This election race can be seen as a battle of opposing ideologies or it can be viewed as a popularity contest. Your choice. For some it is about issues, for others it is a form of raw tribalism. For most, it’s something of a national trauma.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has done so much more than to simply parasitize the GOP. He has raked over the burning embers of the last few decades and insisted we’d be better off embracing the cold slag of the past. He has taken every ugly, debase instinct that festers in the corners of humanity’s soul and thrust them into the light by the sheer power of his own monstrous ego.
And since early signs indicate that he’s crumbling under the pressure of campaigning, you have to wonder how he would cope with the pressures of office.
Which is why he must not win. Which is why the fact that he just did is a little disturbing.
Fool Me Thrice
Things seemed to be just fine at first glance. New Hampshire law allows around 100 of its residents, spread across three separate towns, to have their votes cast and counted before anyone else in the country. The voting took place at the stroke of midnight earlier this morning.
Dixville Notch, the tiniest of specks on a New Hampshire map, voted first. In total, eight people cast their ballots; four votes went to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Two went to Trump and one went to the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson.
A write-in vote cast for Mitt Romney was discounted on the grounds that, you know, this isn’t 2012.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kdmb2Wbhqs
If such a microcosm could be scaled up into the election writ large, then we could all breathe a sigh of relief at the high-caliber bullet we just dodged. Alas, we have to live in the real world. We are liberals after all.
And besides, it didn’t even scale across the state.
Premature Congratulation
Two other towns joined in with the New England state’s early polling spree. But with much of the media apparently satisfied with the Dixville Notch headline it was left to nations in different time zones to follow the story into the wee hours of the morning. To the Times of India, the New Hampshire sunrise seemed to have taken on a decidedly orange hue.
At Hart’s Location, the second town to vote, Clinton once again triumphed this time with a 17 to 14 victory. However, when the town of Millsfield, situated just a few kilometers south of Dixville Notch, cast their ballots, one of those stop the press moments occurred. Because here, Trump trounced Clinton 16 votes to 4.
Which left the final tally in a swing state at 32-25.
To Trump.
Panic Stations
Nobody is going to attempt to extract some kind of electoral truth from data amassed from a few dozen voters. That would be silly.
But this early Trump victory can serve as a reminder to us all.
To be confident of victory in a race such as this is — for Clinton supporters at any rate — understandable. She is the odds-on favorite. She has been in the lead for almost the entire season. She’s the obvious choice.
But therein lies a danger. For many, the very idea of a Trump win is too awful to contemplate it’s like trying to imagine your own conception; icky, don’t go there!
And yet, this is the very prospect we must confront. Every free thinking voter in the U.S. who rejects the poisonous bile Trump represents needs to face this day with the assumption that Donald Trump is going to win. That victory is his, unless they do something about it. Unless they get out and vote, unless they encourage others to do likewise, unless they fight the good fight. Because those who volunteer to car pool, to organize, to pitch in; those people will at the very least be satisfied that they gave it their all.
Such an attitude might fly in the face of what your gut tells you, such thoughts of defeat will not enrich your day or help calm nerves flayed red raw from all the retarded bullshit this election cycle has thrown at you.
But that’s OK. When the polls close, you can take a leaf out of the Big British Book of Dealing with Whatever Life Throws at You.
You can have a nice cup of tea.
Featured Image from Liberal America’s media library
