A winner hasn't been declared in the race yet but, I can't lie, it's not looking good right now.
I honestly didn't even know how to start this post or what to put at the top of it.
Suffice to say the polls were wrong. Wildly wrong. Trump won in areas where he didn't lead a single poll. He also won the votes of significantly more white people than polls indicted. At this hour it appears that Clinton matched or exceeded Obama's performance in the usual urban centers, but Trump cleaned up in rural white counties. The historic turnout of Latino voters has essentially been canceled out by a massive swing of whiteness.
I've been fairly confident all along that Clinton would win, just as many veterans of Obama's two campaigns were highly confident, but even the most cautious or pessimistic pollsters didn't predict the results would diverge so wildly from the projections. I take responsibility if any regular readers feel like I misled them. If I did, I didn't do so intentionally.
I feel a deep sense of regret and sadness that women, Jews, Muslims, people of color, LGBTQ people could come under attack by white men who look like me, and I'm so, so sorry for that. I can't apologize enough. Right now it feels like nothing I've done, including writing for this blog five days a week for nearly 7 years, has been good enough. I feel ashamed.
I'm sure I don't need to tell you how big the stakes were in this election. Everything President Obama has worked for over the past 8 years could be wiped out. Climate change may be locked in. Tens of millions of people could lose their healthcare, including myself. Stock markets have already taken a huge hit as of this writing and could take an even bigger one tomorrow.
I wish I had better news, but I'm coming up short right now.
I sat here for almost an hour struggling to even give this post a title. I'll have more thoughts in the coming days, but for now all I can do is say I'm sorry.
Update (2:43 am)..... Hillary Clinton has reportedly called Donald Trump to concede.