Hillary Clinton officially closed her campaign Wednesday, conceding to Donald Trump and urging for a peaceful transfer of power.
“We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought,” Clinton said in her speech. “But I still believe in America and always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future.”
By that night, thousands had poured into streets from New York to Los Angeles to march against Trump. Protests were mostly peaceful.
It’s For the Record, the politics newsletter from USA TODAY.

Obama invites Trump to the Oval Office

In his first major speech since the election, President Obama commended Hillary Clinton for her lengthy career in public service. USA TODAY NETWORK
President Barack Obama invited President-elect Donald Trump to meet this morning in the Oval Office to plan the transition of power ahead of Trump’s January inauguration.
As Trump and Obama transition, America’s transitioning, too. The nation, and the world, began coming to terms Wednesday with a new reality: Donald Trump will become president of the United States, marking a great many firsts.
Trump will become the first president without any military or political experience. He will be the first president to take office at age 70, making him the oldest ever. He’s also the first president to have appeared in both a Playboy film and a ghost sex comedy, “Ghosts Can’t Do It.”
Obama asked his staff on Wednesday to work toward a peaceful transition for Trump, who broke into politics by claiming Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., a false statement that Trump later admitted as such.
It's going to be awkward.

Democrats: What just happened?

In the hours following Trump’s victory, shocked Democrats stared deep into their souls and asked a question: Why?
Something within them (or perhaps some analysts) answered back: You failed to turn out your base voters. Millennials and African Americans didn’t come through like you predicted. And you forgot about working-class whites.
Lower-income white voters, forgotten after 30 years of a globalizing economy, helped deliver a death blow to a Clinton campaign that didn’t offer them economic hope, Heidi M. Przybyla reports.
“You can’t win elections as a Democrat if you’re not ahead on the economy,” said Celinda Lake, a Democrat linked with the Clinton campaign.
Being a woman didn’t help either. Lake noted that women lost up and down the ballot, from races for the White House to statehouses and Congress.

RIP polling

After Tuesday, it’s clear that America’s pollsters wet the bed. They messed their pants. They threw up on themselves and then didn’t clean up their puke until it dried all crusty on their shirts.
But why?
“The results suggest pollsters may have wildly underestimated the number of hidden Trump voters — people who stampeded to the ballot box on Election Day but never showed up on the radar of surveyors,” Nathan Bomey reports in a polling autopsy.
One poll that didn’t botch it: The Los Angeles times/University of Southern California tracking poll, the only one since October to favor Trump in a 2-way race.
"One of the things that pollsters are going to have to look at are their expectations about the nature of the electorate," said Joshua Dyck, political science professor and co-director of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell.

Around the aftermath

  • In 2012, Trump called the Electoral College a ‘disaster’ (USA TODAY)
  • Bernie Sanders is ‘prepared to work with’ Trump (USA TODAY)
  • ‘Secretary of State Newt Gingrich.’ Oh. (USA TODAY)
  • Chris Christie could join the administration, too (USA TODAY)
  • After Trump’s victory, a new hashtag trends: #NotMyPresident (USA TODAY)

Stephen Colbert preaches

In case you missed it, Stephen Colbert delivered a profound and enthralling monologue — a sermon, really—as the election’s results came in.
"Above all, we, as a nation, should never, ever have another election like this one,” he said.
It’s worth every minute. Watch it in full screen.
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