WHAT HAPPENED? – AT 9:44 A.M. ET:  The postmortems on the election are mostly in, but Michael Barone, one of the best political analysts we have, has now written his, explaining how the polls and predictions could have been so wrong.  From RealClearPolitics:   

Springtime polls seemed to assume the electorate would look much like the one in 2012. The signs that Trump would run much better than Romney among non-college-educated whites weren't very clear, particularly when his controversial comments caused his overall numbers to sag.

Going well into the fall, few polls showed the surge of votes that decided the election in what I have called the outstate Midwest -- the counties outside metropolitan areas with a million-plus people in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and (sort-of-Midwestern) Pennsylvania, states with 64 electoral votes that went to Barack Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016.

Those outstate areas trended the same way as Iowa, none of whose 99 counties is in a metro area with a million-plus people and whose six electoral votes went for Obama and for Trump. There, polls showed Trump opening up a significant lead over Clinton in mid-September. In Iowa and the outstates, Trump won percentages higher than George W. Bush did in 2004, while Clinton ran far behind Obama's 2012 showing -- 12 points behind in outstate Ohio, 11 points behind in Iowa and outstate Michigan, 9 points behind in outstate Wisconsin and 8 points behind in outstate Pennsylvania.

These are all places with many non-college-educated whites and few blacks, Hispanics and Asians. Trump's stands on trade and immigration -- distinctly different from those of other Republicans -- were surely partly responsible for his outstate margins, and it seems unlikely another Republican nominee could have matched them.

Two other factors were in play, factors that led to sharp Democratic gains in these same areas in the 1970s. One was honesty. The outstate Midwest recoiled against Richard Nixon's Republicans in the Watergate years, and this year, these voters had a similar reaction to Clinton's email lawbreaking and lies. That helped Trump, though it probably would have helped any other Republican nominee.

The other factor was dovishness. The Upper Midwest has long been the most isolationist part of the country. In the 1970s, voters there reacted against Republicans' support of the Vietnam War. This year, they seem to have moved toward Trump, who opposed military interventions supported by other Republicans. It seems unlikely another Republican nominee could have duplicated this appeal.

Finally...

So the familiar partisan lines of the past 20 years have been redrawn, and now we have a more downscale Republican Party and a Democratic Party confined to its coastal and campus cocoons. We'll see how that works out.

COMMENT:  Very well analyzed.  Barone knows this nation county by county.  Even the parts where they don't have an Apple Store.

December 2, 2016