It's scary because we ran out of excuses. I The one political party that's top my shit-list is the tea party ever since the day of its creation. And for all the stuffs they did, prior to every election you heard this narrative "the tea party will be punished at the poll!", and that literally never happened. Personally I believe the writing has been on the wall for sometime now, so I don't even considered it a wake up call. To me wake up call implies things have been going smooth then you got a shock treatment. This is more like forcing us to face a reality you have been trying to deny.
In 2016 Trump got the benefit of the doubt, we said we're tired of the establishment, we said Clinton is just a bad candidate with too many skeletons in her closest. Those were our excuses. I can only hope people can face reality now with this current result instead of trying to come up with more excuses.
I wish more people understand/admit it. Similarly I often see defending lawyers get attacked as devil incarnate because the clients they represent, but that's just their job. One can try to argue all days long how moral bankrupt the Republican currently is, and it doesn't matter. They're simply doing what people voted them in for, and those "people" are also American, want it or not, and this election showed there are a lot of them.The Republicans backing Trump is disappointing and worrying, but not really surprising - they will do what their electorate wants them to do. A sizeable chunk of voters, including the vast majority of voters on one side of politics that is fine with authoritarian rule and willing to ignore repeated constitutional breaches and criminal activity, as long as it is 'their guy' that does it? That is terrifying.
In addition, I don't believe the majority of people vote simply base on the ideology line. Seeing how much shift the votes do from election to election is proof of this. How often people change their ideology? Not very often or even at all, but people can switch their votes many times during their life time. It's not like if someone call himself "Conservative" will automatically mark down all Republican options on the ballot like a robot, person calling herself "Liberal" not just gonna mindlessly tick all the Democrat's boxes. Florida (deep red) actually voted to back the measure to bring minimum wage to $15 in the state, while Colorado voted to bring the tax rate down. You can have people who are fiscal conservative but social liberal or vice versa. America has a big problem, but we'll need to fix the current culture of obsession of putting singular labels on people and play a very narrow association game if we want to fix it.