New York: The media got it wrong. The public pollsters got it wrong, so did the private ones. The Democratic Party got wrong. The Republican Party was wrong too. Five living presidents got it wrong. The betting markets got it wrong. The markets got it wrong. By many accounts even President-elect Donald Trump got it wrong.
One man got it spectacularly right, predicting not only that Clinton would lose, but where she would lose, among which voters she would lose, and why: the left wing documentary maker Michael Moore.
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How Michael Moore predicted Trump's win...
... and what he now thinks of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.
In a post on his blog that is undated, but published well before the election, he wrote, "I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November."
"This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, 'cause you'll be saying them for the next four years: 'PRESIDENT TRUMP.'"
Moore's thesis, which he laid out in detail and which has now proved to be spectacularly correct, was that Donald Trump would win four rustbelt states that Democrats believed they could not lose.
"And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes," wrote Moore. "Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It's 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he's expected to do, the swath of traditional red states from Idaho to Georgia (states that'll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just needs these four rust belt states. He doesn't need Florida. He doesn't need Colorado or Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top. This is how it will happen in November."
He argued that men, spooked that "a male-dominated, 240-year run of the USA is coming to an end" would be driven to the polls to keep a woman out of office, and that white men, already embittered by eight years of an Obama presidency, would turn out to block her rise. He speculated that Bernie Sanders supporters would not turn out to support Clinton once she won the primary, and he was right about that too.
People simply would not trust her.
He argued that in a nation that had already elected the wrestler Jesse Ventura to high office, there might be a thick streak of closet anarchism who would vent their frustration once behind the curtain of a polling booth.
"It's one of the few places left in society where there are no security cameras, no listening devices, no spouses, no kids, no boss, no cops, there's not even a friggin' time limit," wrote Moore.
"You can take as long as you need in there and no one can make you do anything. You can push the button and vote a straight party line, or you can write in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. There are no rules. And because of that, and the anger that so many have toward a broken political system, millions are going to vote for Trump not because they agree with him, not because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can."
Moore even laid out his theory in detail in an interview with Bill Maher nearly six months ago.
It begins, unsurprisingly, with a call for a populist movement to take over the Democratic Party, then to fire the pollsters, pundits and media figures who got this election so wrong.