Ashley Stinnett | Who won the election?

Just Monking Around | #outoftheloop — thoughts from the morning after

By Ashley Stinnett 11/09/16 11:17pm

It is 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 9 as I write this. I am in my month of silence for the monk class, and as such, I cannot talk to people, consume any media or read anything outside of what is required for my coursework.

I was at a rehearsal last night taking line notes and every 20 minutes we checked the polls. Last I heard, the New York Times predicted a 77 percent chance of a Trump presidency and was pretty certain he’d win Wisconsin and Florida.

I don’t know who won the election, and I want to avoid all news until I come back on Nov. 21. But I know my state of blissful ignorance will be shattered the moment I step outside today, no matter how much I shield my eyes from newspapers.

I scheduled a tweet, way back in October, to post at some point today. It says something along the lines of “Who won? Send election results to 3805 Locust Walk #plsnottrump #imwithher.”

I remember what my Facebook timeline looked like before I went offline. I’m from a suburb on Long Island, a far cry from the glamorous Hamptons in Long Island, and my timeline was not representative of the average Penn student’s. Trump was not just a silly meme on my timeline. I’d always think about unfollowing people, but I knew that all of the rants were at least giving me an accurate picture of the voter base. Many of the people I’d spoken to here didn’t think Trump had a chance—anyone rational would see what a terrible president he’d be. He’s all show.

I think there’s a good amount of people — no matter how misguided — who feel he legitimately represents them. They aren’t just trolls. They feel ostracized by “educated” people always trying to tell them that they’re wrong.

I fear we, the “educated,” overestimate how numerous we are — and how galvanized. My thought always was: Trump is drawing people out of the woodwork and motivating them. Hillary is not Trump and only a specter of Bernie. To speak nothing of her competence, that was my characterization of their voting appeal.

People kept asking me if I could vote yesterday, and it was impossible to mime to them my situation. I’d registered to vote back in September in person. But, starting in October, I began receiving letters from the state of Pennsylvania saying they couldn’t locate me in their system. The name they recorded omitted the “h” from my first name, and it read “Asley.” No wonder it didn’t match up with my Social Security number. So, I sent in corrections and was met with a new letter-omission a few weeks later. We played mail tag a couple of times, and my registration ultimately didn’t end up going through. I know several people to whom similar things had happened to — a friend with a hyphenated last name, for one. The conspiracist in me thinks that the liberal university campus was being targeted, and I want to scream, “Voting fraud!”

When I heard that 77 percent figure early last night, though, I thought it was surely clickbait from the liberal news media publication. There’s no way polling numbers were accurate then — my understanding was that they were making predictions for a whole state based off of 50 percent of the results being in. But I guess that if the 50 percent were either all urban centers or all rural centers, you could make an accurate prediction. I don’t know. I couldn’t read the article myself.

It’s about 7 a.m. now and not being able to drink coffee, I’d have normally gone for a walk by now to wake up. Today, I still stay holed up in my dorm. I don’t have any earmuffs or blinders to block out the news. It was nice to be cloistered for a bit, but I’ll be ripped back into the real world, whether I like it or not.

I fear Trump. I fear, too, what a Hillary presidency might bring. Honestly, her life would suck either way — an uphill battle in office versus dealing with the fact that Trump won against her? As for a Trump presidency, I can only hope it will bring people closer, “uneducated” people included, in the face of adversity. I hope it doesn’t increase bifurcation, caricaturization, strife and disdain between liberals and conservatives, urbanites and everyone else and “educated” and “uneducated.”

Or else, maybe he’s the ultimate troll and old, early-90s liberal Trump will resurface. Maybe he was just using his reality TV skills to fool us all. I don’t know; I just don’t wanna get nuked immediately.

I will print this out and stick a USB drive on my living room table for my roommate to find. I have written all of my other columns in advance and am not allowed to blog, comment, or criticize during my month of silence. She will do what she will with this.