A crazy end to a crazy election cycle

The most bizarre presidential campaign in American history ended Tuesday with the most unlikely result. Donald Trump garnered enough electoral votes to win the presidency. Everyone I talked to, Democrats AND Republicans, were shocked and surprised at the outcome because no one saw it coming. Clinton's lead had looked very stable going into the last couple of weeks before Election Day with the polls showing her ahead by a consistent 4 to 6 percentage points. But it turns out the public polls were wrong. And the exit polls were wrong. And the internal polls were wrong. Everyone was wrong about the results.

So people were asking how could this happen. With technology as advanced as it is what could have happened to invalidate ALL the polls? The experts, if we can still call them that, said the only plausible answer was that people didn't want to admit to voting for Trump so they lied to the pollsters. Others contended that Americans in general were so fed up with pollsters and the press that they lied to them on purpose to skew the results. Whatever the reason, even though Secretary Clinton received a quarter of a million more popular votes than Trump did, it's electoral votes that win a presidential election and Trump got 279 of them, nine more than he needed.

He and Dwight D. Eisenhower are the two most inexperienced Presidents we've ever elected. Eisenhower was a career soldier who, before he ran for President, was rumored to have never even voted in an election. Trump's whole life has been spent in the private sector, never running for or being elected to any office. So he has no track record and that's evidently what a sizeable number of voters wanted. One potential problem for Trump in matching accomplishments to the promises he made to his supporters during the campaign is that Trump has always been in charge before being elected President. He ran his own company for decades and he was the sole decider as to what was bought and sold and the business strategies his company would employ.

He can't do that as President. We have three branches of government for a reason and that reason is to have checks and balances on all three branches so one person can't dictate to the country what we're going to do. So Trump is going to have to persuade Congress, which contains many members on both sides of the aisle who didn't support his run for the Presidency, to vote for his policies and that won't be easy. The Democrats are already talking about voting as a block to reject everything he proposes, like the Republicans did to Obama for eight years and there are Republican House and Senate members who still oppose Trump and may not fall in line with him either. So it's impossible to know or even predict what he will be able to accomplish during his presidential term.

Politicians typically don't maintain the same attitude and persona after being elected they displayed during the campaign and I don't think Trump will either. He's smart enough to know he has to work with others to get anything done and although it's likely to be very frustrating to him to do that, I think he'll at least make the effort. If the effort fails however, who knows what happens after that.

It's that uncertainly that is one of the reasons for the protests that have erupted in major cities across the country against his election and I don't see that they have any point. He won the Presidential election fair and square, according to the rules we've always elected Presidents by and it's now our obligation to give him the chance to either succeed or fail as our leader. The protests don't accomplish anything.

Finally, on a personal note, I made a few wagers with friends this election like I've done for the past several elections and I lost. I paid off one wager immediately because we played golf on Wednesday and then went to the bank on Thursday to get the money for the other wagers. But before I could seek one person out, he found me, showing up at a watering hole he never frequents which told me he was there specifically to collect on his bet. That was distasteful to me because it indicated he believed I would not seek him out on my own. He was wrong about that and because he was wrong, I discovered a friend I thought I had wasn't really a friend at all.