The question is why, not how

Business Insider has a video on "How election forecasts got the results dead wrong."

But this is not informative; it just compares before and after results of polls versus votes. No, the question of polls versus votes is not really how, but why.

I posted earlier that "ABC/Wapo Effectively Admit To Poll Tampering." But that's a "how" matter, too. The answer of why is addressed, unintentionally, by WaPo columnist Margaret Sullivan this morning: "The media didn’t want to believe Trump could win. So they looked the other way."

To put it bluntly, the media missed the story. In the end, a huge number of American voters wanted something different. And although these voters shouted and screamed it, most journalists just weren’t listening. They didn’t get it. They didn’t get that the huge, enthusiastic crowds at Donald Trump’s rallies would really translate into that many votes. They couldn’t believe that the America they knew could embrace someone who mocked a disabled man, bragged about sexually assaulting women, and spouted misogyny, racism and anti-Semitism. It would be too horrible. So, therefore, according to some kind of magical thinking, it couldn’t happen. Journalists — college-educated, urban and, for the most part, liberal — are more likely than ever before to live and work in New York City and Washington, D.C., or on the West Coast. And although we touched down in the big red states for a few days, or interviewed some coal miners or unemployed autoworkers in the Rust Belt, we didn’t take them seriously. Or not seriously enough.

If you are able to ignore the self-justifying hubris of her confession you c an see that she is on to something: The mainline media ("Democrat operatives with bylines") did not see the country's electorate as it was, they saw it as they themselves were, on purpose. 

Who says so? No less than NYT columnist Paul Krugman: "What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in." Well, duh. And of course, his rant is filled with hateful screeds for those who voted for Trump and what troglodytes they are and how they are racist, prejudiced, misogynist intolerant and dismissive of the rule of law - you know, what a basket of intolerables they are. 

Dismiss the rant and get to the core he reveals about his occupation: the do not know what they are doing nor what they are talking about. And they are intentionally ignorant of their topics in reporting. What you also see is their recognition - their fear, really - that they are becoming evermore irrelevant to most of America.

Which is true. For which we should give profound thanks.

Update: CNN's Jake Tapper says that the election result is "going to put the polling industry out of business. It’s going to put the voter projection industry out of business.”

The final University of Virginia Center for Politics model had Clinton winning 322 electoral votes to 216 for Trump, with Clinton winning Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – all states that she lost. Liberals lashed out at data guru Nate Silver for giving Trump a 35 percent chance of victory heading into Election Day, claiming he was putting his thumb on the scale for Trump by making the race appear closer than it was. Of the 11 national polls to be released in the final week of the race, only two – a Los Angeles Times-USC survey and one from IBD/TIPP – showed Trump with the lead. 

Update: Glenn Greenwald nails it:

The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination. The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. . . . Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently.