The pollsters, the media, and commentators from both sides of the political spectrum predicted Hillary Clinton would comfortably win the White House Tuesday. They were wrong.
The election forecast by Fivethirtyeight pegged Clinton with a 72 percent chance of winning the presidency. Early in the night, the New York Times Upshot report put her at a 80 percent chance. As results rushed in through the night, both rival outlets completely flipped, with Fivethirtyeight adjusting to a 84 percent chance for Donald Trump, while the New York Times also inched his chances up into irreversible digits.
How were the predictions so off the mark?
Some commentators have chalked it up to a “silent majority” that supported Trump even though they were too ashamed to admit it — a disturbing revelation of just how insidious and pervasive racism and misogyny are in the United States.
Analysts told the New York Daily News that some Trump supporters opted to keep their voting intentions secret out of fear of the “social stigma” of being a vocal Trump backer.
Conservative pollster Rasmussen Reports found in August that 17 percent of likely Republican voters were less likely to disclose their voting plans than in previous campaigns, compared to just 10 percent of Democratic voters with the same sentiment. The polemical outlet heralded “hidden support” for Trump among voters “fearful of criticism” if they let their ballot preferences be known. “We won’t know for sure until election day,” Rasmussen reported, “but Republicans are clearly more reluctant than Democrats this year to say how they are going to vote.”
According to Politico, nearly three-quarters of Democrats denied the existence of the amorphous “hidden” Trump voter. But the reality may have impacted the polls by underestimating Trump’s real support base.
Commentators have pointed the blame at the media for failing to have a finger on the pulse of the election.
“To put it bluntly, the media missed the story,” wrote Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, adding that Trump “alienated” journalists into not seeing what was happening in the election until the results became clear.
“If the news media failed to present a reality-based political scenario,” wrote Jim Rutenberg for the New York Times, “then it failed in performing its most fundamental function.”
“The election was a repudiation not only of the political establishment and Clinton, but it was also of the media,” Hadas Gold wrote in Politico.
Trump beat the media he railed against throughout his campaign. He accused mainstream media of being biased against him, banned journalists from his events and advocated more lawsuits against the press, while surrounding himself with conservative media bigwigs in a move some have interpreted as sewing the seeds of a new right-wing media empire.
But while scores of outlets endorsed Clinton, including some traditionally Republican media that made a big shift in backing a Democratic candidate, the votes swung in his favor — without warning.
“Because we are obsessed with predicting opinions rather than listening to them, we didn’t see it coming,” wrote data journalist Mona Chalabi in the Guardian, adding that most people didn’t want to hear “it’s complicated.”
But it is complicated, with racist undertones.
While Trump spent the final weeks of the campaign heralding the inevitably “rigged” election with grossly inaccurate claims about voter fraud, some analysts have indeed pointed out that the system is indeed “rigged” in a vastly different way.
Many have raised alarm over the problem of voter suppression in Republican states where campaigns to purge voters en masse have targeted Black and brown people reminiscent of Jim Crow-era exclusion reimagined for the digital age. Meanwhile, political analyst and activist Van Jones called Trump's victory a "white-lash" against change in the U.S.
Regardless of how misguided the polls were, what seems clear as the U.S. wakes up in Trump’s shadow with both the House and Senate in the hands of the Republicans, racist repression and rollback of basic rights is likely in for a major boost.