December 2, 2016 11:51 AM
Final Thoughts
Reports are that Hillary Clinton believes that FBI Director James Comey’s two letters to Congress late in the campaign halted her momentum.Two weeks before the election the announcement was made that the premiums on the Affordable Care Act would go up at least 25% in 2017.
Of 135,000,000 votes cast, it would only take a change in a total of 102,000 votes in three states, Michigan (10,704), Pennsylvania (68,171) and Wisconsin (22,171) and Clinton is elected. A friend to whom I mentioned these numbers reminded me that even 10,000 is a lot to recover in a recount.
The popular vote margin that Clinton has received in California will exceed Clinton’s margin over Trump in the national popular vote.
It was only 7 days after the 2016 general election when I received my first fundraising request from a 2018 candidate.
This campaign marks the retirement of a generation of democratic political campaigners and operatives.
During the campaign, Trump said what came to mind and then repeated those things which drew the most attention, whether or not they were actually true.
If you watched the Trump events on TV and then watched the Clinton events you could not help but notice the difference in the size and the level of excitement.
The judgement by the media and pundits was that Donald Trump lost all three debates with Hillary Clinton. But if you listened to his words, in each of the debates he made the same several points that were designed to reach his then and future followers.
This election raises the question of whether the reliance on analytics has caused campaigns to abandon time honored approaches. I believe there is room for both.
Now that the campaign is behind us, the media as well as a variety of lawyers and other public officials have decided to land on the question of potential conflicts of interest resulting from the large and complicated business holdings of the President-Elect and his family.
Everyone agrees that the legal conflict rules for government employees do not apply to the President and Vice-President.
Throughout the campaign there was considerable media angst about the fact that Trump refused to reveal his tax returns. The media was replete with stories that he may not have paid any federal income taxes for up to twenty years. He was elected anyway.
There is no way Trump is going to sell off all of his holdings as some have suggested. They are very much a part of the future of his family. He has proposed that the children will run the Trump empire while he is president. There is little question about whether they will talk to their father along the way.
Yes, he and his family are likely to get wealthier during his term in office.
The questions on which we should all be focusing are:
- What is Trump going to do to resolve the problems facing this country?
- What is he going to do to improve the lives of the people who elected him?
Given this last election, both major political parties have big problems but more on that in the next issue of the Watch.
