That's who I remember so distinctly from that night. I was living in Las Vegas and betting sports every day. Our nightly hangout was Little Caesar's casino, a small independent joint not connected with the pizza chain. It was in a small shopping mall at the current site of Paris Las Vegas. Little Caesar's took the largest action in town during the day but the sportsbook closed early and was dark the rest of the night. Many of us who preferred to watch the scores come across the sportsticker as opposed to sweating out the games on televisions made Little Caesar's our spot for years and years. We'd lean against the slot machines and sweat out our wagers while watching that ticker on the wall.
Anyway, none of the right wing sports bettors would accept that Clinton was going to win. Complete denial. They didn't believe the polls or anything else. It was obvious for a month or more. Not until that night when the reports were coming across the ticker did they start to grasp it was actually going to happen.
That night one guy who actually seemed more sane than most of them announced plans to head to the local gun store the next day and stock up on everything they would allow him to walk out with. And he was absolutely serious. He was convinced Bill Clinton would take away his guns within weeks, even if he wouldn't become president for months. That conversation was the first time I realized how wacko most of my sports betting friends really were when it came to politics and a world view.
The next afternoon that guy indeed pulled up with his white pickup truck and showed off all his new stash of weapons and ammunition. I didn't go out to check it out but I watched everyone else follow him.
That experience and the subsequent years in the same climate is what enabled me to realize how much jeopardy we were in toward the 2016 election, after it was glaring that while males were furious at Obama/Democrats and had shifted even further right with more fear and hatred than ever before. I'm convinced Rachel Maddow and others are totally clueless toward those guys and how they think. Probably never spent 5 minutes in their company. Total. Lifetime. Otherwise Rachel would never own that smirk, and certainly not during 2016.
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