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Well I guess we're arguing now about whether Hillary was a strong candidate or was merely perceived to be a strong candidate. But I would say, even if you remove the pundit class bubble the average man on the street thought it was obvious Hillary was going to win. I remember liberal coworkers brazenly exclaiming that Hillary was going to win Texas and wasn't it wonderful. I remember watching the Snowden movie with clips of Trump calling for Snowden to be executed put in the epilogue as a punchline. I was virtually the only person I knew who thought Trump was going to win. Arguments with the liberals I knew. Republican friends and family would pointedly stay quiet when I said Trump was going to win. The only other person I knew who thought Trump was going to win was an ex-auto worker who would call me up and whisper over the phone (I am not rhetorically exaggerating -- he would whisper) that the union guys were all voting for Trump and he might actually carry away with this thing. The only place I could consistently find people who thought Trump could win was on the internet. And privately, after the election, many of these people admitted to me that they hadn't thought Trump would win. That they were just trying to hold frame and save face. That they wanted it to be true but that they couldn't believe it would be.
I remember the Billy Bush tapes and by all conventional accounting everybody thought Trump was toast. "Because you'd be in jail." And I remember the Al Smith Dinner; I heard it from someone who was there that everyone in the room thought Trump was going to lose, and that the bad taste of his mean speech was taken as evidence that Trump knew it too.
I don't think that's true; Romney beating Obama was a mainstream possibility and he was up at times. Trump beating Hillary was an extreme outlier very few pollsters showed at all and many had her leading by quite comfortable margins. (Although I think in more realistic quarters the idea that Hillary was up +10 was not treated seriously and it was supposed that she was up by +3 or +4.)
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