Thoughts on the Election

• Wow, Trump won. After all the final votes get tallied, it’ll be interesting to do some analysis about how Trump in states compared to both expectations and against previous elections. Trump won in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin: pipe dreams in the previous elections, but the margin of victory in previous Republican strongholds was diminished. Ohio went for Trump by 8.6%, but Arizona was only 4.3% (it went for Romney by 9.1%)
• Trump wasn’t my #1 choice for President, but he was still better than Hillary. My primary reason for wanting Trump was for the future of the Supreme Court. Trump has floated potential names for justices and by all account, they are reasonably originalists. Hillary clearly stated she would appoint justices that would ignore the Constitution and decide important issues that should be left to the people via the 10^th amendment. Our country suffers when a democratic debate turns into a mandate from the Supreme Court, no matter how unpopular. Who knows what 7 liberal justices would do to gun rights, perhaps buying into the conventional liberal arguments that the 2^nd amendment is about muskets or only if you are in the National Guard. There is nothing to prevent them from overturning Heller. Concepts like stare decisis (precedence) are often touted by the media if a liberal ruling is in jeopardy, but they wouldn’t bat an eye to overturn Heller and impose strict gun laws.
• Liberals I know on Facebook were gloating so much before the election. If they won, they’d be taking victory laps. Now they are in meltdown mode, cursing all Trump voters. Liberals demonize their opponent and then wrap themselves in a cloak of moral superiority. My reaction is a mix of schaedefruede and annoyance.  Republicans didn’t become unhinged when Obama won.  We were forced to sit silently while everyone did victory laps around “the first black President.”
• A Clinton victory would have been a victory for the media. Almost all of the news and coverage was heavily slated to Clinton. Sure, they were able to push in the inexperienced Obama, but at least they couldn’t push someone under constant FBI investigation.
• When Democrats win, the talk is how Republicans need to change their policies to be more electable. When Republicans win, the media talk is that Republicans are angry, or at worst, a stylistic complaint about their candidate, e.g. People didn't like candidate's clothes. The fault never lies with their policies.
• Trump won’t be as great as his ardent supporters claim, nor will he bring about the calamity that his detractors fear. He is more of an old-school Democrat like Al Smith or Harry Truman. Even if he does just a decent job, he will cruise to re-election (if he chooses)  because the fear-mongering about him “being racist, sexist, xenophobic bigot, who will go house to house to deport anyone who isn’t white” will prove to be grossly false. Then the liberals will be left with nothing.
• The market is up tremendously despite all of the negative stories about how the market would react if Donald won.