They call it “eating crow” when you made a statement or a prediction and it turned out to be dead wrong. Well, I would never eat crow as I feed wild birds and I have the utmost respect for crows and they are considered to be very intelligent.
So I won’t use that expression — I’ll just say that I was dead wrong about the outcome of the Presidential election. I didn’t see any possibility of Donald Trump becoming the President-elect of the United States — yet I saw him attain that position about three o’clock this morning. I take little solace in the fact that I was far from alone in seeing little chance of a Trump victory. The famed “Five Thirty-Eight” web site, under the direction of Nate Silver, yesterday had Trump with only a 28.6 chance of winning the presidency (as opposed to a 71.4 chance for Hillary Clinton), the Washington Post’s “The Fix Map”s final prediction had Clinton winning 275 electoral votes to Trump’s 215, and the New York Times’ “Who Will Win the Election” statistical page on Monday had Clinton with an 85% probability of winning the election. In short, their predictions were as wrong as the 1948 Chicago Tribune’s “Dewey Beats Truman” front page.
I do not include my wrong prediction in the category of the usually right-on newspaper predictions because their analysis was based on both polls and sophisticated modeling (which must now obviously be critically been re-examined) while mine is based on a long-standing personal animus toward Trump and an outrage at the way he conducted his campaign (with the bombast, name calling, comments about Mexicans, Muslims, and women, and lack of any policy details). The dislike of Trump goes back over 25 years dating back to the coverage by Wayne Barrett of his real estate dealings in the Village Voice. I later wrote a 2009 poem “Donald Trump” (contained in the “New and Selected Poems by johnmac the Bard” (available on Amazon)) relating to the non-functional local campuses of the “Donald J. Trump State Park”.
So I was dead wrong in my predicting of the outcome of the election. Now, I sincerely hope that I was dead wrong in my overall opinion of Trump because he will now be guiding our country for at least the next 4 years. He gave a wonderful and gracious speech last night (https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/09/president-elect-donald-trump-speaks/) after being designated the winner by the networks and I hope that this tone continues. He will become our next president and I wish him (and the country) well.
Copyright, John F. McMullen 2016
