Top 5 Reasons Trump’s Victory Should Be No Surprise

5. Polls don’t measure what they claim to measure

Last night, nearly the entire country was convinced that Hillary Clinton would handily win this election because of the polls.

Is polling science due for an autopsy this morning? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s been evident that Trump’s internal polls were telling him that he was competitive in states that haven’t gone Republican in decades. But again, he’s not really a Republican, and so assumptions about red and blue states should go right out the window.

But were the polls that were reported really honest? There were examples of polls that excluded millennials, polls that over-sampled Democrats, polls that identified likely voters simply as people who voted in previous elections, ignoring those who were re-entering the electorate or voting for the first time. Given that the mainstream media pays for most of these polls, were they designed to provide confirmation bias? Was there an attempt to create a Hillary bandwagon that just didn’t prove successful?

Joe Scarborough noted this morning that there were many professionals he personally interviewed that would take him aside and tell him that they were supporting Trump, although they would not admit to such “in polite company.” Clinton did not do as well among college educated whites as was predicted, so either people were lying to pollsters, or pollsters weren’t reporting results fairly.

Surely, there will be many articles this morning discussing the postmortem of our political establishment, but Clinton may still narrowly win the popular vote. Still, as we often remind ourselves, the United States is a republic, not a democracy.