President-elect Donald Trump served up a lot of controversial comments, gaffes, outrages, and unfounded accusations over the course of the 2016 election cycle — but at the end of the day, he won the election and won it fairly within the rules of electoral politics.
Pro-Clinton or anti-Trump protestors — take your pick — may adopt the slogan “not my president,” but the electoral process that has guided our country worked exactly as designed and produced margins that don’t engender notions of a successful challenge.
In an election cycle in which Trump and his supporters made loud and frequent accusations that the election was “rigged” or otherwise structured against his candidacy prior to Nov. 8, the actual result was a large electoral margin in his favor — but a clear loss in the popular vote.
Ohio State University law school professor Edward Foley told NPR he defined “rigging” of an election as “the systematic manipulation of the voting process or the counting of ballots. It’s intended to distort the outcome of the election, and it’s a systematic effort to do that.”
Commenting on confidence in the U.S. election process, Foley went on to say: “Statisticians talk about confidence levels: that notion that we can be 95 percent confident or 99 percent confident or 99.9 percent confident. Those are pretty good levels of confidence. We just can’t say it’s 100 percent confidence.”
On the national level, my belief based on a dogged study of months of available polling and modeling was that Trump would win the popular vote but lose the electoral vote. I could not have been more wrong.
My fear was that the country would witness protests very similar to the ones we’re watching nightly on the cable news networks, but that those protests would be led by Trump supporters angry over a Clinton electoral vote win and a Trump popular vote victory.
This election turned the conventional wisdom about American political behavior on its head. Even with a Republican Party that was deeply divided, Republicans and conservatives “came home” to support the GOP nominee whether they really liked him or not.
Democrats — particularly in the swing states — strategically abandoned Clinton in areas that in the past had been reliable Democratic territory.
Whether it emanates from Democrats or Republicans, undermining public confidence in the electoral process is an inherently dangerous proposition. The glue that holds American democracy together is the notion of “loyal opposition” with both words in that term carrying equal weight.
The protests over Trump’s election will eventually subside. He now has to transition from campaigning to governing. With GOP majorities in both houses of Congress, Trump has two years to work on the solutions he promised.
But Congress will have much to say about the success of the Trump agenda. That’s a fact that seems lost on many of the protestors. Lost, too, is the fact nationally that some 46 percent of eligible U.S. voters didn’t bother to vote on Nov. 8.
