If Donald Trump really intends to punish his enemies and reward his friends now that he, gulp, has all the power in the land, I think we should consider moving to the 54th precinct of the 19th Ward.
That’s among the safer precincts in Trump’s new America, given that the Donald won almost 70 percent of its vote.
That’s the highest Trump margin in any precinct in Chicago.
In contrast, the 430 voters of the 35th precinct in the 24th Ward gave Trump exactly zero votes.
That’s the very same number of votes that I got from that west-side precinct.
So if the presidency were determined by who got the most votes from the 35th precinct in the 24th Ward—and really, I think that might be an improvement over our current system—Trump and I would be in a tie, and the fate of the nation would be in the hands of Congress.
If only Congress weren’t also controlled by the Republicans.
As you can see, the time has come for me to do my famous postelection voter analysis, in which I pore over precinct-by-precinct results to see just how bad the candidates I supported got clobbered.
Generally, as a progressive, I’m on the losing sides of elections in this town.
In this case, I was in step with Chicago. Hillary Clinton won about 84 percent of the Chicago vote, while most of the rest of the country was igniting the Trump revolution.
Or as Reader editor Jake Malooley so eloquently put it on election night: “I knew that we live in a bubble. I didn’t think it was on another planet.”
Jake, if I have anything to do with it, one day your quote will be included in Bartlett’s.
By the way, the 54th precinct in the 19th Ward includes the intersection of 111th Street and Kedzie in the Mount Greenwood community on the far southwest side.
It was on that corner that an off-duty Chicago police officer shot Joshua Beal last Saturday, just before the election.
So perhaps the pro-Trump tally was a classic case of a Chicago white backlash vote.
On the other hand, the 54th precinct gave Mitt Romney almost 55 percent of its vote in 2012. So it was trending Republican long before anyone had heard of Black Lives Matter.
Overall, the far-northwest-side 41st Ward was the friendliest to Trump, giving him about 43 percent of its vote.
By and large, however, Trump got trounced in Chicago. How trounced? Well, think of it this way: he did worse than Mitt Romney.
And that’s not easy, considering that Romney was up against President Obama, the hometown favorite.
In 2012, Romney got 148,181 votes, or 14.5 percent of the Chicago vote. Trump got 132,308, or 12.5 percent.
Clinton actually outpolled Obama in terms of sheer votes: 881,140 to 853,102.
Clinton even did about as well as Obama in the black wards. Or at least her opponent didn’t do much better than Obama’s opponent.
For instance, in the south-side Eighth Ward, Trump got a whopping 1.54 percent of the vote.
In contrast, Romney won 0.67 of the Eighth Ward vote.
Guess things are really looking up for Republicans with black voters.
As far as the Latino vote, well, it was sort of a mixed bag.
Latinos were supposed to be the emerging force in this election, if for no other reason than that Trump had singled them out for denigration with his talk of “bad hombres” and building a wall along the Mexican border.
To see how they responded, let’s look at the 12th Ward on the near southwest side, which has one of the city’s highest concentrations of Mexican-American voters.
Clinton won almost 85 percent of the 12th Ward vote.
On the other hand, only about 58 percent of its registered voters showed up to the polls.
Think of it this way: this man went out of his way to denigrate Mexican-Americans, and about 42 percent of Latino voters here didn’t bother to tell him to go fuck himself.
That would be the most depressing statistic of this election, if not for the fact that roughly 53 percent of white women nationwide voted for candidate pussy grabber, according to exit polls.
Susan B. Anthony must be turning over in her grave.
But moving on to a brighter subject, Clinton did well with the Bloomberg/Buffett crowd.
This requires an explanation. At one point during the Democratic National Convention, when I was soaring on the fumes, I was telling everyone that Hillary was gonna win, ’cause all the rich white people who generally vote Republican would cross over—just like their superrich heroes Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett did.
And that sort of happened, at least in the 42nd Ward, which includes downtown and the Gold Coast.
Back in 2012, Romney got 8,973 votes, or 35.7 percent of the total in that ward. Trump only got 6,267 votes, or 20 percent.
In retrospect, it seems the problem for Clinton is that there just weren’t enough rich Republicans to compensate for all the working-class whites who voted for Trump.
Man, I’ll tell you, the world’s really changed since the days of FDR.
Finally, my own little corner of the north side stayed true to the Democratic cause.
That is, Clinton beat Trump in my precinct 573 to 58.
I guess that means my neighbors and I should hunker down in anticipation of Trump’s retribution.
I wonder if he’ll believe me if I tell him that I was one of the 58?