From the top of the ballot to the bottom, organized labor's preferred candidates for state and national offices were generally not the preferred candidates of the rest of the voting public in the Nov. 8 general election.

At the top of the ticket, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton lost a close race to Republican Donald Trump, who will succeed Barack Obama as the nation's 45th president.

“Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division,” Trump said. “It is time for us to come together as one united people. It’s time.”

Clinton in her concession speech, said, "We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America and always will. And if you do, then we must accept this” election outcome. “We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.”

Trump won Michigan by 13,225 votes even though there wasn't a single pre-election poll that said he would win the state. MIRS News Service cited pollster Ed Sarpolus of Target Insyght, who said about 230,668 fewer Democrats (nearly -10 percent) voted in this election vs. 2012, when President Obama was re-elected. "What this shows is why so many early polls were wrong because they didn't take into account the significant dropoff in Democratic turnout and the large surge in Republican turnout," Sarpolus told MIRS.

A total of 2,029,301 Michigan Democrats voted this year - 42 percent of all votes cast, vs. 47 percent in 2012. Among Republicans, there were 152,413 more votes cast than in 2012 for a total of 1,959,766, an increase of about 8 percent compared to 2012.

Among union households, according to Politico, nationally, Clinton outperformed Trump among union households by just 8 percent, compared to President Obama's 18 percent margin in 2012. In Michigan, exit polls showed Clinton with only a 13 percent advantage over Trump among union households, while Obama beat Mitt Romney by a 33 percent margin in 2012. In Ohio, Clinton actually lost Ohio’s union households to Trump by 9 points.

Labor union leaders, along with everybody else who saw the pre-election polls that showed Clinton winning, were stunned by the results.

“North America’s Building Trades Unions stand ready to work with President-elect Trump, as well as with the leadership and lawmakers of both political parties to cast away left-over animosities from this past election cycle," said Building Trades President Sean McGarvey, "and to begin anew in fashioning a productive and prosperous path forward for all Americans.”

But one of the frequent letter writers to our paper, retired iron worker Doug Kalnbach of Nashville, Mich., asked if we were as "unsurprised" about the election results at the top of the ticket as he was.

"I could not find any male union member that was going to vote for HRC  (Hillary Rodham Clinton)," Kalnbach said. "I am still really upset with the DNC (Democratic National Committee), Bernie Sanders beat HRC in Michigan and had a huge movement started behind him and yet they forced HRC on us. I think the good ol' boys in the DNC must of had stock in Samsonite as they wanted someone with a lot of baggage already.

"Until they let we the people choose who we want to run against the Republicans then this is what we will have to deal with, no Democratic representation at all.  Who needs high dollar pollsters either, drive around the country and see all the Trump-Pence yard signs, that are still up!"

The lack of union enthusiasm for Clinton filtered down the Michigan ballot for all Dems - "it was a shellacking," said Michigan Building and Construction Trades Council Legislative Director Shorty Gleason.

In the races for control of the Michigan House of Representatives, labor hoped to chip away at the hold Republicans have had on the legislative body since 2010. Didn't happen: It was unlikely Dems were going to flip nine House seats in order to regain the majority and thus provide unions with a blocker on all the GOP-backed anti-labor legislation that has emerged from the state Legislature. Dems didn't come close: they gained just one seat, but lost another, and the GOP emerged from the election with the same 63-47 advantage. Candidates for the state Senate were not on the ballot.

On the Michigan Supreme Court, Republican-backed justices will continue to dominate, keeping their 5-2 advantage after the election, as two incumbents successfully fought off challengers. That 5-2 majority likely means more rubber stamped approvals of whatever future anti-labor legislation that will come before them.

"Well, it's going to be another tough road ahead for us in Lansing," Gleason said. "But we're going to keep doing the same things that helped use stave off prevailing wage repeal this year. We're going to be keeping up our contacts with the legislators who will still be in office, and educate the new lawmakers who are coming in about our issues. We hoped for a better outcome, but it's just going to be more of the same."