The mood in New York City in the afternoon before the world’s most expected election was one of wired up tension. Liberal New Yorkers would prove to have ample reason to be correct in their anxiety.
The election divided America’s Russian and Ukrainian diasporas along largely ethnic lines, no less than it divided the rest of the nation. Many Russian-American voters voiced the concern that “I don’t want a war with Russia and Hilary will star World War 3” as their justification for voting for the reality star.
The returns that began coming in around 8 p.m. Eastern Time were immediately stunning in their consistent underachievement of the targets set by Hillary Clinton’s voters.The pans of the faces at the Clinton headquarters depicted mass shock and dazed confusion reminiscent of the after-effect of a terrorist attack.
At around midnight the pundits announced that so many Americans had made inquiries into moving to Canada that the Canadian immigration website had crashed.
By midnight the CBS news analysts announced that “Hillary Clinton’s pathway to the white house is narrowing significantly.” The far eastern blue collar counties of Pennsylvania and Michigan counties that included the suburbs around Detroit were being significantly outperformed by the Trump campaign. America’s liberals were aghast as state after state was colored red on the cable channels’ maps.
By midnight the majority of the analysts were admitting that the Republican was steamrolling across the board. Wisconsin, which Clinton had never visited during the campaign, and which had been widely referred to as a the Democratic “blue wall” was called for Trump late in the evening.
Instead of being gleeful, the right wing pundits on Fox News seemed to be even more stunned than their ashen faced Democratic counterparts. The crowd on the floor of the Trump headquarters would break out into periodic chants demanding that Trump “lock her up.” The pollsters, analysts and political operatives whose every pre-election prediction turned out to be outrageously incorrect began to argue about why it was they had gotten every single prediction wrong. They mused whether this was a victory for the Republican party or rather the birth of a new political movement. The social networks began to fill up with people vowing to never trust polls ever again.
By 12:30 the Fox hosts were cackling about the “choice this country has made” while the business channels showed the U.S dollar cratering and the stock market taking a historic dive. Bedecked in pearls and sounding uncannily like a French aristocrat mourning the fall of the ancient regime, Reagan’s former speech writer Peggy Noonan declared an apocalyptic uprising against the elites. A tenacious cartoon billionaire reality star had just upset every possible expectation.
At 2 a.m, the Clinton campaign Chair Joh Pedestal stepped out onto stage to tell the crowd to go home and get some sleep. The campaign would wait until every vote would be counted, and Clinton would herself not speak on the night of the election. After all the months of speculation whether Trump would concede in the event that he lost, it was the Clinton campaign that would wait till the next morning to surrender. At almost 3 in the morning it was reported that Clinton called on Trump to offer her concession.
