The Worst Political Prediction of 2016 (by Politico)

Hillary Clinton will be elected president

Frank Luntz on Twitter, November 8, 2016: “Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States.”

Save for liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, Trump-cheering Twitter personality Bill Mitchell and a smattering of others, nearly everyone in the country was surprised on election night when Donald Trump became the president-elect. For months, pundits ruled out any possibility that the billionaire real estate mogul could actually pull it off. In June, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent called it “a fantasy.” In July, Moody’s Analytics suggested that the electoral outcome was a done deal—Clinton would win easily. In August, one of The POLITICO Caucus’s GOP insiders declared that for Trump to win, “it would take video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of ‘Death to America.’” In September, on With All Due Respect, 2008 Obama campaign manager David Plouffe broke down why he believed Hillary Clinton had a 100 percent chance of winning. In October, the editor-in-chief of GQ, Jim Nelson, penned an essay titled, “Let's Face It, Donald Trump Is About to Lose.” And the day before the election, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball prophesied 322 electoral votes for Clinton and 216 for Trump.

For a time, it was almost laughable how uncompetitive the race seemed to be. In an October episode of Saturday Night Live, Cecily Strong (playing Martha Raddatz) introduced Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon (as Trump and Clinton) to the stage, announcing to the audience, “Please help us welcome the candidates, Republican nominee Donald Trump and—can we say this yet?—President Hillary Clinton,” to a burst of cheers and laughter. And President Barack Obama on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show—after reading a tweet from Trump that stated, “President Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States!”—confidently joked, “At least I will go down as president.”

Even Trump has admitted that, on the morning of November 8, he didn’t think he was going to win.

But it wasn’t just the pundits, the politicians, the comedians and Trump who got it so incredibly wrong. The professional pollsters who devised meticulous methodologies for forecasting election results were also caught with egg on their faces. The Princeton Election Consortium gave Clinton a 99 percent chance of winning. The Huffington Post’s forecast gave Clinton 98 percent, PredictWise gave her 89 percent, and the New York Times’s The Upshot gave her 85 percent. Even FiveThirtyEight, which was the most bullish on Trump, gave Clinton over a 71 percent chance of winning.

All of this, of course, gave us the most shocking election night in recent memory.