John Oliver: Make Donald "Drumf" Again.

[Adam White]

You had a 50/50 chance of getting it right. I have a hard time believing you had any greater insight than people who do this for a living.

If you had got it wrong, you'd be on here explaining how your opinion was correct at the time or something - or how the election was stolen, etc.

It was this dismissiveness, and frankly arrogance, that lost the left elections far & wide, including the POTUS. Not to mention they had a completely shit candidate buried with actual real scandals & collusions.

Again - I think you were just repeating talking points and had it turned out the other way, you'd have your excuses.

Clinton is expected to win the popular vote. And I would argue that the "left" (as you call them) haven't lost "far and wide" at all - the Democrats are expected to gain a seat in the Senate and seven in the House (some of this may change, of course).

Obviously the Democrats didn't do as well as they had hoped to - but they weren't routed by any means.

I agree that people have been underestimating Trump and it ultimately proved their downfall. That and picking a terrible candidate.

I thought this was an interesting opinion piece this morning:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald-trump-white-house-hillary-clinton-liberals

Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn't all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn't accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it's time to consider whether there's something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the "last thing standing" between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!

[fsquid]

Instead of listening to the rust belt working people, the democrats wrote them off as flyover bigots.  Biden warned against this back in the early summer.