Sorry but this land is no longer my land and never will be until Trump
is no longer President.
I refuse to support an arrogant bully and demagogue who shamelessly used
fear, anger and hatred to gain political and personal power.
The ends do not justify the means and never will.
By their actions ye shall know them.
Good luck citizens of the new Trumpocracy---government of the Trump,
by the Trump and only for the Trump.
Don't come whining and crying to me when you find out too late
you made a big mistake and got fooled by a fraud and huckster.
You messed up your America and as a result messed up mine too.
Don't blame me for your mistake. I was in the majority---
I didn't vote for Trump but you did. Your fault. You deal with it.
No cooperation with the Trump regime now or ever.

Ms. Frable was being very short sighted when she said neither candidate would change her tax/financial situation, but she felt her daughters would have better jobs after college with Trump. Nothing has borne that out, except deep down you feel a woman shouldn't president or it's time for white people to take control again.

A State That is of Two Minds also voted approximately 65% to 35% in Favor of Bernie Sanders.....not HRC

It was so nice of you to give one small paragraph to Wisconsin. That is more respect then Hillary gave to the state without one visit during the campaign. Just another example of the bubble that New York is and it's inward looking New York State of mind. There is an entire big country out there beyond New York!

Trump does, in fact, believe the US now belongs to him to do with as he pleases. I have no intention of allowing him to do so. I pray Americans will remain united against him.

It seems that in presidential elections throughout most of my adult life people said, we have X million people in this country, and this is the best we can do? Until Obama. For those who supported him, he really did represent the best of who America can produce. Trump is ultimate, ironic and painful pendulum swing, the worst we can do. While I "understand" why people voted for him, I don't get it and I never will.

Many Clinton supporters understood the pain because they experienced it themselves. I am referring to the economic migrants, such as myself, who fled Rust Belt cities such as Buffalo, to come to places like Boston. In 1974, Bethlehem Steel let off 15,000 people in one day under a Republican Presidential administration. My generation came of age and the Buffalo as we had grown up in was gone. It had been a city where someone with a high school education, who was willing to work hard could have a comfortable life. The life that produces the goods we enjoy as consumers is also a hard one and not to be romanticized. It requires long hours, is often noisy and smelly. The heat can be something else, if you work in metals or chemical manufacturing.

As economic migrants we left Rust Belt cities and towns, and our families behind. We had to start from scratch. We had no one to call to put in a good word when we applied for jobs. We had no political connections. Many of us have succeeded. Unlike Buffalo in the 1960's, we pay 50% of our health insurance costs. We have had to train and retrain for new positions. We have had our companies bought out and have had periods of unemployment.

We supported Clinton because we knew in our hearts that the old way of life is gone. Factories will use more automation. We fault Trump for his promises to bring back the "good old days." We fault his divisive racism. All races worked in Buffalo at Bethlehem Steel. All races suffered.

There are two common threads in these interviews: race and immigrants. The interviews and photos show that people are concerned that "someone" is taking or will take away what they have struggled and worked to attain. These concerns of what is or may be lost are varied and diverse, but nonetheless valid.
One comment in these interviews was particularly disconcerting. In the interview by Emily Bazelon, the interviewee said that Hillary Clinton not standing up for herself against her husband was “more damaging than goofball words Trump came up with.” Trump viscerally expounded hateful attacks against women, the disabled, religion, our veterans, and immigrants. He insinuated “Second Amendment people” to act to stop Hillary Clinton from being elected. He said HE ALONE can fix all the problems facing this country. He shuts out the media. Donald Trump was not just uttering goofball words. He was expounding what he believes, now evidenced by aligning himself with some of the most narrow- minded racists in politics, people who believe as he does and who he can easily control. And yet 47% of Americans, among them several of the interviewees here, cast their votes for this person. The belief by many that this person, Donald Trump, can remedy their concerns, simply boggles my mind. All of us must work to ensure that America does become the country Trump envisions.

It can be our land again. The land of those of us who voted for reason and sanity, reasonable regulation, social and economic justice, a balanced U.S. Supreme Court. The land of those of us who were not blinded by the hate/sexist machine and voted for Ms. Hillary Rodham Clinton. A majority of us.

We now live in fox nation with a hefty side of hate radio and internet propaganda meant to keep the hate going and even ratchet it up as the financial elite attempt a world takeover.

How did it happen? Readers are advised to watch this video from mediamatters.org for a brief summary of the con job that was done on America. The video concentrates on the propaganda fox so-called news spreads but the website covers hate radio and internet engineered hate as well.
They are now trying to convince Americans that The Con Don and his hate regime aren't at all like Hitler. Do not believe it and pay less attention to him than those around him. They are the real danger to every single American and every person in the world who is not at the top of the Top 1% Global Financial Elite democracy/government-destroying machine.

Hate, aided by sexism, won this sham called an election. I

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/11/18/video-trump-and-power-fear/214528

These are real people. They do not appear specially selected, nor edited (judged) for their thoughts and comments. Nice job.

Yes, pretty much everyone was shocked. But then, we did think that the turnout would be strong. It wasn't. More importantly, a significant number of those protesting didn't vote. How ironic. You take to the streets, many looking for trouble/mahem/destruction, to complain that Trump is evil and must not be allowed to be president. You extend this to attacks on anyone you think (or did) vote for Trump. And you feel justified and righteous (the government appears to be sticking up for you by its silence), and then we find out you didn't even vote?!

I'm not thrilled with the outcome, but understand it now. I've been saying for months that the left leaning media is putting Trump to the forefront daily. Why? Guess they thought that voters would do their bidding, think their thoughts, buy into their agenda. After pandering to 'minorities' (whatever that is these days) and claiming whites were 'privileged' and somehow owe minorities because of bad policies in the 50s and before. Reporting the guilt of 'white' police officers killing unarmed black men (false agenda when it comes to the statistics) and applauding the chaos and destruction in the streets as a result. It's as if the left media thought chaos was a good thing - like supporting the Arab Spring because it was just so cool that the masses were rebelling. Lennon had it right.

What a nice collection of essays and photographs. Keep it up, New York Times, and help the collective "us" understand each other in more nuanced ways. We need to stop being a we-they nation and work for a real common good, as opposed to what just the 1 % would have - a divide and conquer nation.

I understand that many people are troubled by the election of Mr. Trump. I was no Trump fan.
The thing that so many of the political and media and university elites seem not to recognize with all of their education is that it was not only anger at the elites that fueled Trump's popularity and eventual election, but fear—not fear that a few individuals will feel emboldened to act out and do and say dastardly things, but fear that the government will become more despotic, more tyrannical against them and their way of life.
Mr. Obama's "more perfect union" was not more perfect for most states and almost half of our union's people. It had become frightening, and the people in those states said, even with all his foibles and missteps, "We're going to take a chance on Trump."

The best reasoned analysis of the 2016 election results I have seen. Succinct, easily verified and right on the money.

"The American people constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish , ignominious mob of serfs and goose steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and they grow more timorous, more sniveling, more poltroonish, more ignominious every day."

--- H.L. Mencken, 1922

What is most appalling is that so many voters were upset with obstruction in congress - and then rewarded the obstructionists!

I use the example of the Jobs for Veterans Act as my son is a veteran. The GOP leaders controlling congress refused to bring it to a vote, much less pass it - but GOP voters blame Obama.

I attribute our nation's problems to disinformation - foundations and think tanks funded by a small group of extremely rich people with the express goal of creating false facts, promoting fear and talking points to persuade people that up is down and in a state of constant emotional panic. Those messages are disseminated on a daily basis over an entire AM radio network, tv network and dozens of websites with the specific of deceiving the electorate. It's political payola, and surprisingly profitable at selling survival gear, gold and over-priced Chinese-made consumer goods to the paranoid.

Is it any wonder small town residents don't know who were the obstructionists?

Some think they've thrown a hand grenade into the system to break it loose, but instead they've set off a slow acting but massive suicide car bomb.

Trump successfully positioned himself as the change candidate. He takes different positions on each issue, each shaded differently by the shifting light on his chameleon-like profile.

Reading these interviews it is clear that there is NOT a consistent perception of who Trump is or who he will be once he is in office. These voters are hopeful that Trump will do what they want -- since they heard something they like in one of the variations in his positions. Each reads the light bouncing back in their direction -- filtered through "their" media outlets.

If you go to Fox News vs. the NY Times sites after a news event, such as immediately after the Bridgegate convictions, you see totally different coverage and placement on their sites (buried deep and minimized on Fox vs. headlined on the NY Times) -- with radically different spins. People have become entitled to their own facts. However, ultimately we will have a common future.

We all need to build bridges and increase understanding across borders -- state borders. I am contacting relatives and friends from Ohio and listening but challenging misperceptions and misrepresentations of facts. We need to increase communication between red and blue areas to reach together for a better country and a more common understanding -- breaking through the Orwellian narrowcast self-determining realities.

When I read these kinds of profiles, I am always struck by people's unwillingness to support reforms that really would help them. Where is the outcry for, at a minimum, a public health care option based upon an expension of Medicare? Where is the cry to rein in capitalism's many flaws and excesses? On Social Security, where is the support for raising the cap on contributions that will sustain this program well into the future? Where is the support for investment in alternative energies that would employ people and also help stay the encroaching hand of climate change?

These issues have been raised, by Sanders most recently. But he had limited appeal beyond a core of like-mind crusaders; the general population seemed not to notice or care about his ideas.

We -- or at least a large portion of the population -- strongly want change. But in reality, we seem to want only incremental change, not bold steps, and we seem hypnotized by a longing for some idyllic past. We are letting caution and political ennui stifle our can do spirit. Frankly, there is a lack of a national, American imagination, and it is keeping us captive to stasis and fear.

My reply to the "Creatures" supporters is this:

On some great and glorious day the "Plain" folks will reach their hearts desire at last , and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron"

H.L. Mencken!

As a Minnesotan, I'd just like to say that the similarities between Ventura and Trump are superficial. As a big mouth, Ventura said cringe-worthy things, but he wasn't anti-press, he didn't threaten people's lives, he didn't sound like a fascist, and he was socially liberal. In governing he was a bit lost, but took a little out of Dems and a little out of Rep. handbooks - he wasn't that bad.

Trump's potential for destruction infinitely worse.

When someone says they didn't vote for Obama because Sasha had only a one week internship, call it out for what it is: racism. How dare a black teen undertake only a one week internship. It should have been a six month contract to work in the salt mines! And never mind that the Trump children probably never even bothered to fill out an internship application. They just suckled off the family teat.

Isn't this a little late in the game? This should have been a daily staple of The Times' campaign coverage, and not just the political reporting we mostly got: stenographic reports from the Trump and Clinton campaigns coupled with poll results which seem in retrospect to have been reported from another planet. Yes, The Times did good work along the way, but not enough when you consider that this is one of the great newspapers of the world. Someone needs to look at the political editors and reporters who failed their readers, then reassign them. Cast a critical eye at the predictable voices of the Op-Ed pages, for some of these contributors are way past their sell-by dates. Make new contributors go out to the streets and gather information before sharing their wisdom. Readers deserve more than columnists regurgitating what they've read or what they've gleaned from a few phone calls. And as a symbolic gesture, prohibit any reporter or editor from attending the dreadful White House Correspondents Dinner. Send a reporter to cover it, but stop participating in it. Remember the classic journalistic adage: Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.

The NYT has now unwittingly uncovered the exact problem that got a blowhard and demagogue-in-waiting like Donald Trump elected president of this country. This magazine article describes how Times' reporters "fanned out," presumably from the enlightened intellectual bastion of New York City, to discover Donald Trump's America--"Your Land." But before the election, there was never any thought given by these reporters about "Your Land." "Your Land" was just the "flyover zone" to them. "Your Land" is a place reserved for derision for three years and 364 days each election cycle, and then is expected to stand up on their hind legs and vote "the right way" on the 365th day.

Go back through the NYT archives and look at the articles written in the past months by these authors, Greg Howard, Alec MacGillis, Michael Paterniti, Jacqueline Woodson, Marcela Valdes, Charles Homans, Emily Bazelon, Nikole Hanna-Jones, and Ruth Graham, and try to find any real insight whatsoever about the people who reside in "Your Land." There is none, because these reporters proudly belong to an East Coast elite that has grown up with what they consider a cultural entitlement to ignore and even ridicule people who disagree with their views of the world. They are on the "right side of history" and have no real use for people in the "flyover zone," who aren't.

So, the message from "Your Land" is save us the forced and false introspection. "Your Land" got the last word.

Almost all of the whining and complaining by the so-called, "forgotten" angry white Americans (and others) has come about because of self-inflicted wounds. If you look at the political landscape over the last 30 years, many of the states where the most economic pain is felt are staunchly Republican and conservative. These are places where unions have disappeared, where taxes have been lowered for the wealthy classes and large businesses, where investments in infrastructures, schools and other public services have been "drown in the bath tub," and where people continue to claim that "liberals, immigrants, NAFTA and every other conceivable thing in the world, caused their problems.
Also, as another reader pointed out on another NYT article about the struggling mid-west: we have been reading these hard-luck stories about struggling Americans for years now. This isn't "news." It's an old story. It keeps getting recycled because the very people who are suffering keep voting against their own self interests.
Now that the new "annointed one" has appeared, let's see is the savior all of these folks want.....I doubt it.

Judging from those quotes by the Latino community in Florida it's obvious racism, fear and selfishness is not reserved for only the white community. As a white person why do I bother supporting equality when so many minorities voted for Trump? If they do not look out for themselves why should I? Yes, I'm very upset at this outcome.

Finally, only now, you're fanning across America to find out what America really thinks? It's a little late, isn't it? We're all still reeling from the NY Times prediction on election day that Hillary had an 84% chance of winning. Did you make up that number? As someone who has read the NY Times exclusively for many years, I'm now questioning everything you write. Is it true that your editors told your reporters to write what they thought the news should be? When you published the headline, "The US is stunned at a Trump victory!", it should have read, "The NY Times is stunned that no one listened to us and voted for Hillary!" Shameful. Get out from your ivory tower in Manhattan and try to see another view other than your own, or you'll lose even more paid subscriptions.

These portraits are both fascinating and frightening, sort of like the state of Maine which self-admits to being a total study in contrasts, as the reporter described. Black and white, cold and hot, rural and coastal, employed and unemployed, on and on and on.

But the portrait of the women who voted for Trump in Pennsylvania is the one that remains with me, for an almost surreal faith and hope in Trump's potential, as only they can see it.

Case in point: "Other women called themselves pro-choice but backed Trump because they didn’t think he really opposed abortion or thought the law in states like theirs wouldn’t change even if he chose future Supreme Court justices with an eye to overturning Roe v. Wade."

They should have had the luxury of waiting a week, given Trump's insistence--today at least---that gay marriage stays but Roe vs Wade will be overturned by the next justice Trump picks.

I don't know. A campaign all built around the devil you know vs the devil you don't seems to be the thread running through all these studies, interviews, photos, and portraits. The common denominator seems to be novelty: without a political record to evaluate him, Trump supporters seemed very willing to project onto Trump their deepest political hopes.

Such a tremendous "leap of faith," from jobs to social issues to foreign policy! For some reason, voters took Clinton on the words of others while becoming enamored by Trump DESPITE his own words.

Deeply disturbing . That there is pain in White America in the rust belt and everywhere else was evident to foreigners visiting now and then . That the white majority felt that the pandering to minorities had got beyond their limits , as if they, the minorities, had a veto and must be shown their place was evident . As a reader of the NYT and a foreigner not resident there nor a frequent visitor , it puzzled me why Americans couldn't see , hear and feel it . If a 200 plus year old Democracy with a constitution and rule of Law can feel and behave this way , then what of Russia and China ? Is the future of democracy doomed ? is this the beginning of the end ? are all democracies never going to understand that majoritarianism is not the solution ? Are we condemned never to rise above ourselves ? Dark thoughts on a frozen bleak landscape - that is I am afraid the US today and the World tomorrow . The readers responses just confirm it.

So helpful to read these stories and hear these perspectives. Thank you to the writers for doing this important work.

Scraping his cabinet out of the woodwork is filling it with rats and cockroaches. He's surrounding himself with flawed people that he can maipulate, not people he can or will listen to.

If these are going to be the brains behind Presidency, we're all ....... well you know...........uh...........fracked!

The link should read "Reflections from Obama's America." He has been president for the past eight years.

Especially disheartened reading the story of the Frables. This truly was the election of middle america, or perhaps better yet, mediocre trash. People really love the apologetic rationalizing of every loathsome absurd element about this clown. We need abortions more than ever, for certain. Truly, the trash represented in this vignettes are SAD! on an epic scale. Hope everyone enjoys the white trash president.

"... You must not become a peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say."

-Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

(Wise words for journalists to keep in mind during an election season.)

The silhouette of NH looks a tad bit wonky.

Guessing what Mr. Trump will do and people lay their money down on the stock market, though poker or a roulette wheel are just as good bets. Thinking about the consequences or is this just something we stop doing now that Mr. Trump has been elected?

The number one problem in America is the American electorate. We, the people, could fix every problem in our country IF we could come together and speak as one.
But, ....., we may as well be 50 countries rather than The United States because we are not even remotely united.
My online Webster's defines united as 'joined together for a common purpose.'
We have not had a common purpose from the get go.
And, the divisiveness in America continues to grow, fueled by politics and money.

NYT shoud have go to people and interview them BEFORE the election, not after. Maybe then their polls would have any use. Too little too late.

I really don't know how I will ever believe in what NYT is "reporting".

I can only shake my head at Palma Frable's comment that Hillary Clinton's choosing to stay in her marriage with Bill is more damaging to women than Donald Trump's comments about assualting them. And putting forward Ivanka Trump as a entrepreneurial role model is also a head-scratcher. Her recipe for success begins, "First, be born to a billionaire."

These election results, and all that flow from them, were in the offing months past. Conservative, Blue Commenters advised that HRC was wrong on immigration, emails, guns, trade (jobs), and banks. But the NYT "curated" those comments.... allowing them to appear sparingly, if at all, and ignoring the repercussions for their Chosen One, who lost.
HRC had time, six months past, to Get A Clue, but steadfastly held to her self-sure vision of un-employing coal miners.
It's Maslow's hierarchy, really. Clinton supporters operated mid-pyramid while Trump supporters were economically forced to the base level.... "food, shelter, security"..... from their previous positions planning for their kids college tuition. Probably the first who would have gone to college in their family.
Thanks HRC, and thanks NYT... for completely not getting it. Keep advocating for social dalliances when people need bread.

There should have been a lot more of this reporting and mane then the media wouldn't have called this election before these people even had the chance to vote. I've been writing and taking photos for a year. I was sad and nervous but I was never shocked.

Dear Trumpster,
Enjoy the victory. We educated elite are hard at work designing automated factories, self driving trucks, taxis and robotic police officers. We have also stopped donating to charitable causes. Enjoy your impoverished future. signed, MIT/Stanford educated minority immigrant.

The state of North Carolina still doesn't have a governor-elect. Yes and election was held and yes people voted and yes a Democrat won and the next day the Republican controlled state changed the rules. There has to be a counting of absentee ballots now since the margin was big enough - over 5000 votes for the Democrat but suddenly the rules changed. This is my America - an America in which the elections don't matter.