Bradley effect

President-elect Trump. Roll that around in your mouth for awhile, see how it tastes.

This is what we get after the most portentous election in American history. The office of what was once quaintly called chief magistrate will be occupied by a temperamental narcissist hustler with no knowledge of statecraft, history, the world, or the Constitution. The republic is over, baby. You just need to decide how you'll live with it.

The pundits and pollsters were surprised. I was not.

For months, I've had a nagging worry. The cultural left grabbed the public square. Gay marriage, now accepted by most Americans, was not enough. We had Black Lives Matter shouting down opposing views and even taking the microphone from Bernie Sanders, whether a police shooting was uncalled for or righteous. The LGBTQI activists pushed into mainstream media to the point of a New York Times story on gender identity change in the first grade. The left weaponized language, such as "white privilege." As if all white people are the same and similarly "privileged." It celebrated the coming minority status of white people, demonized "white American history" through the lens of presentism as a cavalcade of nothing but genocide and oppression. Wrong-thinking academicians were badgered into silence or out of a job. The thought police aggressively patrolled social media.

And through all this, I thought: an increasingly angry number of whites were keeping eerily silent. Until they didn't on election day.

Yes, "fear of losing white privilege," "white nationalism," and no small amount of Obama Derangement Syndrome led to Trump's victory. It wasn't about the economy. But overreaching by the left was perhaps most consequential. And that kills the idea that Bernie Sanders would have been the better candidate. First, he would have been savaged by the right as SOCIALIST! (He was their preferred opponent). But like Hillary Clinton, he would have necessarily been the tribune of a changing country where the opponents of that change get a vote, too.

A version of the Bradley effect was surely at work here, too, where white likely voters told pollsters they were voting for Hillary — but when it came time to vote, the marked Trump. I warned about that, too. At the same time, years of Republican vote suppression efforts came together in this election, with results that were no doubt substantial and perhaps even decisive. As to this latter, most of the media will be so busy "normalizing" Trump that it will go unexamined.