Well, to be Machiavellian for a minute, Trump is the only candidate that Clinton has a prayer against. The other Republicans consistently outperform Trump in the polls. On the other hand, this has been a bad year for pollsters.

If she really believed in her causes and not her career, she could have decided not to run and backed a promising successor a long time ago.

Thanks to Wikileaks, we know that the Democrats wanted to ensure that the Republicans would nominate someone more extreme. Look at the PDF attachment here. There's more than just this quote, too:

Operationalizing the Strategy Pied Piper Candidates

There are two ways to approach the strategies mentioned above. The first is to use the field as a whole to inflict damage on itself similar to what happened to Mitt Romney in 2012. The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more “Pied Piper” candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party. Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:

• Ted Cruz

• Donald Trump

• Ben Carson

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1120 (Read the PDF attached)

Is there anyone else that could have secured a majority in the House and potentially (as of 1247am EST) the Senate? I doubt that, DC politics is more about trading wins like potheads passing the joint around. I don't mean that pejoratively but literally -- Republicans and Democrats trade wins and losses to curry favor with one-another, meanwhile the interests of the American people are secondary to this political snobbery.

Furthermore, who else could have rallied the masses to vote so thoroughly? A Jeb vs Hillary election would have been very dull, almost depressingly so, meanwhile a Cruz vs Hillary election would have bordered on hopelessly disinteresting.

It sounds like you want to cut off your nose to spite your face.

How so? I'm not excited about a Trump presidency.

My hopes are that 1) the media will keep a better eye on Trump (going off the last 8 years, they'll ignore any atrocity as long as it's committed by the blue team), 2) that Trump is not as smart as Clinton, and therefore less able to deceptively achieve his goals and 3) that 4 years of Trump will mobilize Americans to fix their electoral system and seek out real alternatives to the Democrat / Republican duopoly.

Oh please, stop the rhetoric. There will still be an election in 2018 and even in 2020. More importantly there will still be redistricting after the 2020 census and using a Trump backlash the Democrats might actually be able to redistrict in their favor along demographic lines, shutting out the Republicans from majority control of national and state houses for ever.

And you realize that Clinton is actually a Republican too? I'm not calling it our Brexit moment, nor am I remotely excited about the next 4 years. I don't know what kind of moment it is, but let's not pretend that Clinton was a safe alternative. She is as dangerous as Trump, if not more so.

I personally would have liked to see Jill Stein hit 5%, but that looks unlikely.

Clinton may have been a centrist and not helped the Poor. Trump won't help the poor, so it's at best a toss-up.

The problem is that there are a lot of people who are not white, male, Christian, heterosexual, natural-born. And it's gonna get difficult for all those people. Clinton would've left them alone, Trump is fanning the flames of xenophobia.

Calling Trump a Republican is probably a bit strong. He ran on that ticket, but historically his views are quite liberal.

Historically, his views have been whatever was convenient for networking with politicians useful to his business interests.

Nope. I don't think John McCain or Mitt Romney would ever want a dictatorship. Heck, I think 90% of Americans would take up arms if a president didn't give up power peacefully and the military didn't peacefully stop listening and push him out the door.

I meant in terms of this election being a reaction against the moral decadence of the establishment rather than being about economic independence. I didn't mean that the US was going to become a dictatorship. (And in fact Iran itself still has elections.)