What went wrong? say the pollsters and media mavens.
What do we do now? say the Democrats and opposition Republicans.
For all the second-guessing and protesting going on around the country, coupled with cheering and jubilation in other parts of the nation, the final score is that Republicans won control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Yes, Donald Trump collected a majority of electoral votes and was named President-elect of the United States. And no, he did not collect a majority of votes from the citizens of America.
And despite what the Trump surrogates claim, this is not a mandate. Were it so, the candidate would have collected a substantial majority of votes throughout the country as well as in enough key states to gain a more narrow majority of electoral votes.
Now the issue becomes whether to change the Constitution and abolish the electoral college in favor of a direct election to the presidency rather than the indirect system that's been in place since 1789. It was set up because the framers of the Constitution did not trust the so-called Average American to choose wisely. Instead, they would choose supposedly wiser, better educated men to choose a President for them.
And yes, at the time voting meant only white male property owners would do the actual choosing.
That was then. This is now.
However, the odds of amending the Constitution to abolish what for Republicans was a successful system are somewhere between slim and none. At least, not for a few more years.
It's possible, though, that midterm elections in 2018 might switch control of the House and Senate to Democrats, and the next population census, in 2020, will call for redistricting of population areas. If Dems are still in control after that, redrawing election districts could be done in such a way as to help the party maintain control until the next census ten years later.
It's called gerrymandering, and that's been a tradition in American politics in America since the early 19th Century, when politicians in Massachusetts redrew a district to ensure the re-election of one Elbridge Gerry. A diagram of the new district reminded a cartoonist of the shape of an angry salamander, so he coined the term "gerrymander" to describe the manner and shape of the contrived district.
Thus began a well honed tradition in American politics.
As for whether the new President will actually do what he said during the campaign he would do when in office, he is already modifying his promises. Like any other salesman, he said the things helpful to sell the product -- in this case, himself. Then when the sale is made, he can carry on with his own agenda -- whatever that may be.
But even if we take him at his word, that he will try to do all the things he promised, the reality is that he will need the support of Congress to do that. There is enough opposition to him personally from both Democrats and Republicans to at least slow him down, force him to modify his proposals, or even to abandon some of them.
As for using a bunch of executive decrees to bypass Congress, he would then face legal challenges all the way to the Supreme Court, which could very likely reject them.
It has happened before. When Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up various programs in his efforts to help the nation recover from the Great Depression, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court regularly overturned them. Granted, FDR then simply renamed a program and started again, but meanwhile that gave him time to continue while the challenge worked its way through the court system.
So what will happen now? Trump does not have a mandate, such as FDR had in both the popular vote and the electoral vote. The reality is that Trump won an upset victory, which few analysts and commentators expected.
The questions now are whether Trump will modify his sales pitches to help close the deal on various programs he has offered, abandon some as being unsalable, or develop new ones more likely to satisfy the needs and wants of the American public.
When a salesman has trouble persuading customers to buy a product, a successful strategy is to either change the product, modify the sales pitch or find some new customers.
On a national government level, the American public as customers aren't going anywhere.
Donald Trump, master salesman and President-elect, has already begun to change his products and modify his sales pitches.
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