During the closing weeks of the election, one graph kept popping up in my mind. It charts the ideology of the Supreme Court’s swing vote since 1940 and then projects how that ideology would likely change depending on the presidential election results.

If Hillary Clinton had become president, the graph shows, the court would have immediately taken an extreme liberal turn, becoming, by far, the most liberal Supreme Court in the graph’s recorded history. If Donald Trump were to win, the graph showed the court would gradually become quite conservative, near to its most conservative point in history if Trump were to spend eight years in office.