After all, bookmakers Betfair said Clinton's chances of winning were 70% and many other sources had it much higher: the Princeton Election Consortium had it at 98-99%, a figure used by some print media at the time. But some pundits and commentators got it right: the University of Southern California/Los Angeles Times predicted a Trump win. And a Yale economist, Ray Fair, has a simple model which predicts election results on the basis of economic performance and which pointed to a Trump win as the average American family has not done well over the last 16 years. Here's Karl Rove (G W Bush's former adviser): "Trump was the candidate of change in a year when 62% of voters said the country is on the wrong track. These voters went for Trump by 69% to 25 for Clinton".
The psephologists are still poring over what happened. They have pointed out that Trump beat Clinton 62% to 33% in counties that are at least 85% white. In places where 97% or more of the population were born in America he won 65 to 30. But the result wasn't really decided on racial lines as 29% of Hispanics voted for Trump, as did 29% of Asians and 37% of other racial groups. Trump did better than the last Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, with all minorities, including blacks. So if it was a "whitelash" then Niall Ferguson pointed out that a lot of non-white voters are suffering from what Marxists used to call false consciousness.
But there were probably many things that didn't register with us about the US election that were relevant. For example, sanctuary laws. What are they and why are they relevant? The so-called "sanctuary laws" are rules enacted by states which forbid state and city employees co-operating with the, often feeble, efforts of federal officials to enforce the US immigration laws, shielding even convicted criminals from any risk of deportation. Local activists had complained about sanctuary policies for years without national politicians listening - until a young woman was fatally shot in July 2015 on the San Francisco Embarcadero by a Mexican drug dealer with seven felony convictions and five previous deportations. Kate Steinle's murderer had recently been released from jail despite a request from federal immigration agents to detain him for deportation proceedings.
Trump picked up an issue that mainstream politicians had refused to touch. He promised to penalise financially sanctuary cities in addition to making illegal entry harder in the first place. Yet despite the belated national outrage, amazingly San Francisco reaffirmed its sanctuary ordinance in May 2016.
Why did this strike such a chord with the electorate? Well, let's stay with California, one of the honeypot states for immigrants, for a moment. In the 1950s and 60s California led the USA in educational achievement; today the percentage of students lacking the most rudimentary maths and reading skills matches poor southern states like Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. California redistributes millions of local tax-payer dollars to schools with large numbers of low-income pupils to no discernable effect. Since 2000 more college graduates have left California than entered it, partly due to the high taxes needed to sustain the state's spending on the poor, a population which, according to Heather Mac Donald, consists "overwhelmingly" of low-skilled immigrants and their progeny.
But won't these people raise themselves up, as all previous generations of huddled incoming masses into the USA have? Isn't that the American dream? The dream isn't working anymore apparently. The poverty gap between low-skilled immigrants and the native-born (of any ethnicity) persists into at least the third generation, both in California and elsewhere in the USA. What's gone wrong? While many low-skilled immigrants possess an admirable work ethic, their children and grandchildren too often assimilate downwards into underclass culture, because of their parents' lack of social capital. The incarceration rate of Mexican-Americans in California increases eightfold between the first and second generations. The breakdown of the rule of law from unchecked illegal immigration over the past 4 decades was as troubling to America's silent majority as were the financial and social costs, though those exist too: just as we have heard in the UK, low-skilled immigrants depress the wages of the less-educated indigenous population.
So there was something that I don't think we were told here in the UK news - not that it would have made any sense to me without some explanation. I can quite easily see why this internal issue between the federal government and some of the states would play strongly with voters there. It also perhaps explains why the Hispanic vote for Trump, although much lower than for Clinton, was higher than expected, which appeared puzzling. There isn't anything puzzling about people of Hispanic origin in the USA who are concerned about uncontrolled immigration, alarmed by events like Kate Steinle's murder and angry that their state government isn't cooperating with the federal government to keep egregious criminals out of their neighbourhoods. The fact that they are Hispanic and the people they fear are Hispanic is irrelevant - they are all just people.
This was part of the problem with Clinton's campaign. Like moderate left campaigns of recent decades, they try to contrive a coalition of minorities and interest groups to form a majority. The result is they stop looking at people as people. Trevor Phillips, one time head of the Commission for Racial Equality, has said that he was always being wooed by lobbyists and campaigners for whom the only characteristic of his that they were interested in was that he is black: they weren't really interested in what he had to say as himself, just as a representative of a particular group. When you think about it, a lot of this goes on. The left, which always likes to portray itself as a defender of minority rights, tends to be hung up about these groups as groups, not as individuals. They often take it so far that they actually ghetto-ise (if that's a word) minorities, entrenching differences.
But returning to Trump and Clinton, maybe luck came into it. Maybe Clinton was unlucky with the timing of the resurrected email story. Though for me, she should have been dissuaded from going forward as the candidate by the Democratic party right from the start. The email story came to light in March 2015 - the month before Clinton declared her presidential candidacy. Some folk seem to think I exaggerate the significance of the unsecure email server issue. But I would expect that someone employed by a major UK company who used a domestic email server for work purposes having been briefed that it was not allowed on security grounds would be subject to disciplinary action. And in a high security context probably sacked. The debate about whether it was illegal seems to me to be irrelevant. In many cases it might not be illegal but it would contravene employment terms and conditions. And it was deliberate. In the case of any UK politician standing for or occupying high office I am sure it would have ended the person's political career. The problem in the American system is that, if the issue comes up late, it's practically impossible to change the candidate in a presidential election. But the Democratic party could have sorted this out at the outset, or at any time until very late in the day. Except that, by some accounts, they dissuaded the better candidates from standing against Hillary, so she could be anointed. Leaving a choice between her and Corbyn-like Bernie Sanders. Maybe it was the Clinton's dynastic influence or maybe they just thought she had the best chance. Bad call as she was identified as "the most joyless candidate in presidential history" by Trump's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway. (Note - a woman. Despite his misogynistic comments, Trump clearly trusts women in key roles and people say, from that point of view, he is gender and colour blind. How often, I wonder, is it hypocritically the other way round?) Either way, Clinton proved to be the more unpopular of two unappealing candidates, leaving the Democrats to wonder whether almost anyone but Clinton would have won.
So was Trump was lucky with the timing of the news about the case against his university, announced on 18 November? As it was settled he was in control of that timing. And anyway it hadn't really penetrated his Teflon coat. So he just wanted it out of the way before he takes office.
The Trump and Brexit campaigns were both shambolic but authentic. Authentically boorish, ridiculously naïve and downright offensive at times in Trump's case; authentically misleading in Vote Leave's. But lacklustre and totally lacking in inspiration in both Clinton's and Remain's. The status quo campaigns didn't come anywhere near the crisp soundbites of "Make America great again" and "Take back control". The Clinton and Remain campaigns didn't really seem to have their heart in it. In a word, they were negative. Politicians always say they don't like negative campaigning but they are always ready to turn to it. And usually it works. But 2016 marked the year where hope trumped (sorry) fear.
Whether you were for or against, Trump and Leave offered a vision of something different, in other words hope. Yes, it might be illusory, but the alternative was to keep on keeping on; that was all people were offered. That shouldn't - needn't - have been the case, but Clinton and Leave thought it was the best way to win. Or maybe they actually didn't have any ideas. Harder for the Remain campaign, as it wasn't credible to guarantee to change the EU. Clinton doesn't have that excuse.
So what do we know about Trump, besides the all too visible facts that he is vain, thin-skinned, intemperate, prone to preposterous and inflammatory statements and attention-seeking, with a colossal notion of self? Well, we have moved on from the "misspoke" version of the truth, used by Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton in previous campaigns when caught out having said something palpably incorrect, to Trump's personal campaign to define "post-truth": when asked whether he regretted any of his campaign pronouncements, he said " No. I won."
And we know that I have some things in common with Trump: we both like golf and are prone to making outrageous comments for a start. But also we both like fish finger sandwiches. However, I don't like diet coke or hamburgers; nor do I abstain from tea, coffee and alcohol. Nor am I, unfortunately, a billionaire. Hey ho.
But what I'm really wondering is whether the new president will be trusted with the "send" button. No, not the one on the "football" - the nuclear button if we are to believe the Harrison Ford film Air Force One - but the one on his Blackberry. Trump apparently sleeps only 3 or 4 hours a night and it's thought that the intemperate tweet he released at 3am during the campaign and other similar ones really did come from his phone, while the more mundane tweets announcing campaign events were sent from a different phone, presumably of an aide. I thought that surely this button would be regarded as too dangerous to let the president do it himself? But as president-elect he still seems to be tweeting..... Maybe we have entered a new era, perhaps to be known as Trump/Johnson, where diplomacy is conducted by speaking out - with remarkable honesty it seemed to me - in press conferences and on Twitter rather than keeping it for direct discussions in confidence. I actually find this refreshing, though whether it is a wise way to influence China or Saudi Arabia I seriously doubt.
Though whether he retains access to his own Twitter account or not, frustration is inevitable for Trump due to the president's lack of unfettered power. Which led Bill Clinton to say being president was like running a cemetery - you have plenty of people under you, but nobody's listening.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W Smith Fellow at Manhattan Institute. I learned about the sanctuary laws from her column, "His party's refusal to keep illegals out let Trump stomp his way in", which appeared in the Sunday Times on 13 November 2016.
The psephological and betting data can no doubt be found in original sources, but I got it from Niall Ferguson's Sunday Times article "This was no whitelash, it was a vote to get America working", also published on 13 November 2016.
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