November 09, 2016 09:34 AM UTC

Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States

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• by: Colorado Pols

“This is the most incredible political feat I have seen in my lifetime,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan today. We can’t disagree.

Donald Trump is our next President. Whether he will govern as the bombastic character he represented during the campaign — or move to a more collaborative tone, as he indicated in his victory speech — is a subject for another time. Today we look around and try to assess what happened to create one of the greatest political upsets of modern times.

What happened? This question will not be answered today — even Trump’s own campaign didn’t anticipate this victory — but let’s take a look at some of the various theories floating around the political world:

From the Washington Post:

President-elect Donald Trump was right all along. He had a silent majority. The media, the pollsters and Republican elites never saw it – even though it was right in front of them the whole time…

…“Confirmation bias” is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing theories. Since he came down that escalator at Trump Tower 17 months ago, many elites could never fully visualize Trump as the president of the United States. That made it very hard to see him winning the nomination – until he did – or winning the White House – until he did. Confirmation bias does not mean one preferred a particular outcome. Rather, it is a condition of psychology: All human beings tend to put a premium on information that validates their existing expectations and downplay new data points that undermine them.

Even many members of the Republican establishment who supported Trump could never envision him prevailing. That meant that some very talented GOP operatives (who have won very big races) were insisting until late last night that the votes were not there for Trump. A Republican who won a statewide race in Florida two years ago texted after polls closed to say Clinton was going to win that state by four points. (Trump won 49 percent to 48 percent.) Another veteran Republican, who has served the Bush family in various roles, emailed in the wee hours of this morning: “I no longer need to go to Rome. Going to watch an empire fall right here in the next four years.”

How did the pundits and pollsters fail to predict this outcome? Politico attempts to explain:

Geoff Garin, a veteran Democratic pollster who worked for the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA, said many surveys had under-sampled non-college-educated whites, a group that Trump appealed to. He also argued there had been on over-emphasis on the belief that the country’s rising demographic diversity would put Clinton over the top.

“There was too great a belief that demographics are destiny, and that demographics would lead to a certain outcome,” he said. “The reality turned out to be much different that.”…

…Others pointed to the surge in momentum Trump received when the FBI announced 11 days before the election that it was reviewing new evidence related to its investigation into the handling of sensitive information by Clinton and her aides at the State Department.

There will certainly be plenty of criticism of FBI Director James Comey in the weeks and months to come, but fundamentally, Trump simply tapped into a disgruntled base of American voters. From the New York Times:

But Mr. Trump’s unfiltered rallies and unshakable self-regard attracted a zealous following, fusing unsubtle identity politics with an economic populism that often defied party doctrine.

His rallies — furious, entertaining, heavy on name-calling and nationalist overtones — became the nexus of a political movement, with daily promises of sweeping victory, in the election and otherwise, and an insistence that the country’s political machinery was “rigged” against Mr. Trump and those who admired him.

He seemed to embody the success and grandeur that so many of his followers felt was missing from their own lives — and from the country itself. And he scoffed at the poll-driven word-parsing ways of modern politics, calling them a waste of time and money. Instead, he relied on his gut.

There are undoubtedly many reasons for Trump’s shocking victory. Scientific American suggests five specific reasons: 1) a silent Trump vote, 2) Celebrity overcoming organization, 3) a populist revolt against immigration and trade, 4) an outsider vs. insider conflict, and 5) America is fundamentally a divided country.

What say you, Polsters? What happened?