Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader should have his amateur pundit status revoked. He got the results of the late Presidential election very, very, (and he can’t emphasize this enough - VERY) wrong. It is little consolation that most everyone else got it wrong too. Even the esteemed Larry Sabato and his “Crystal Ball” - which is your Maximum Leader’s favorite site for political punditry - got it waaaaaaay wrong.

Your Maximum Leader will try to digest what has happened and comment on it when he has some cogent thoughts on the matter. But here are a few items he’d like to put out there:

1 ) Not every person who voted for Donald Trump is a racist, woman-hating, sex-addicted, Islamophobe, degenerate. There are a lot of decent people out there who voted for Trump because they couldn’t abide by Hillary Clinton. Your Maximum Leader has been on the record stating that he’ll never vote for another Clinton, Bush, Kennedy, Roosevelt, or even Adams. Your Maximum Leader knows a great many people who voted for Trump because they wouldn’t vote for Clinton and “a vote for a 3rd party was a vote for Clinton.” (By the way, your Maximum Leader was told, often, that the reverse was also true, “a vote for a 3rd party was a vote for Trump.)

2 ) A vote for a candidate other than Clinton or Trump was, in fact, a vote for someone other than Clinton or Trump. Your Maximum Leader is a little embarrassed by his vote for Gary Johnson. Not because it was one vote less for a major party candidate. He’s a little embarrassed by his vote because, as he’s stated before, Johnson was a weak candidate who didn’t have mastery of foreign policy issues. Your Maximum Leader, if he had it to do all over again, would likely cast the same vote.

3 ) As hard as it may be for some, it would behoove everyone to try and give Donald Trump, President-elect Donald Trump, a chance to be a better President than he was a candidate.

4 ) Your Maximum Leader must tip his bejeweled mylan cap to Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon. From what your Maximum Leader can gather, they are the masterminds behind Trumps strategy to hit “safe blue” state rural areas. They seem, at this point, to have had the vision to project a path to victory and convinced Trump to take it. Trump must also be credited for being a tireless campaigner and doing all he could to get out to actually talk to the voters he needed. It is a tremendous accomplishment.

5 ) Your Maximum Leader can’t state it enough… Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate. Certainly your Maximum Leader thought that the one Republican she could knock off was Donald Trump. But he was wrong. She couldn’t even do that. Your Maximum Leader would admonish Democrats stop blaming their shortcomings on voters and seriously examine their candidate and her campaign.

6 ) Though he doesn’t normally read post-election books on how campaigns were run, he may make an exception for this election year.

7 ) It is at a time like this that your Maximum Leader wishes that there was more civility among the political classes in Washington. The worm turns. The wheel of karma rolls on. The shoe always comes to be on the other foot. It is precisely at the change of administrations when one party or the other comes to regret the things they have previously said. Specifically your Maximum Leader is thinking about President Obama’s “you lost” and “elections have consequences” comments to Congressional Republicans shortly after taking office. Your Maximum Leader can imagine President Trump using much saltier language to the same affect against Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in January 2017.

8 ) Your Maximum Leader hopes, but doesn’t really expect, that Mike Pence (Vice-President-elect Mike Pence), Speaker Ryan, and Senator McConnell, will be able to influence President-elect Trump with an agenda that can get done and can repair some of the damage done all around, by both candidates, in this campaign.

9 ) Get over attacks on James Comey. While your Maximum Leader would not have made the same decisions he did about releasing information about ongoing investigations, Comey did what he thought best and has been as bipartisan as it is possible for an FBI Director to be. It may also be that Comey’s letters may have had less impact than we all have thought. (Please see #5 above.)

10 ) Pollsters and pundits really need to figure out what the hell they are doing and do better. The Brexit vote should have been a red flag telling pollsters that people lie to pollsters - especially if by being honest they think that they will be branded as racists, bigots, and degenerates. Apparently only the USC/LA Times polling picked Trump. Your Maximum Leader seems to recall reading somewhere along the line how the USC/LAT polls were “complex” and “poorly weighted.” So he dismissed them. He thinks now that the method used to collect this poll data will be replicated by others. Particularly the identification of people to participate in long-term polling and seeing the evolution of opinion. Also, by talking to the same people month after month, a level of trust - and a level of honesty with the pollster - is established. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t know how this would work out, but it deserves being looked at.

That is all for now…

Carry on.

Follow your Maximum Leader on Twitter and Gab.ai. His handle: @maximumleader