Wednesday Morning - The Aftermath

The presidential election comes to an end, mercifully, tomorrow night. But what happens Wednesday morning? Regardless of who wins, there will be both fallout and follow up from both the campaign and the results. Here are a couple of my key projections.

1. If Trump wins - There is a slight chance that he wins in which case it will be Brexit to the trillionth degree, with millions of voters wondering what they just did and, just like in Britain, googling "autocrat," "recall," and "Canada." If he does pull the inside straight, (in which voters individually vote for him as a protest pick not realizing that hundreds of thousands of others are doing the same), I do not expect Trump to complete a full four year term (for whatever reason).

2. Assuming the polls are accurate, Hillary Clinton is elected the first woman President of the United States. Congratulations! Unfortunately, she will be seen by many as not the affirmative pick despite her historic accomplishment but because she is the lesser of two evils. While she probably won't crack the 370 electoral votes her husband got in 1992, she may exceed his 43% popular vote total (or not).

3. Unless she wins in an unexpected landslide, expect the knives and second guessing by Democrats to come out in droves following the election. Right now everyone is most concerned about losing to Trump and less concerned about the score, but there will be plenty of Wednesday morning quarterbacking about why she couldn't do better against a historically bad opponent. This will be doubly so if she doesn't have long coattails and doesn't flip the Senate and perhaps pick up some seats in the House. After Tuesday, plenty of congressional Democrats might be left wondering what might have been had more popular candidates like Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren been leading the ticket. And after eight years of Obama's moderation, she won't be getting the liberal pass Obama got when he succeeded George W. Bush

4. Of course, it is possible that Hillary is able to deflect all of this blame for her underperformance to the FBI and Jim Comey who undermined any momentum she had with the late breaking email announcements.

5. The Democratic infighting will look like a preschool sandbox fight compared to the coming Republican civil war. As much as the establishment would like to see him go away after Tuesday, a man of Trump's ego, narcissism, and lack of political couth isn't going anywhere. It will be especially bad if Trump loses in a relatively close race with plenty of finger pointing about who is at fault and rounds of recriminations for those elected officials that didn't support or endorse him.

6. As a historically unpopular president-elect, it will be interesting to see how long the honeymoon lasts. More the point, the GOP 2020 presidential primary begins on November 9th as elected officials fall all over themselves to take on Clinton in four years.

7. What happens to Merrick Garland? Will Mitch McConnell snub Obama one final time and refuse to consider his Supreme Court nominee? Will the Senate GOP relent on hearings during a lame duck? Will Clinton renominate him or pick another (more liberal?) justice? Will however this plays out set a precedent for future nominations?

8. The media - having so obviously taken sides in the Trump-Clinton campaign will the media continue to advocate against anti-democratic rhetoric and machinations or will it have been solely confined to the uniqueness of the Trump candidacy? For instance, Trump was rightly criticized for delegitimizing President Obama's authority, but can't the same be said of a Senate that refuses to consider the Supreme Court nomination of a twice elected president? 

9. Bill Clinton - the former president cum First Dude was last heard on the campaign trail criticizing Obamacare. He was pretty much muzzled after that for the campaign's duration, but we're about to get daily doses of the Big Dog for the next four years. Think of all the coverage Michelle Obama got/is getting then multiply by, oh, infinite.

10. Hispanics ascendant - First there were soccer moms, then NASCAR dads. I expect the voter profile of this election to be known for Angry Latinos bent on sending Trump packing. From the Democratic side, do their numbers and mobilization supplant african-americans as the Dems' key constituency? For the Republicans, does their massive loss among latinos prompt them to appeal to this largest ethnic bloc or does it cause them to double down on their opposition to any immigration reform that the eleven million undocumented residents potential new voters in 2020?