> That's about a 1% difference. I don't see how that translates to "surprised most of us"!
You can't use the result of the elections to claim that the result was "expected"!
The stock market expected a Clinton win, and so did betting markets outside the US:
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/07/betting-sites-see-record-wage...
Arguably, at some point even Trump indicated that he believed Clinton would win, when he claimed the elections were "rigged".
Here's a video where a computer programmer who worked on voting systems is questioned under oath, and he makes some pretty good arguments that elections are rigged. At least the ones where electronic voting machines are used.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcxGGnmRQAs&t=92s
I'll admit, I didn't bother researching, but I'd understood a lot of electronic voting machines were used in the election we just underwent.
The results of the election only slightly surprised me, but I've gone to great lengths to avoid ingesting media from mainstream sources. Outside the mainstream, Trump's popularity was quite a bit more obvious.
My point is that candidate B claimed the election would be rigged against him; it's not a stretch to assume he thought candidate A would probably win at that point.
But what was surprising, all along, to people from all sorts of echo chambers (including, I think, Trump himself) was that Trump had this support in the first place. He was the goofball candidate in the primaries. Mitt Romney, the previous Republican nominee, called him a "phony" and a "fraud," and said, "He's playing the American public for suckers." Imagine McCain saying that about Romney, or Kerry about Obama! He dominated the news cycle for months with indiscretions and mistakes. He lost the debates, by any metric in which you care about actual policy discussed at the debates. Republicans were quite worried about him dooming the party. It was clear months before November that he was a realistic candidate who would win about half of the popular vote, but the fact that we got to that point was surprising.
But in the final weeks the US election had close polling. Clinton was leading Trump by less than 5% in most polls and was actually behind in a few of them (Matt Drudge always managed to find those polls to link to).
So it's hard to understand why people might have those beliefs in a relatively close election. Easier to understand if the election was predicted to be a blowout.
But blowouts don't happen that often. The most recent true blowout I experienced was Reagan vs Mondale in 1984. An electoral blowout, only Minnesota and DC voted for Mondale. But the popular vote was closer, roughly 59%/41%.
As pointed out, trump himself didn't expect to win.
That echo chamber thing cuts both ways.
It's only "most of us" if you live in a liberal echo chamber. E.g. the NY Times has done some recent naval gazing, but it would be fascinating to find out what percent of their employees voted for Trump. Fewer than 10%? Fewer than 1%? So, certainly, the result "surprised" them.
Meanwhile in the real world the popular vote breakdown was:
That's about a 1% difference. I don't see how that translates to "surprised most of us"!