Williamson County voted more than two-to-one for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton for president.
Here is how people out and about in downtown Franklin felt the day after the election.
Brandy Corley: I voted for Donald Trump and I was surprised, because everyone says we are divided country but if you look at the map it is mostly red, with a few bigger blue states. I am really glad that he won. It did take a lot of people by surprise. I voted for Trump, and not against Hillary.
I like that he is not afraid to speak his mind and stand up for what he believes in; he doesn’t dance around the issue. And he has no problem saying how he feels and what he has done, he owns up to that. He is not divided on anything he says. And with the things that Hillary says, what she has said and done, how she covers that up and hides from it, I feel we have had too much of that in America. It is time to get back on the right track and face reality.
William: (elected to not give last name): Most of the media, the liberal media that is, I think in shock and disarray at what the outcome is, because they all showed and were portraying that Clinton was the lead, the favorite, for so long and so much negativity against Trump. And then he blows everything out of the water.
I have confidence in the country as a whole.
Karen Flournoy: You really want to know what I think? He is a misogynist, and I can’t stand him. My husband and I are seriously thinking about moving to Europe. He is a known liar and a cheater. People did not do their homework enough. I did my homework on Hillary. The e-mail thing was just all they had on her. And, I am very depressed. So much so that we are getting our house ready. We are going to go. We are leaving. It is not my United States anymore.
How can you like somebody like that? He is a pig. He is a classic Narcissist. Ego-head. Doesn’t care about anybody but himself. So. America, I hope you enjoy it. And I feel like going. That is how I feel. I normally don’t talk about it, and I am very upset today, so I wanted to be cautious talking to you. But that is just how I feel. Depressed.
Matt Dunn: I voted for Trump in the primary, and yesterday. I have been a lifelong Republican. Trump started catching fire and I started to believe he was the only one who could go in and get something done there. When he won the nomination, the Republicans won’t show up for their own convention, it completely reaffirmed that and it increased my support.
Last week, my wife — and she would kill me if I told her I told you this — she is from upstate New York and supported Bernie Sanders. And she went in last week to early vote, and she didn’t tell me she was going so I did not have a chance to try to convince her to vote for Trump. She said she sat in there for 10 or 15 minutes going back and forth and ultimately cast her vote for Trump.
We were watching the coverage the other night, and they were talking about how the only path for Trump to get to the White House was through support from the ‘silent majority,’ and she looked at me said, ‘I guess they are talking about me.”
It came down to, Hillary is crooked. We don’t trust her and wouldn’t vote for her, and she was very put off by really what Hillary did to Bernie in the primary, and purging voter rolls in New York City, which the mainstream media has not covered. That and all the other investigations and stuff going on with Hillary.
I think too often platforms are so broad, and they cover so many different topics, that unless you are a hardliner on the right or left you are not going to fall in under all those branches. And, you know, politics is local. There are issues that will matter a lot more to one person or another depending on where they are from. At the end of the day, then, you have to vote for who you think can be effective as a president and, as bad as it has been politically for my adult life, Donald Trump has never been elected to any office. He is a billionaire and didn’t go in there with super-PACS and Wall Street. He is the ultimate outsider. He will not kowtow to anyone. He is also a marketing and branding genius, with the positions he took in the primary and then some reaffirmed but with lesser vitriol in the general. He is the Apprentice.
Brian Hurst: I am not very surprised by the outcome because I thought there was a lot of uncertainty already built into it, and neither candidate who came out looked strong. Policies in either direction, pulled them radically. The way they were forced to run, was it was based on people’s fears and concerns. So the result, my prayer is there is some type of unitedness that comes out as a result of this, because our country has been through a lot. A lot of hate. I support our current president, one hundred percent, although I don’t agree with a majority of his policies, I’ll support this president the same way, although I don’t think that he will get a lot accomplished. Our number-one goal coming out of yesterday was that one party wasn’t in control of the House, the Senate and the Executive branches and dang it, if that didn’t end up happening.
I still have hope for our country, because I think our country has a lot of really good people in it. Not everybody who voted for the Republican party, they are not all bad people. And not all the people that supported her are all bad people, either. And I hope we can get past it.
I think about it, because I have three children. Two of them lean left, the other and myself hold strong conservative, religious beliefs, social beliefs. But at the end of the day, we are all one country. And our government has failed our country so far, because we are not doing much anything right. I think that is why people supported Trump, just because it was something different.
I would not vote for Hillary, I would never vote for her. And I tell my kids, if it had been any other candidate for the Democratic Party they would have won hands down. And if it had been anybody but him from the Republican side, versus her, they would have won hands down.
Megan Cook: I was disappointed. For me, I don’t think either candidate was actually the best choice, but Hillary was the lesser of two evils. We were faced with a candidate who had complete and utter disrespect for women in general, and has no track record in holding public office versus somebody who we may not be totally happy with her track record but she has served publicly for most of her life and at least she has a proven track record and has had some good policies.
I felt like for me the sticking point for me with him, in addition to a lot of other things, was I could not get past what that would mean for my daughter in terms of who he is as a person. How do I teach her about respecting a president who thinks the things he does about women.
Also, I worried that other world leaders will think he is a joke and we will take a back seat in the world political arena from here on out because they will not want to deal with him, or think he is a joke. And I don’t trust him to make decisions and, unfortunately, there are also a lot of things that will set us back in terms of women’s rights and marriage equality — things that I don’t think should even be up for debate.
Susan Klapper: I was extremely shocked, and amazed at how close the race was. I am honestly disappointed, because I really wish Hillary would have won. We are in town visiting, and are from New Jersey,and voted absentee. I tried to keep the TV watching at a minimum last night, because I didn’t want to be stressed about hearing about what was happening, so unexpectedly. Basically we woke up at 3 a.m. by hearing my son, Josh, say, “Oh, crap.”
It is a little scary and I am anxious to see what Paul Ryan is going to do. It will be an interesting future for America.
