Sunday, November 13, 2016

One-Third of Clinton Voters Say Donald Trump is Illegitimate President-Elect

I have to confess by this time I thought the anger and despair would have died down, but it's not. I expect it's going to go on for a while now, and those dejected about the election are never going to accept Donald Trump's legitimacy. What comes next isn't clear, but it seems to me people should be channeling their emotions and efforts into conventional forms of political participation, like organizing for 2018 and 2020. It's not that far away.

As noted, I was depressed for a couple of months after 2008, but when the tea party started going in my area, I joined up. It gave me a chance to be around similar people with similar goals, and the tea party started winning. It was fun. Democrats need to get organized at the grassroots. They need to get active and start working for their issues. If it were me (and I were young), I'd travel to those states where Democrats lost in the Electoral College and start organizing for the next round. Can Democrats win those disaffected voters back? That's the challenge. And it's a calling for the left.

In any case, at the Washington Post, "One-third of Clinton supporters say Trump election is not legitimate, poll finds":

A strong majority of Americans accept Donald Trump as the winner of the presidential election last week, but a significant minority of Hillary Clinton supporters say his victory was illegitimate, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey was conducted immediately after Election Day as anti-Trump protests sprang up across major cities, at the end of an acidic campaign in which Trump himself said he may not accept election results if Clinton prevailed.

The Post-ABC poll finds 74 percent of all Americans say they accept the election of Trump as legitimate while 18 percent do not. That result parallels a Post-ABC Tracking Poll just before the election, which found 79 percent of likely voters saying they were prepared to accept the outcome of the election regardless of who they support.

But while Trump supporters were more reluctant about accepting results before Tuesday — 22 percent said they were not prepared to do so — an even larger share of Clinton supporters now say they do not view Trump's election as legitimate.

A 58 percent majority of Clinton supporters say they accept Trump’s election, while 33 percent do not. Questions about Trump’s victory are passionate — 27 percent of Clinton supporters feel “strongly” he did not win legitimately.

There are sharp racial and gender differences in Clinton supporters’ acceptance of the results. Only 18 percent of whites who supported Clinton say Trump is not the legitimate winner, identical to the public overall, but fully 51 percent of black, Hispanic and other nonwhite Clinton supporters say Trump’s victory was illegitimate. Women who supported Clinton are twice as likely as men to question the legitimacy of Trump’s victory, 42 vs. 21 percent.

A Gallup poll released Friday asking a slightly different question found a smaller 23 percent of Clinton supporters saying they would not accept Trump as the legitimate president when he is inaugurated in January.

In the Post-ABC poll, nearly all of Trump’s supporters say he was elected legitimately, 99 percent, also marking a turnabout in confidence from one week ago when only 69 percent said they were prepared to accept the results of the election...
That's pretty revealing: A majority of "non-white" Clinton supporters reject Donald Trump. How's that "Hope and Change" working out for us? This is truly the legacy of the Obama years. We're divided along racial lines like no time since the civil rights era of the 1960s.

And it's going to take leftists to make things better. They're going to need to find a path to healing. I see Trump supporters saying time and again that their support for the Manhattan mogul is not racial. But leftists see everything through the lens of race. It's a cancerous legacy of the last 8 years. And it's a challenge for all Americans.

Still more. (Via Hot Air and Memeorandum.)

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