Editor's note: This is a revised and updated version of a column first published online-only Wednesday.
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.
Faces at the little gathering, so eager-looking at 7 o'clock, had grown long by 8:20.
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 distrust, 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Obamacare was either going to be repealed--probably with a Medicaid block grant left totally to the discretion of the Asa Hutchinsons of the world--or left unfixed and to wither.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.
What might our new foreign policy be? Who could say? Trump had no evident understanding of foreign policy.
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 went to polling places from Pennsylvania to Ohio to Wisconsin to Michigan 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--indeed the state of his existence--and delivered 80 percent margins to Trump.
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 Michigan. By 9:45 p.m., the white working-class male without a college education was rejecting her wholesale in both those states.
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.
By 10:30 p.m., a reality TV celebrity beset by megalomania and a short attention span--and who groped women and paid no income taxes and started 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 seemed to await the Dow Jones come morning (except that the 800-point plunge overnight in Dow futures gave some investors an element of bullishness when the markets actually opened).
Generally, 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.
Then, to make my evening complete, state Sen. Jason Rapert sent me an open message on Twitter: "You got trouble now, ole buddy."
At long last, the strutting preacher-senator also got something right.
At 11:10 p.m. Trump edged ahead of Clinton in the Democratic lock of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia had voted heavily for Clinton and in full. Returns were still coming in from the white working men without college degrees living between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh--Alabama, as James Carville once called that part of Pennsylvania.
Short version: Nate Silver was wrong. I was wrong. All the pundits were wrong. The midday-confident Clinton campaign was wrong.
I had told the weekly LifeQuest class that the prevailing national mood was for disruptive change, which favored Trump, but that Trump was squandering the advantage by frightening Republican women with his abominable behavior.
Guess what? Exit polls found that 89 percent of Republican women voted for Trump. They wound up coming home.
That lifted Trump to Mitt Romney's level. Then blacks turned out in lesser numbers for Clinton than for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. That combination of factors made the race essentially a tie, which permitted the white working-class males with no college education--and white working-class females with no college education to a strong if lesser extent--to deliver Trump's victory.
Meantime, medical marijuana passed in Arkansas, just in the nick of time.
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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.
Editorial on 11/10/2016