“so What Now?”

There are three things to remember tonight

1) There are 70 days until Donald Trump’s Inauguration. 70 days left of Obama as our President. There’s time. You can breathe.

2) There are Checks and Balances in the way our Government is run specifically to prevent a Dictatorship. While Donald Trump will soon be given a lot of power, it may not be as much as you think. He can’t change anything he wants at the drop of a hat, and he definitely can’t overturn any legislation previously deemed Unconstitutional. This includes Same Sex Marriage and other things. 

Unless he can come up with a new, strong case against it (and the man can barely read, so, doubtful), that won’t stop being a thing. Many other things won’t stop being things the minute he sits in that chair. There’s time. You can breathe.

3) You are worth 100 of Donald Trump. He is a weak, pathetic little man who can only get what he wants by bullying or throwing money at it. Don’t let him take away the freedoms and rights that your predecessors fought tooth and nail for. You can still fight against him by voting in every upcoming local, state, or senate election you can over the next 4 years. By rallying and spreading the word and growing your own politics. 

Don’t give up because the Boogeyman is President. You still have a big, glorious life to live full of new and fantastic experiences and feelings ahead of you. It doesn’t end here. You’re stronger than him. You can outlast this.

Watch: President Obama delivers pointedly feminist speech at United State of Women summit

#NotMyPresident

choncegiving:

The electoral college does not vote until December 19th. We have 40 days.

What does this mean?

Right now, the presidential election results are only a PROJECTION of the election outcome. They are PRELIMINARY RESULTS. A candidate still needs to earn 270 electoral votes to win. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, which means that more than 50% of the voters wanted her for president. The electoral college shouldn’t guarantee an override of the public’s opinion– and it doesn’t have to.

There are 21 states that do NOT restrict which candidate the electors vote for. Out of these 21, Hillary lost the following:

As you can see, these states are worth 166 electoral votes. As it currently stands, Hillary Clinton is projected to receive 232 votes. Trump is projected to win 306. This means that 37 votes need to be taken away from Trump to bring him down to 269. Hillary Clinton needs 38 votes ADDED to win 270. These electoral voters can also abstain, which means that they can refuse to vote for either candidate. If 37 of the voters within these states abstain then no candidate will have reached the required 270. In this case, the vote would be taken to the House.

Trump won Pennsylvania, a state that typically votes blue, by less than 100,000 votes. While it is highly unlikely to get all 20 electoral voters to cross party lines and vote democrat, it also isn’t impossible to convince a few of them to be “faithless electors.” We only need to convince 38 out of the 166. That is 23%. There are SIXTEEN states we need to focus our attention on.

A move like this would be unprecedented. However, as we all saw on November 8th, odds don’t guarantee reality. Trump had a less than 20% winning, yet given the circumstances, enough people came together and made it happen. We can make this happen. 

Ask yourself this: What do we have left to lose? We can stay complacent and accept that this country will be run by a racist, sexist, islamophobic, homophobic, ablest bigot, or we can at least try. 

How?

SPREAD THE WORD. Trend #NotMyPresident to let people know that we do not accept being led by a man who does not care about our wellbeing. Email your professors, email the dean of your colleges. The last thing a university wants is negative press. Millenials can take a stand, but that doesn’t mean we have to be the only ones. Church-led events helped bring a lot of disillusioned voters to the polls. Spread the word in any way possible, whether it be on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or even in person. Stage a peaceful protest. Hand out flyers. Let the people around you know that you don’t accept this man as your leader when he won’t even accept you as a citizen with your designated rights.

These 166 people need to face the consequences of electing this man. 

Do this for the people who couldn’t vote. Do this for the people who live in the very real fear of being deported. Do this for the people who will have to face the rise in hate crimes. Do this for the people who have a very real possibility of losing their rights. Do this for the people who will no longer afford necessities. 

hey but 

shoutout to everyone who got up this morning and went to work or class, or got their kid up, or had to do the grocery shopping while everything was falling to pieces. 

you all did great. whatever you did to get through the day, even if you broke down, you did great. everyone who couldn’t is no less for it, but to every service worker with no sick days and every employee trying to pretend like customer service or routine meant a thing–you did great. 

you are very brave, and so strong, and you deserve whatever rest you can find. 

lizdexia:

When Obama won, the right threatened violence and uprisings. They spewed vitriol and simmered in their own hatred and this is what we got.

Today, I’ve had so many conversations with people who are considering and embarking on new paths of public service. People who are talking about law school, public policy, teaching, international engagement, volunteering, even just giving radical amounts of kindness to the people around us who need it. I’m not seeing violent rhetoric or talk of violent uprisings. I’m just seeing a lot of good people saying “It’s going to be hard work, and we’ll do that hard work because we need each other.”

We can take our country back. When they go low, we go high.

listen.

even if trump wins, it doesn’t mean it’s over. congress will not let him do most of what he wants to do (i mean, a lot of it’s unconstitutional, lmao). even if they do, it will a take a long time, perhaps even bleeding over into the next president’s term (and i hope to god that next president is a democrat). so do not assume that everything he proposes will happen! and voting is not our only way to participate in the government. protest. lobby. fight. don’t just accept a trump victory. if he wins, we need to fight harder than ever. we can’t give up. we can mitigate the effects of a trump presidency, but we need to fight.

millennials are a powerful group. we can make our voices heard. i know it’s scary. but it’s more important than ever to fight. don’t give trump an easy victory. fight as hard as you can for the entire 4 years he might be president. and help each other, protect each other. lift up your head and fight together. it’s easy to be discouraged, but the fight is not over.

i’m scared, too. i’m scared for my life. and take the time you need to take a deep breath and get away from everything for a little while. but in the end, if trump wins, we cannot make that easy for him. people are making a trump presidency seem like doomsday right now, but congress, checks and balances, and the actions of people – like us – can stop most of it from happening. the only bad thing that is really guaranteed to happen under a trump presidency is the appointment of some conservative supreme court justices (but even then congress has to approve them).

so tl;dr: if trump wins, the fight is not over. take a deep breath and hold your head high. he cannot, and will not, do everything that he’s proposed. so keep fighting and don’t let him destroy everything we’ve worked for.

“I first ran for Congress in 1999, and I got beat. I just got whooped. I had been in the state legislature for a long time, I was in the minority party, I wasn’t getting a lot done, and I was away from my family and putting a lot of strain on Michelle. Then for me to run and lose that bad, I was thinking maybe this isn’t what I was cut out to do. I was forty years old, and I’d invested a lot of time and effort into something that didn’t seem to be working. But the thing that got me through that moment, and any other time that I’ve felt stuck, is to remind myself that it’s about the work. Because if you’re worrying about yourself—if you’re thinking: ‘Am I succeeding? Am I in the right position? Am I being appreciated?’ – then you’re going to end up feeling frustrated and stuck. But if you can keep it about the work, you’ll always have a path. There’s always something to be done.” (Humans of New York)

You are going to run this country, and this world, very soon. So you will not listen to this man, or the 75-year-old, doughy-faced, gray-haired nightmare men like him, when they try to tell you where to stand or how to behave or what you can and cannot do with your own bodies, or what you should or should not think with your own minds. You will not be cowed or discouraged by his stream of retrogressive babble. You won’t have time to be cowed, because you will be too busy working and learning and communing with other girls and women like you, and when the time comes you will effortlessly flick away his miserable, petty misogynistic worldview like a fly on your picnic potato salad. He is the present, sadly, but he is not the future. You are the future. Your strength is a million times his. Your power is a billion times his. We will acknowledge this result, but we will not accept it. We will overcome it, and we will defeat it. Now find your team, and get to work.

‘Parks and Recreation’: Leslie Knope Writes Letter to America Following Donald Trump’s Victory (via Yahoo)

To the young people in particular, I hope you will hear this. I have spent my entire adult life fighting for what I believe in. I have had successes and also set backs. Sometimes really painful ones. (..) This loss hurts, but please, never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.

Hillary Clinton, in her concession speech a few minutes ago. (via taylor-svift)