postmerdem

[calimac]

The response of those I know who were on the losing side of this election has overwhelmingly been grief. That's interesting. Those who lost eight years ago responded mostly with anger, and have gone on responding that way ever since. I think that says something of the differences between us.

I respond to grief by retreating into research. After my mother died, I stayed up most of the night selecting photos from her collection, and copying them at the all-night copy store in Palo Alto, for the memorial board at her funeral.

Now I'm researching election statistics. This is interesting, and you can see county-level (town-level in New England) statistics here. Can you find the counties that went 85% for one or the other?

The big Wednesday-morning quarterbacking question is, did the 3rd-party vote turn the election? And the answer is, it could have. The only state for which, if all the Jill Stein voters had gone Hillary, she would have won, is Wisconsin. That's not enough. But if a goodly portion of the Libertarians had done so as well, it could also have taken Florida, Pennsylvania, and, interestingly, Arizona, and that would have turned to a 302-EV Clinton victory.

But I don't think that's likely. Turnout is the real issue here, the same turnout that lost the Democrats the 2010 midterms. That, and voter suppression and intimidation, which I await measurements and estimates of.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I don't think you could anticipate many Libertarians voting for Clinton. The ones I know, or follow online, were trying to decide if they could hold their noses hard enough to vote for Trump. I was one of those who couldn't; I voted for Johnson. But had I not done so I would have followed Bush's alleged example and left that line blank. Or stayed home.

Though there is always Megan McArdle at Bloomberg View, whose recent column explained why she thought Trump was an unacceptable risk. I hope she turns out to be wrong.

If all the Johnson voters in New Mexico (where he did best) had gone Trump, Trump would have carried that state. On the other hand, if the Stein voters had gone Clinton, they would have taken it back to Clinton. That's as big an impact as Johnson had, I think.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's why I separated out the two, and added that I didn't think the second scenario was likely. Jill Stein voters may have been mostly itchy Democrats, but my impression of Libertarians (in the past as well as now) is that they're mostly disappointed Republicans.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

The Libertarian Party as it is now, and much of the larger movement, grew out of the Goldwater presidential campaign, and out of Ayn Rand's support for Goldwater. So pretty much yes. I was not myself a Goldwater supporter (too young then for political awareness) and in retrospect I think he was wrong about states' rights; but he's clearly one of the ancestral figures.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I just started writing a postmortem, and my first point is turnout.

[(Anonymous)]

That is interesting. The losing side from 2008 still seems to be angry even in this year's victory, to judge from the nasty taunting I perused online today.

-MTD/neb

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I just started writing a postmortem, and my first point is turnout.