Washington, DC: Defying all electoral predictions, Donald John Trump has been elected as the 45th President of the United States of America. It wasn’t merely the opinion polls that got the calculations horribly wrong; the initial results were misleading, too, as the pro-Democrat American media had begun reporting little leads that Hillary Rodham Clinton got over her Republican rival from obscure villages and counties.
Trump needed 270 electoral college votes to clinch the presidency, which pollsters had said was near impossible. He finally defeated Clinton by a huge margin.
In preliminary analyses, Trump’s victory is being attributed to a low voter turnout among Blacks. While the Hispanics turned out in large numbers, they did not vote for Clinton en bloc; Trump got 35% of their votes. In the television interviews with women, it turned out Clinton is not liked by many people of her own gender.
Analysts also say the Democrats’ strategy was flawed. They concentrated on social messaging while Trump-led Republicans’ economic message for the have-nots made deep inroads into the American demography where housewives, the uneducated section of the White population and those who feel deprived of jobs by immigrants make a sizeable chunk of the electorate.
The graphic by CNN that follows shows dominance of the Republicans across the central and southern parts of the US. For the final score, one may catch the live streaming by one or more of the following YouTube channels:
At the time of reporting, these channels had not called the election yet. Unlike the Indian television channels where Times Now relayed CBC, for example, that showed Trump with 283 electoral college votes leading Clinton by a huge margin hours ago, commentators in these YouTube live videos say the Republicans have not arrived there as yet.
But little is left to imagination or speculation after Donald Trump’s speech. Contrary to what the media had been expecting of Trump till yesterday, it may well be Clinton who could say, at daybreak, something went wrong in the election mechanism to account for her defeat!
The Associated Press says it is final. The score is 276-218 in favour of Trump. Their illustration follows:
While the media reported that Clinton had conceded defeat and Trump relayed the news through his speech, too, she did not come out to deliver a concession speech on the occasion. Her campaign manager John Podesta said she would speak not before the next morning.
In his speech as President-Elect, Trump came across as a personality diametrically opposite of how he has been projected by the media. He said he was the president for all Americans. He addressed those who had not voted for him, saying he needs to work with them. Trump appealed to fellow Americans to “come together as one united people”.
This was besides the customary show of solidarity with members of one’s family that mark the on-stage performance of all American presidents and presidential candidates. Vice President-Elect Mark Spence in his wlecome speech and Trump in his expressions of gratitude spoke highly of their families.
Trump has reiterated he will revoke the nuclear agreement with Iran, repeal Obamacare (outgoing president Barack Obama’s healthcare programme) and revise the trade deals with quite a few countries, especially Mexico and Canada. But he also said that, while American interest would be supreme for him , he would also like to be fair to all other countries.
The election results include retention of control of the Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives. It will be interesting to find out how the future president’s relationships with his colleagues in the party who had abandoned him in the course of the campaign would pan out.
As for the media, a humbled but graceful New York Times has called the result “a powerful rejection of the establishment“. The Washington Post has posted a long list of American citizens unhappy with the results. The headline of another report in the website calls the result “shocking“. Betraying its grudge, the BBC, in what should have been a simple chronology of events of the evening, has reported, “Donald Trump has declared he has won the US election,” as if the actual result differs from his declaration. The Economist‘s headline is preceded by a slug: “Fright night“.
