I started banging that drum W-A-Y back on DU, and was largely ignored.
Michael Moore posted his theories about how we needed to pay attention to what was going on in the rust belt, how there was a very real chance that Trump could win, and he was branded a has-been, a sell-out, starved for attention, and a "ReTHUGlican."
Moore's prediction pretty much came through.
We believed polls from sources like Huffington Post, that showed Clinton with a 95% chance of winning.
And as far as voter recounts, fraud investigations, etc are concerned, I can hear Antonin Scalia laughing from the gates of hell as he says "get over it."
It's all rotten to the core...whatever the Trump machine did to win, I don't believe we will ever get all the answers.
So now, we are having conversations about Paul Ryan's dream of Social Security and Medicare being obliterated actually having a shot at reality.
We knew all of this six months ago...further back than that.
We just weren't in the mood to talk about it, because we knew we were going to win in a landslide, because the polls told us so.
Now the only real shot we have is 100% of elected Democrats voting against it, and enough Republicans finding their "conscience" (or at minimum, a reluctance to deal with the political blowback) who will follow suit.
If Ryan rolls Medicare into his plan to dismantle Obamacare via "reconciliation," we're screwed.
We're screwed anyway.
We have to learn to ignore the polls, and we need to aggressively reach out to every segment of voters who felt that we weren't listening to their concerns. It's too easy to say that Trump rode in on the back of white supremacists. He DID, but it also goes a lot deeper than that. There are the people who simply did not vote, or voted for Stein, and the voters who underplayed the "evil" of Trump by deciding that he was the "lesser of two evils."
I've heard it said many times that the "opposition research" the Republicans had waiting to spring on Sanders could have brought him down, if he had received the nomination. That could very well be true. I know that Clinton got between two and three million more popular votes than Trump. I've followed the whole saga.
And by the time everything went into the pot and got stirred, we were handed "President Trump."
IF his goals are met...and more specifically, IF Paul Ryan's goals are met...we have the next four years to figure out how we are going to fix what can be fixed. Wins in 2018 can be the start of that.
But rest assured that Trump will be focused primarily on his own personal enrichment and ego gratification, that the Republicans will be focused on enriching the billionaire class, that everything they see as "entitlement"...Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, you name it...will come under the knife. They will try every backdoor approach imaginable to push legislation through, and the degree to which Democrats can block them is the degree to which they will "succeed."
We have no "new" information. We simply believed that what is happening right now was not going to happen.
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