Okay, I freely admit to being pleasantly surprised after all. We got the notice stuff out of the way in the post below.
For sure pollsters blew the prediction badly, as they did with Brexit in the U.K. Populist nationalism is alive and well here as well as in England.
Now, how did this unexpected election win occur? Trump got the overwhelming support of white non-college grads everyone said he'd get. Exit polls are said to have shown that substantially more white college grads voted for Trump than were expected to do so by the pundit class.
College grads knew they were supposed to support Clinton and lied about favoring Trump: they either told pollsters they were undecided or supported her. This was the real "shy Trump vote" people speculated about. The other DrC suggests a sort of non-racial "Bradley effect" operating, and I concur.
COTTonLINE first mentioned the emergence of tribal politics in March of 2014 and has returned to the topic several times. It was likely white bloc voting would become routine.
I've predicted that if Clinton lost, she will prove to be the last white candidate nominated by the Democrats for at least the next several presidential cycles. I stand by that prediction.
I expect a more fine-grained analysis of voting trends in the coming weeks will determine that African-Americans didn't turn out in nearly the numbers who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Perhaps millennials - many of whom favored Bernie Sanders - will be shown to have underperformed as well. And once again the likely Latino vote was apparently overestimated.
