Trump wins the White House

Republican Donald Trump — billionaire developer, reality TV star and political novice — rode his populist message of drastic change into the White House Tuesday, in a stunning victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Article by SFGATE.com

“Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream,” Trump said in his victory speech, which didn’t begin until nearly 3 a.m. in New York. “America will no longer settle for anything less than the best. We must reclaim our country’s destiny and dream big and bold and daring.”

The Trump victory, along with a surprisingly strong GOP showing in the House and the Senate, gave Republicans control not only of the White House, but also both houses of Congress.

Trump rolled through the nation’s rural areas Tuesday, running up overwhelming margins among blue-collar voters slammed by an economy that’s improving at a snail’s pace and desperate for someone — anyone — who might bring political change.

Trump’s vows to “make America great again” and “drain the swamp of corruption in Washington” resonated with those voters, who turned out in droves during his campaign to cheer the larger-than-life businessman at raucous rallies across the country.

In his 15-minute speech, Trump thanked Clinton for running “a very, very hard-fought campaign” and said that the former secretary of state, who he has attacked nonstop through the entire campaign, “has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country.”

He continued the theme of reconciliation, opening what’s likely to be the long and torturous process of healing the partisan void left by a long, divisive campaign.

“Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division, we have to get together, to all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation,” Trump said. “I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.”

That sweep of the government’s leadership will give Trump the backing he needs to boost his ambitious plans for changing the focus of government and the way it works.

The president-elect will also have the support of the many people pulled together by what he said “was not a campaign but rather an incredible and great movement, made up of millions of hard-working men and women who love their country and want a better, brighter future for themselves and for their family.”

He spoke of that earlier in the day.

“We’ve brought millions and millions of new people … into the party,” Trump said Tuesday afternoon in an interview with conservative talk-show host Michael Savage. “These are great people that have been forgotten, and they’re hard working, they’re very, very smart and they feel let down by their politicians and let down by their country.”

Trump won the battleground states of Ohio, Iowa, Florida and North Carolina and broke through Clinton’s “blue firewall” of must-win states.

While Clinton took Colorado and Virginia, and Trump claimed Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. That was enough for a victory, even though the results still weren’t final in Michigan and New Hampshire.

Clinton needed to draw a political inside straight to keep Trump from becoming the 45th president of the United States, overcoming the businessman’s late leads in those states. She didn’t.

The former secretary of state didn’t take the stage at her New York City rally on election night. Instead, John Podesta, the campaign’s director, came out at 2 a.m. in New York to tell the stunned crowd of Clinton supporters it was time to head home.

“They’re still counting votes, and every vote should count,” he said. “We’ll have more to say (Wednesday).”

At 6 p.m., with Trump showing surprising early strength across much of the East and South, Clinton sent out a Twitter message to her supporters.

“This team has so much to be proud of. Whatever happens tonight, thank you for everything,” she said in the tweet.

An overjoyed crowd of Trump supporters wasn’t going anywhere on election night as they jammed into the GOP party in New York, hoping to hear Trump give a victory speech.

For Republicans, who also held control of the Senate, it was a time to start thinking of what a Trump administration could do, especially with his party holding both houses of Congress.

In his interview with Savage, Trump said he was confident that his election day performance was going to surprise pollsters who had made Clinton a slight favorite to become the nation’s first female president.

By 8 p.m., Trump’s supporters in San Francisco were growing increasingly excited. Supporters raised their plastic wine glasses high and erupted in cheers, whooping and clapping as Trump was projected to win Ohio.

“This is amazing,” said Daniel Businger, 19, who wore a Stars and Stripes sport coat, Trump for President pin and “Make America Great Again” hat.

“This is something Romney and McCain weren’t able to do,” he said. “We’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Trump is outperforming. I didn’t expect him to do so well,” said Jason Clark, chairman of the San Francisco Republican Party. “This could be America’s Brexit moment,” he said, referring to the United Kingdom’s surprise vote earlier this year to leave the European Union.

About 100 supporters in the small event space in the Twitter building on Market Street clapped and cheered as Trump’s electoral vote tally rose. Several sported Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” hats.

It was a very different story at Clinton’s headquarters on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco.

Clinton supporters walked into the party in high spirits, ready for a victory bash.

But with Trump outpacing Clinton hours after polls had closed across the country, voters and volunteers held tight to their beer bottles and wine glasses.

“I know we live in a bubble here, and I know San Francisco doesn’t look like the rest of the country, but still,” said Liz Garcia, 30, who lives in the city. “I feel so out of touch with so much of America, and I just don’t understand how I can be so well informed and so out of touch.”

For many observers, the 2016 presidential race brought out the worst of American politics, with both candidates relentlessly on the attack. Instead of providing voters with a positive picture of who could best solve the country’s many problems, Clinton and Trump instead painted grim caricatures of opponents they argued could mean the end of the country as we know it.

According to a national exit poll, the tsunami of personal attacks left many voters disgusted with both candidates. While 61 percent of the electorate said they didn’t like Trump, an only slightly smaller 54 percent expressed similar feelings about Clinton.

Neither came close to cracking 50 percent when voters were asked about whom they viewed favorably. The rating was 44 percent for Clinton and 37 percent for Trump.

Only 39 percent said they would be excited or optimistic having Trump as president; 43 percent were enthusiastic about seeing Clinton in the White House.

“The next president could be the candidate voters dislike the least,” said Tony Quinn, a former GOP consultant who now edits the nonpartisan California Target Book. “There is a lot of unhappiness out there.”

But just how big a difference the mudslinging, the charges that brought screaming headlines and the repeated Twitter storms actually made was questionable.

Exit polls found that most voters had picked their candidate long ago. About 62 percent of voters said they decided before September whom they were going to vote for. Another 26 percent decided in either September or October. Only 12 percent said they made their choice in the past week.

Even before the votes were counted, there were calls for a political cease-fire.

“I’ve been tough on Donald Trump, as tough as anyone,” Vice President Joe Biden said at a Virginia rally Monday night. “But when this election is over, we have got to let it go. … We have got to stop being blinded by anger. We have to start seeing each other again.”

It won’t be easy. For much of the fall, the campaign was a compilation of calumny, with each candidate vying in a seemingly endless contest to see who could toss out the ugliest charges.

To Trump, Clinton was “Crooked Hillary,” the “most corrupt candidate ever,” and someone he vowed to jail as soon as he was elected for her alleged mishandling of classified emails during her years as secretary of state.

For her part, Clinton lambasted Trump as a failed businessman and tax scofflaw who repeatedly abused and derided women and someone “temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be president and commander-in-chief,” as she said at an October rally.

They each had plenty of outside help to make those charges stick.

In October, a 2005 video was released with audio of Trump, who was wearing a live microphone, bragging to Billy Bush, then the host of “Access Hollywood,” about his attempt to seduce a married woman and how he could grope and manhandle women without consequences, because “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

While Trump apologized and dismissed the incident as “locker-room talk,” more than a dozen women later came out to say they had been groped and grabbed by Trump over the years.

Clinton found herself the target of computer hackers, likely from Russia, who broke into the files of both the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, her campaign chairman, and stole thousands of emails. Those emails were released by Wikileaks in a continuing drip of material embarrassing to Clinton and her campaign.

The email problems caused her continuing woes, even after FBI Director James Comey announced last July that while an investigation found Clinton’s use of a private server to handle State Department emails to be “extremely careless,” no criminal charges would be filed.

But on Oct. 28, just 11 days before the election, Comey said in a letter to Congress that a new batch of emails had been found on the computer of a Clinton aide’s estranged husband and that the investigation was active again.

While Comey said Sunday that no new evidence had been found in the emails, the renewed investigation stopped Clinton’s rise in the polls and allowed Trump to hit the corruption question even harder.

Chronicle staff writers Cynthia Dizikes and Marissa Lang contributed to this report.

John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @jfwildermuth

Read more at: sfgate.com