So there’s this thing in American punditry, where the conventional wisdom is eternally wrong, and when they’re proven wrong yet again, they look around and say no one could’ve predicted when in fact, lots of people had predicted. Jonathan Chait, for one, has gotten really good at that.
Here’s the Real Reason Everybody Thought Trump Would Lose
Atrios responds:
I'm tired of reading think pieces about WHY WE ALL THOUGHT DONALD TRUMP WOULD LOSE (I'm looking at you, Chait). First of all, we all didn't, you and your circle jerk did. Secondly, I don't care what your prior beliefs about the Republican party were. If you were an alien anthropologist sent to study this election but otherwise didn't know a damn thing about about the American electorate, you would have looked at the polls and predicted a Trump win. Thirdly, to the extent that your knowledge of Republican voters might have added a bit of special sauce to your poll analysis, we hippie liberals have been telling you for years that a sizeable chunk of Republican voters are absolute blithering idiots. Also, racist. This is not news.
I went back and took a look, and turns out I was saying Trump would win October, I was convinced of it in December, and I provided solid empirical data-based evidence why Trump was headed toward victory in January.
And it didn’t require anything special, just noting that Trump was stroking that part of the conservative id that drives modern GOP politics: racism, resentment and violence, and then looking at polls for empirical confirmation. I mean, this was the polling in December:
What kind of moron did you have to be to look at that, and think anything else but a Trump victory was in store? Did you really think Rubio’s 12 percent was going to shake up the race? Did you think that Trump could say something to shake off his supporters, after surviving supposed “gaffe” after gaffe? It was clear there was nothing he could say that would cost him support. He even bragged about it, that he could “shoot someone and not lose voters”! Once you realized that, the math for anyone not named Trump never added up.
So yeah, it was easy to predict a Trump victory! Well, unless you are part of the establishment punditry. Lucky for them, no one ever pays them to be right.