely labeled by slurs -- racists, sexists, bigots homophobes, xenophobes, losers -- blew the doors off the political prediction business.
Nobody whose job it is to see things coming, saw it coming. We heard hundreds of times throughout the campaign that Donald Trump "had no path". He didn't have a path to the GOP nomination, he didn't have a path to get 1,237 delegates at the GOP Convention, and then he had no path to 270 Electoral College votes and the White House.
Well, all along, you know who didn't have a path? The ruling class. The elites. The haughty, propagandizing media. The establishment, of both parties. They had no path to stop the massive but peaceful uprising of the core of the country that gave their would-be overlords the boot.
The Declaration of Independence says, "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." And in this election, the American people withdrew their consent to be governed by a bunch of arrogant, corrupt screw-ups.
The ruling elites of the early 21st century -- who consider themselves "citizens of the world", rather than Americans -- have been tossed on the ash heap of history. And the Clintons have finally, at long last, been dispatched into the deep.
Though the pundits are still begging each other to explain how it happened, and what it all means -- the vote was not nuanced. The outcome was decisive. Donald Trump won 30 states out of 50, for a total of 306 Electoral College votes, to Hillary's 232. That's the worst Electoral College showing for a Democrat in 28 years.
And while the left is clinging to the sole talking point it could salvage, Clinton's supposed popular vote edge (which I've predicted could well evaporate as the official tallies are completed), Hillary's lead there "is entirely due to her oversized margin of victory in uber-liberal California," according to to the 11/17/16 Investor's Business Daily. "California alone is dumping vast numbers of votes into the Clinton column -- where she currently has 3 million more than Trump."
But aside from the coasts, Hillary got schlonged. As Michael Barone reports in The Washington Examiner, 11/9/16, "The heartland -- roughly the area from the Appalachian ridges to the Rocky Mountains, with about two-thirds of the national vote -- went 52-44 percent for Trump." That, ladies and gentlemen, is a national mandate.
This was the continuation of an eight-year anti-Democrat wave. Under Barack Obama, the Democrats have lost 69 U.S. House seats, 13 U.S. Senate seats, 12 governorships, and 913 state legislative seats. They have been weakened so badly nationally that they fully control the governments of only five states. Democrats are in their worst shape in terms of national elective power since the 1920s.
None of this was supposed to happen. Remember all the conventional wisdom from the smart people. They told us: "Trump will lose in a landslide, he doesn't have a prayer. Because of Trump, Republicans will lose the House and Senate, and it will be a bloodbath." So anyone supporting Trump was excoriated as a sellout, an idiot, complicit in taking the Republican Party down the tubes with massive landslide losses. Which would finally teach everyone, once and for all, you can't listen to talk radio. You must only listen to the conservative intellectuals.
Well, not only were Democrat policies and the Democrat Party repudiated, up and down the ballot, but so was the so-called intelligentsia on the right. Look at what has happened. The Republican Party with more power in Washington and across the fruited plain than it had in almost 100 years, all because of one election.
As Victor Davis Hanson put it at Town Hall on 11/17/16: "Trump miraculously won the Electoral College despite adversarial media and hostile Democratic and Republican establishments. He ran with relatively little campaign spending, virtually no ground game, few political handlers, little celebrity backing, and few establishment endorsements. And he won because he rewrote the traditional rules of red/blue presidential politics."
Which, if you recall, is exactly what Donald Trump said he would do, from Day One.
Of course, Trump's analysis received nothing but contempt and ridicule at the time. And meanwhile, everything the know-nothing know-it-alls on our side told us beforehand turned out to be dead wrong. On the Bloomberg TV show "With All Due Respect" on 11/15/16, GOP strategist Mike Murphy was asked why he had been so sure there was no way Trump could win:
"Where my blindside was, I did not think [Trump would] do better than Romney with Latinos. I assumed [Hillary would] get historic numbers of African American turnout in places like Detroit and Milwaukee, which she did not do ... I knew he'd do well with non-college-educated white working class folks, but I did not know he would break the meter ... [H]e blew away Reagan numbers there. I've never seen anything like it ... [He] picked the lock of the Electoral College. He won fair and square. I missed that coming because that has not been seen before ... He massively over-performed in the rural areas, exurbs, and these metal-bending [manufacturing] towns."
This, after months of treating Trump supporters and analysts who predicted exactly this scenario as fringe idiots. Murphy claims to have learned a good (although "bitter") lesson, but for the most part, the consultant class will not. Exhibit A, the report Politico ran on 11/17/16 titled, "GOP Learning Wrong Lessons from Trump Win, Republicans Fear."
It's about a bunch of "Republican operatives" panicked that after what Trump just accomplished, nobody is going to listen to their harping about demographic outreach, which is what passes for a core principle with these guys:
Republican operatives spent four years warning that the party needed to diversify -- or risk a blowout at the ballot box. Donald Trump spent the campaign trafficking in divisive racial rhetoric [ED: no he didn't] and he won anyway. Now, those who pushed for a more inclusive GOP fear that their party will absorb the wrong takeaways from Trump's win ... "The demographics of the country are very clear, and this worked this time, but is it a long-term winning strategy...?" asked one veteran conservative who helped lead the NeverTrump movement. "No ... Sooner or later, the Republican Party, if it's going to be viable, it has to be more inclusive."
Donald Trump just demonstrated how small identity-based thinking is. He just took all the consultants to school on how to make a political appeal to Americans. No more splitting us up into categories -- we're done with the basket of deplorables. We have to remind the elites, over and over, how badly they lost. There's a new America rising. They were routed. They are defeated. We have to pound it into them. And I'm happy to do it.