Nobody among the intellectual class anticipated Trump's election in 2016. Much like physicists hypothesized dark matter to account for the apparent greater mass necessary to stabilize galaxies and such, the political intelligentsia hypothesized an enormous, hidden body of "dark Nazis" to account for their chosen candidate not winning the election. It is unfathomable to them that enough people in the center, center-right, and right could be discontent enough with being told whom to vote for and why someone running on a platform of tighter immigration controls and more jobs for Americans is evil incarnate, that they were willing to "hold their nose and vote for Trump", to swing the election in his favor.
Political intellectuals tend to lean left, and whenever a rightist scores a major political victory they start predicting stormtroopers goosestepping through American streets Real Soon Now, going back to at least Reagan. So the Nazi Revival is generally accepted as real, and if you contest the idea's truth you may be considered one of them.
WBUR, Boston's NPR news station, published in their blog "Cognoscenti" an article titled "Why Donald Trump will Win in November" in May of 2016 (https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2016/05/06/election2016-tru...). I can't think of anything more representative of what people think of as the left leaning intellectual class than a Boston NPR blog with a Latin title.
This idea that him winning in 2016 was inconceivable to media/intellectual circles is a bit of revisionist history.
Eh. Most of the mainstream media ran headlines predicting 99% chance of a Hillary win and a few of them sniped at Nate Silver for giving Trump a 30% chance (stupid tech bros).
A single contrarian take doesn't undermine that trend.
Note that no one denies Hillary was considered the favorite, I also mention the HuffPost model which was the most prominent to reflect a near certainty. Most news outlets, even conservative ones, reported on this notable predictive modeling effort.
What there was, was a diversity of opinion and vigorous debate (sometimes devolving into sniping, sure), the thing that is supposed to be there. There wasn't a 50/50 split, but I don't remember a single publication I read at the time (all the classic left leaning intellectual rags) that didn't run pieces predicting a Trump victory.
The 99% number so often paraded as a sign of failure wasn't a 99% chance of being president. It was a 99% chance of winning the popular vote.
That prediction was correct, and by a decently large margin. But losers often become president because of the electoral college (it's happened 5 times already), and losers will continue to benefit for years to come.
It was a conditional probability of Trump winning a bunch of states he was behind in, naively projected as if they were independent. It turned out they all swung the same way, and those probabilities were not independent.
> Nobody among the intellectual class anticipated Trump's election in 2016.
A number of people in the intellectual world did, or at least wrote articles purporting to explain why it was more than remotely possible.
The relatively new set of people in the major media trying to play the poll-based mathematical prediction game that Nate Silver started with 538 who weren't Nate Silver undersold the chances of it happening because they made the naive mistake assuming that deviations from polling averages between states were independent of each other rather than, as historical analysis of the type Silver does would show, tightly correlated. But “media outlets want what Silver does but can't afford to pay to have Silver, or anyone with anything like his level of skill at what he does” doesn't represent the “intellectual class”.
I think it's also absurd to treat the less likely of the two plausible possible winners of the US Presidential election winning as some sort of black swan event as opposed to "well within the realm of possibility".
I'm not sure even Jill Stein or Gary Johnson would really be a black swan event, given that I can list it as a possibility, but it's definitely a lot more gray than "either the Democrat or Republican wins".
He won the election by winning the electoral college. You know, I know, everybody knows that.
There is no need to explain where an "enormous hidden body" of votes came from because it didn't. There is no need to explain why the polls were wrong, because they were as accurate as they normally are. There is no need to explain why elites were wrong about what the people thought because they weren't. And there's no reason to argue about whether the election was rigged, because Trump said it was.
Political intellectuals tend to lean left, and whenever a rightist scores a major political victory they start predicting stormtroopers goosestepping through American streets Real Soon Now, going back to at least Reagan. So the Nazi Revival is generally accepted as real, and if you contest the idea's truth you may be considered one of them.