So much for all of my analysis and hunches. Trump won, and I am still in the process of figuring out why. Given the closeness of the election,with the split in the popular and electoral college, I am resistant to simple explanations of what went right for Trump while going wrong for Clinton.  I plan to take some time to think about it and wait a few weeks until all the votes are counted.

I apologize to readers if my confidence increased your shock and suffering on election night.  I wrote what I thought based on my understanding of past elections.  Clearly there was something going on that I didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand. While I am well studied in polling techniques and the political science of elections and the economy, that analysis was not the primary source of my confidence which ended at about 85 percent likelihood of Clinton victory on election eve. The primary source was my confidence in the electorate to make rational decisions, not necessarily the decision I would want in every election, but rational ones nonetheless.  That’s why this is so hard for me to understand.  For now my confidence in the essential goodness of our system and our people is quite shaken.

A lot of weird stuff happened in this election that strains simple explanations.  How come there was so little ticket splitting with Senate results matching Presidential results in every single state for the first time in maybe a 100 years or more?  As the author of campaign finance reform, why didn’t Russ Feingold win in Wisconsin if this election was about populism?  If this election was all about race, then why was Obama holding 55 percent approval ratings and would have easily beaten Trump had he been on the ballot?  The article closest to my own current thinking is by Ezra Klein, entitled

Clinton’s loss can be explained—Trump’s win rewrites what we know about American politics.

I suggest reading the entire article at:

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/11/13578618/why-did-trump-win

A few words from his excellent piece:

I don’t have a model of the American people that accounts for electing someone like Trump. He’s done too many things, said too many things, tweeted too many things that would typically be disqualifying in American politics. Remember when Mitt Romney was mocked for his car elevator? Trump has a house covered in gold. Remember when John Kerry was assailed for supposedly insulting the military by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth? Trump slandered war heroes and Gold Star parents despite getting repeated deferments from Vietnam. Remember when John McCain was dismissed for seeming ill-informed and out of touch amid the financial crisis? Trump doesn’t know how NATO works or what the nuclear triad is.

Trump’s victory is unnerving in a way nothing else in politics ever has been to me — it suggests there’s no bar, no floor, no you-must-be-this-decent to serve. I thought more of my country.

Polls show that in narrow ways, the voters saw what I saw — people did believe Trump unqualified, unkind, dishonest, indecent. It just didn’t matter.

To explain Trump’s competitiveness, if not his win, you have to search for truly primal appeals that overwhelmed all that — the power of partisan identity, the fear of Others, a dominant racial majority that rose in fury against the idea that it was becoming a political minority.

I hope Trump is a better man as president than he showed himself to be on the campaign trail. But I can’t confidently explain his win. In some ways, I don’t want to — I am scared of the conclusions it forces.

For now I’ll close with my own words from an email I sent to my brother the day after the election:

I don’t really have any sage words. I take a tiny bit of comfort that Clinton is winning, and is likely to extend her lead, in the popular vote. At least we know that a bare majority of our fellow citizens favored her over Trump. I still believe in our republic and that the voters will hold Trump and his party accountable in coming elections.