Mourning Hillary's Loss in the Electoral College

My husband and I went to Costco in Coralville, Iowa to buy stuff we needed and found a mini-support group in front of the popcorn sample stand. A woman from Illinois paused with a friend to chat about the election. She said she’d been crying for days and Friday was the first day she’d been out of her house. Both she and her friend had voted for Hillary. So did my husband and I.

The gentleman hosting the popcorn samples was black and from another country. He knew more about the Electoral College than we did, although I knew that the Electoral College is weighted more toward rural voters than urban voters because the founding fathers feared that farming communities with slaves (i.e., “non-people”) would have less influence than northern colonies. They also feared democracy. The popcorn man knew that Alexander Hamilton set up the Electoral College.

I gave the woman who’d been crying a big hug and told her I almost cried but the shock was too great. (The tears wouldn’t come. Maybe I’d be better off if they had come.)

A handsome middle-aged man hovered in the periphery. I was afraid we were blocking the samples and offered him and someone else some samples of popcorn. But he stayed hovering nearby even after he took the cup of popcorn. Maybe he wanted to hear what we were saying.

My husband hovered further away but stayed within sight. Had he stayed nearby, it might have comforted our Hillary contingent to know that a man in Iowa voted for Hillary. Hillary lost Iowa by nearly 10 percentage points.

I smiled at an African-American man working near the entrance/exit as we left the store. He didn’t smile back. He probably was thinking what I was thinking when I saw an elderly, tall, conservative-looking white couple walk toward their car as we were entering the parking area.

“Trump voters,” I thought to myself. But I couldn’t possibly feel the fear and loathing that a lot of minorities must be feeling right now, although the majority of Americans, women, have experienced a huge loss as well. (The women who voted for Trump just don't know it yet. I imagine their daughters will.)

I've noticed a lot of people are taking Trump's election personally. Van Jones called it "a whitelash," a rebuke of Obama's presidency. I take it personally too; this was a rejection of a woman qualified to be president. She lost to a serial groper, a sexual assaulter, a bigot and xenophobic who's obviously unqualified and unfit to be president.

I had lunch with a friend the day after the election, a friend who's a Republican and voted for Hillary Clinton and Sen. Chuck Grassley. We were both in mourning. I thought of writing in Rob Hogg's name instead of voting for Patty Judge, but I held my nose and voted for Patty Judge after reading an article about how we shouldn't write in non-candidates' names.

It still surprises me that 53% of women voted for Donald Trump, who bragged about sexually assaulting women, claimed he never did, and then insulted and threatened to sue the 12 women who came forward to say he had indeed assaulted them. Being an openly avowed sexual predator is apparently not a crime that prevents a presidential candidate from being president-elect in 2016. That alone is a shocker, especially if you've ever been sexually assaulted.

In fact, some Trump supporters want to repeal the 19th Amendment, which gives women the right to vote.

A few locally infamous misogynists teased me that a “wise man” of their acquaintance was going to write in “Strike the meteor” for president. Thanks, all of you who wrote in mythical candidates or threw away your votes on third-party candidates. I told my "leftist" tormentors that this election was serious and to grow up. Maybe now that they’ve woken up to Trump’s America they’ll …. No, they won’t. They’ll blame everyone but themselves.

“Hillary didn’t inspire me,” a male, third-party voter protested to my husband, who caucused for Hillary in 2008 and 2016 and voted for her in 2016. In other words, the third-party voter was saying, "It’s Hillary’s fault for not inspiring me.” No it isn’t. While she could have done a better job of explaining what she was going to do for the country, she was clearly more qualified to be president than Trump. And don't forget, she had to play a lot of "d" as in defense. The FBI, including FBI Director James Comey, came after her; the Russians hacked her email and that of the Democratic National Committee; the media set up a false equivalence between Hillary's so-called "crimes" of using a private server for her emails and Trump's sexual assaults, failure to pay his workers and contractors, fraud, racketeering, misrepresentation of services, misogyny, bigotry, and xenophobia, together with conspiring with the Russians to destroy Hillary and boost Trump's campaign. The media also gave Trump billions of dollars' worth of free air time.

What comforts me is that several women of color from diverse backgrounds won U.S. Senate seats: Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Tammy Duckworth (D-IL). Women of color won Congressional seats, too.