Donald Trump won the popular vote.Let the fact sink in, steep awhile. This is a first. He didn’t in 2016. He certainly didn’t in 2020. This time, though, the majority of Americans who voted chose him for president.He overcame the BS baked into the Electoral College, which renders the vast bulk of votes in this race into mush. He has a fully legitimate victory.No one, least of all me, can squeak about winning the office by some sleight of hand when most voters went for the other candidate. We chose him. Hail to the chief.The majority of votes cast across the country roughly made the math work in the calculus in which the 40% of Utah and Texas votes that went for Kamala Harris and the 40% of California and New York votes for Trump were washed out in winner-take-all electoral points for each state.I appreciated avoiding a lot of really stupid campaign ads except for during the World Series and Sunday Night Football, still guilty pleasures. I didn’t indulge in cable TV news (FOX or CNN) or in listening much to the candidates themselves, each issuing their usual. Never mind differing styles — there’s little in the kabuki of the stump itself to lock in a thoughtful vote. All those words and nothing said.No surprise, then, that the candidates become caricatures and their supporters in line to vote offer nothing more than a shorthand of slogans and simplistic insults to explain their reasoning.A president is not going to save an economy, solve immigration (legal and otherwise), make the price of eggs go down, hand you your “living wage,” make you safer, solve global warming. Ironically, the administration voters seek change from in fact handled a lot of those issues slightly better, although of course that’s not really the point.In 2008, the hopey-changey phenomenon worked the opposite way, leading to inevitable disappointment and enough votes in just the right places for a new administration in 2016, then 2020, and then … now. The odds are the new administration will fix some mistakes and make some new ones, same as ever.This is not to dismiss the reckonings to come, immigration probably the most brutal, which will generate a rise in resistance on humanitarian grounds, seeds for the next groundswell for change at the ballot box. The political red lands will try, try again with an American form of sharia as various churches seek to regain former dominance from a different age. The bell has long been tolling on that, however. The 70% of Americans who don’t attend church regularly won’t be herded.The bell also has been tolling on fossil fuels and Big Oil and Big Coal, much as politicians in states like ours have sought to prop them up in their end-of-life throes. Renewables are as inevitable now as steam was to hooves, laptops to typewriters. Even the Republicans taking over every quadrant of federal government won’t hold back time’s tide.But they can and will create lots of new messes taking over for the Democrats, who did the same in their turn. Each party in its own way is dumb as toast, frankly, the product of our political machines and the insidious workings of human nature and groupthink.We toggle back and forth. One party has better answers for a part of our problems and is all wrong on another. The pattern isn’t exactly hidden. It’s that we’re color blind, everything tinted red or blue.Maybe we’ll chug along the familiar path faster this time is all. The popular vote lined up for the Republicans in the presidency, and they won the Senate and in all probability the House for the first time since the early 2000s.They already have the Supreme Court and hold the cards for new appointees for the next four years. This body serving today as a second Senate, still bearing a façade of gravitas, could well slip further into partisanship, a shadow House, pure crazy town from a Democrat’s perspective. I have little faith the Democrats would choose better if they had the chance, but a closer balance of these forces does seem better to me, or at least more reflective of our country today.  The tyrants were the first to congratulate Trump on his great victory, and it was, actually. Putin seems happy, and Zelensky can see the death blow for Ukraine in America’s vote. This doesn’t look like a step toward the security fellow citizens think we’ll achieve by stiffing the free world and embracing the dark one.I don’t see the price of eggs going down anytime soon because of a new president. It doesn’t work that way, simply put. Being football season, the analogy at work here goes something like the defense can’t stop the other team from scoring, so let’s bench the quarterback. That will fix everything. Or, the drummer can’t get the beat, so let’s pull the plug on the guitars.But then, the Democratic answer to pointing out that the defense can’t stop the other team is smug incredulity: “What do you mean. Of course it is.” Only, um, it’s plainly not doing the job. We all can see the score.So the instinct that we need big change seems right on. Even I can understand that much. The question is whether the decisive action we took was incredibly stupid or that doing something, anything rather than nothing actually is the wiser course.At least a clear majority of us agreed this time. We’re more or less leaping together.  Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.The post Journalism Matters: This win was fully legitimate appeared first on Park Record.