Pence is more bats*** crazy with his religious beliefs than either of them and he's very near to the presidency.

I am an ex-pat in the US. I grew up in the UK, and emigrated as an adult.

Hillary is not charismatic, and that is a big part of her lack of national appeal. Scandal after scandal has degraded her standing over thirty years in the public eye. She has offered no vision, instead listing policies and plans without really connecting to the average voter. Furthermore, the Democratic party has allowed itself to become dominated by wealthy elites who have little connection to the party's core support. Surprisingly, perhaps, far more Republicans seem at home with poor people than do many top Democrats, and the latter tend to talk down to the working classes: telling what they should and should not want and need. Re. Hillary's "basket of deplorable" comment. That was taken worse than Romney's "40% don't pay tax and won't ever vote Republican" comment. Throw in the fact that she will switch support for issues and ideas at the first sign of unpopularity, and people don't think she can be trusted.

The more recent leaking of emails has not helped, as they have shown many of the assumptions about the Democratic Primaries being rigged against Sanders to be true. The suspicions about her email server look more worrying when emails showing she knew perfectly well why she wanted a private server, came to light. She wanted to hide stuff. Therefore, it is perhaps no surprise that large numbers of Bernie's supporters simply did not vote for her. They wanted change, transparency, honesty, and the best she could offer was more of the same, without the charisma.

The electorate across the political spectrum has been crying out for an outsider for the last dozen years. Witness the Tea Party which started out as a narrow single issue party and grew from there. It was composed of mostly disaffected voters who felt they had been marginalized by the political system. In many ways they were right. When they were spoken to, particularly by the left, they were ridiculed, maligned, and discounted. This last year or two has seen two outsiders do really well in the primaries and election: Sanders and Trump. Much of what they were saying is quite similar: i.e. you've been screwed by the man, DC and the old guard look after their own, I can be your champion.

So, when the election came up, many of my Republican friends decided not to vote, or to vote for a third party candidate as a protest. From the analysis of the election, 5-10m Democrats did not show up to vote. The weather was good, there were no real problems of access to voting, yet they did not show up and support her. Republican numbers were down, but third party candidates got the largest share of the vote in ages. She still failed to win. Not only that, but Republicans now control both houses too. That's a damning indictment of the Democratic party's last eight years.

Economically, the economy is growing very slowly and many of the new jobs are at the lower end of the food chain. Medical costs have gone up massively, and quite a lot of people lost their healthcare coverage because of Obamacare. That has driven up costs for ordinary working people, without solving the problem of lack of health insurance. Thus, there are still many people who are unemployed or underemployed.

The problem of immigration has not gone away, and that has had an effect on wages at the bottom of the scale. Democrats seem to have focused on ethnic minorities and not on blue collar whites. Whether that perception is wholly true, is immaterial. It certainly looks like that.

Add in a focus on things such as transgender rights for kids, etc., and you have a large part of the population wondering what on earth the Democratic party is thinking. It spends a huge amount of time on a few hot button emotive topics whilst not paying attention to Syria, problems with China, Russia, the economy, jobs, immigration, etc. It's no wonder ordinary blue collar voters have stopped voting for them, or for voting for anyone calling for changes in the status quo. As Nickgusset mentioned, Trump and Sanders are similar in many ways.

I have a violent temper, am mostly incomprehensible, as tight as a ducks chuff, deep fry my heroin and have early symptoms of liver failure. Any good?

You miss my point. It was seen as normal and utterly unremarkable.

What, like being opposed to it? Hardly a niche viewpoint.

patronising my *rse ... you don't have to be a pseudo intellectual bleeding heart liberal to be depressed at having a psycho pussy grabber as president. Either introduce an IQ test to disbar brainless freaks from voting or have some jury service element brought into democracy ... old fashioned REPRESENTATIVE democracy is failing, it's being subverted by a conspiracy of evil jokers and morons. I like and respect thoughtful open-minded people from whatever class thy choose to be identified with, but sod democracy - Trumpers should all definitely be shot - not all Brexiteers mind, just most of them