How could the polls have been so wrong? Virtually every mainstream poll showed Hillary as a sure thing. How did they miss the Trump tidal wave?
From the beginning of the race the pollsters in both the Democratic Party and the mainstream media entirely misunderstood and underestimated who would vote. It was never realistic to think that Hillary’s voter turnout model would be exactly like Obama’s. There are numerous reasons why Hillary Clinton did not perform as well among African Americans as Obama did. Hillary’s support was soft and a majority saw her as “dishonest” and “untrustworthy.” Hillary would also bleed among progressive democrats and Bernie Sanders supporters whose views on trade and war were closer to Trump’s than they were to Hillary’s. The media blissfully went on using an outdated model, padding the numbers of Democrats in their samples by either design or stupidity.