Many political pundits, since the presidential election weeks ago, are still attempting to understand and explain what happened. None is really able to grasp the magnitude, the shock of the unpredicted event.

Even Bill Clinton, after voting for his wife Dec. 19, said when asked about the outcome of the election that it was the result of both the Russians’ hacking into the election process and FBI Director James Comey’s review of newly discovered emails immediately before the voting.

Prior to the election, and totally undetected by both campaigns and the media, a tremendous pressure was building among the American public like water dangerously rising behind a dam that was about to burst.

That pressure was called “change,” and it had little or nothing to do with all the pundits’ theories.

The public had just about had enough of the two parties’ political establishments, the market and the Washington “swamp” in general. If you define “change” as “going outside the norms politically,” both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders stood to gain by this demand for change.

The polls were showing that Sanders had a better chance of beating Trump than Hillary Clinton did.

But the Democrats, so assured of making history by electing a woman to the White House for the first time, decided to undercut Sanders’ campaign, which made it a two-person race between the establishment’s Clinton and the outsider, Trump.

The Democrats, believing they had a huge lead, went to bed on election night feeling quite secure, having defeated Sanders. They were oblivious to that dam that finally burst on Election Day, flooding the valley below, washing out all in its path: the House, Senate, the White House and many local offices.

Eliot J. Chandler

Augusta

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