Why liberals are shocked and I made bank

Judging just on my facebook feed today, it's apparent that a whole lot of people still don't really understand this election, why it happened, what it means, and, most importantly, why it was quite predictable. A common theme seems to be the conviction that the election was decided by ignorant voters. Not only is that opinion wrong, but I think we can put forth a good case that the opposite is true: Trump voters were generally more informed, less ignorant.

They can't explain it

Liberals seem to be at a loss to even piece together a rational - let alone accurate - description of the election. Most are just uncontrollably spewing emotions out. Some are giving answers but they are primarily rationalizations fueled by their strong emotions. A few seem to get it, of course, and probably there are many more who are staying quiet.

I suspect we can correlate the level of emotion with their level of ignorance. The mechanism is simple: the further the psyche is removed from reality, the more shocking reality will be when it hits. The worst offenders out there, the ones ranting that Trump supporters are fascists, bigots, etc., are merely showing, besides their own hatefulness and lack of self-control, that they are very shocked by the results. They're shocked because they were ignorant of reality.

And reality came fast. Look at the timeline below. I've marked out in green where Clinton dropped down from 80% odds, to where Trump climbed to 80% odds. It was less than two hours!! That's a short span of time to have your worldview pulled out from under you. No wonder they're so angsty.

Most of us who voted Trump already had a worldview in place that understood the Trump appeal. We realized that the media was serving as propaganda, that the polls were being highly skewed by gaming the sample sizes and weightings and other tricks, and we were familiar with the ruse because we were warned by our friends in England about how things went down during Brexit. We got that information from alternate sources of media. From social media, from news aggregators such as Reddit and Voat, from alt-right bloggers and vloggers, and from new media sources, including places like Breitbart and Infowars.

Liberals would dismiss anything coming from Breitbart or the conservative blogosphere on principle. Only corporate media was a credible source, they would basically say (ironic, no?), and really no one on the left wanted to hear our arguments. So they closed their eyes and ears, assured themselves that CNN and John Oliver would only tell it straight, and their feelings and egos were spared. Most of them disregarded the Wikileaks. How many liberals actually went to Wikileaks, or read any compendiums? I bet far less than 1%. Project Veritas literally filmed DNC operatives admitting to damning criminal and unethical activities. Hillary supporters said O'Keefe was biased so the videos didn't count, or that they were edited (how do you not edit a video?). The level of denial was dangerous. When we saw Hillary supporters basically refusing to acknowledge Wikileaks or Project Veritas at all, we knew they were actively trying to hide from the truth.

Now that reality has hit all at once, they have nothing to anchor to. They know the media called Trump a racist and fascist, which they have internalized. Now they're telling the world that what must have happened is the American voters, who turned out massively to elect Barrack Obama in '08, are actually really racist and hateful. The argument is not consistent, but they don't have much to work with. They call Trump supporters ignorant, which only displays psychological projection since they don't really know what's going on. They're ignorant, so they assume we're ignorant, but they also are certain they are intellectually and morally superior.

They could not predict it

Why were they so ignorant? Simple confirmation bias. They tended to accept news that felt good to hear, and reject all else. Everyone does it of course, but unfortunately for them, the media was 96% giving out bad information that appealed to the liberal bias. A model of the world is only as good as its ability to predict. Let's look at the media predictions right before the election:

• The New York Times: 80 percent chance of Clinton victory
• Huffington Post: 98.1 percent chance of Clinton victory
• Nate Silver/538: 72 percent chance of Clinton victory (323 electoral votes)
• Bing.com: 89.7 percent chance of Clinton victory
• NBC/SM: Clinton +6
• IPSOS: Clinton +4
• Fox News: Clinton +4
• NBC/WSJ: Clinton +4
• ABC/WashPost: Clinton +4
• Herald: Clinton +4
• Bloomberg: Clinton +3

Those were wildly off the mark. To those who trusted the media, the numbers made sense. Trump was a horrible candidate, so of course the polls were safely favoring Hillary. Well they didn't make sense to me. It didn't make sense to me at all that if Hillary had 80% odds, that Democrats would spend the last day of the campaign in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Clearly they knew something the media wasn't saying. Judge them by their actions, not their words. I looked at their actions, and that day I bet against Hillary at 4:1 odds, in the general and in Florida and Michigan.

I bet against the media. I bet that it was all propaganda. I bet what I knew from Wikileaks, that they were colluding with the DNC to sway opinion, rather than report reality. I bet that Trump's rallies, an order of magnitude larger than Hillary's, were significant. I bet that the media was lying at every turn. I bet that voters didn't trust the media anymore. I bet my model for reality was more accurate than theirs. And I made a lot of money last night.