It was 8:20 p.m., quite early, when I left the little victory watch party of neighborhood liberals and walked home, appropriately in the dark, to pet the dogs and ponder the midnight-due column.
Party faces eager at 7 o’clock had grown long by 8:20. Champagne was uncorked.
“It’s going to be all right,” some were saying. But it wasn’t going to be all right. Returns don’t lie. They are a nightmare without waking.
It looked at that early hour like a dire circumstance for the nation no matter what happened.
Either the totally unfit and utterly preposterous Donald Trump would be elected president; or he would lose narrowly to late-reporting votes from Democratic urban strongholds, then contest the outcome and fuel the nation’s cancerous resentment and hatred; or Hillary Clinton would stagger to a wholly unimpressive victory that would render her even more anemic as president than I had already expected even with a clear-enough victory.
Obamacare was going to be repealed (and not replaced) or left unfixed and to wither. The Supreme Court might never get a ninth justice, unless it got a Republican who might undo women’s rights and gay rights.
Pollsters and the conventional national media would lose yet more credibility, exposed as thoroughly wrong and wholly out of touch.
The gaps between Americans based on gender, race, class and geography could only widen and get more dangerous.
This was the revenge of the white working man without a college education.
He — not James Comey — was the story.
This white working man without a college education went to the polling place to protest the state of the economy, the state of politics, the state of the culture, the state of police-black relations, the state of the world, that so-called globalism — indeed the state of his existence — and delivered 80 percent margins to Trump.
Clinton was winning upscale diverse states. She was losing states populated substantially with those white working men without a college education.
By 9:15 p.m. I tweeted that it would come down to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., delivering Virginia to Clinton, along with Nevada, where the early vote was supposed to sustain Clinton.
But that assumed Clinton would win Wisconsin, because she had been so sure of it she hadn’t campaigned there, and, in the end, Michigan. By 9:45 p.m., she was significantly behind in both.
Then Nate Silver, who can never be wrong when he adjusts after the fact, declared Trump the 55 percent favorite to win. This was a few hours after he had declared Clinton a better than two-to-one favorite.
Some of us make binding predictions, stand to account and accept the fools the white working man without a college education has made of us.
By 10:30 p.m., a reality TV celebrity who groped women and paid no income taxes and ran a sham university — and who was essentially backed by Vladimir Putin and openly endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan — appeared to be in the process of winning the American presidency. Presumably he would then mass-deport Mexicans, build a monstrous wall and make the country … either great again or a debacle.
One who loves his country roots for the former, even as the latter seems a more logical possibility.
Asian markets looked toward the United States and plummeted. That fate awaited the Dow Jones come morning. Dow futures plunged 750 points. It meant 401(k)s would bleed — darned near bleed out — by midmorning.
Markets like stability. The United States was in the process of doing the most unstable thing imaginable. Trump called it “Brexit-plus,” getting at least something right.
So then, to make my evening complete, state Sen. Jason Rapert sent a message: “You got trouble now, ole buddy.”
At long last, the strutting preacher-senator also got something right.
Rapert was chortling that America seemed to be electing a man that he, in March, had said no self-respecting preacher in the Church of Christ or Assembly of God could ever support.
At 11:10 p.m. Trump edged ahead of Clinton in the Democratic lock of Pennsylvania.
Silver explained that he had warned all along of Clinton’s Electoral College challenges.
Yeah, well, and I said at the close of Tuesday’s column that I thought Clinton would win, but that I was applying conventional political wisdom, which had been wrong at every turn this year.
Short version: Silver was wrong. I was wrong. All the polls and pundits were wrong. And the Clinton people, said to be confident midday, were wrong.
Meanwhile, medical marijuana passed in Arkansas. Perhaps the state can become a destination for residents of states not offering new forms of relief for new levels of pain.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.