Eh. Most of the mainstream media ran headlines predicting 99% chance of a Hillary win and a few of them sniped at Nate Silver for giving Trump a 30% chance (stupid tech bros).

A single contrarian take doesn't undermine that trend.

> Most of the mainstream media

The mainstream media and the intellectual class have very little overlap.

The intellectual class media I should say, then. NYT, Washington Post, etc.

Note that no one denies Hillary was considered the favorite, I also mention the HuffPost model which was the most prominent to reflect a near certainty. Most news outlets, even conservative ones, reported on this notable predictive modeling effort.

What there was, was a diversity of opinion and vigorous debate (sometimes devolving into sniping, sure), the thing that is supposed to be there. There wasn't a 50/50 split, but I don't remember a single publication I read at the time (all the classic left leaning intellectual rags) that didn't run pieces predicting a Trump victory.

The 99% number so often paraded as a sign of failure wasn't a 99% chance of being president. It was a 99% chance of winning the popular vote.

That prediction was correct, and by a decently large margin. But losers often become president because of the electoral college (it's happened 5 times already), and losers will continue to benefit for years to come.

It was a conditional probability of Trump winning a bunch of states he was behind in, naively projected as if they were independent. It turned out they all swung the same way, and those probabilities were not independent.