postmerdem

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.