William A. Donohue
I tweeted the following on November 4. “Bill Kristol, who has been wrong all along, now says Hillary will win bigger than Obama did in 2012. My takeaway—it’s good news for Trump.”
The eggheads blew it. This election proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Ivy League pundits and scholars are anything but the independent thinkers they claim to be. Indeed, they function more like a herd.
Most of the chattering class never served a day in the armed forces, or even took a swing at a baseball, so pampered has their lifestyle been. From the National Review and the Weekly Standard, to the New Republic and the Nation, the softball kings and queens need to do penance: they need to sit down and talk to the proletariat. George Will—are you listening?
The day before the election, I emailed some friends about the outcome. In two of my missives, I said, “Look for a Trump upset tomorrow”; the other two said, “I think the pollsters are all wrong. Predicting a Trump victory.”
What did I see that others didn’t? Over a year ago, I said neither Jeb Bush nor Hillary Clinton would get elected. Why? Voter fatigue—we’ve had it with the two families. Jeb got .2 percent of the primary vote and Hillary is still in disbelief.
In early 2016, I commented on Trump’s strengths. My first article appeared on February 10, “Elites Don’t Get Trump’s Appeal”; it drew a favorable response from Trump. My next piece, published on April 22, read, “Trump Taps Into Mass Distrust.” On June 2, I wrote, “Trump is a Man of the People.” The titles convey my central point: Trump resonates with angry voters, most of whom have been treated like dirt by the establishment.
The eggheads got it wrong from the get-go, beginning with the primaries. To wit: If Hillary Clinton couldn’t win in Michigan and Wisconsin, she was in deep trouble come November. More-over, I reasoned, many of those same Democrats who voted against Clinton in the primaries were poised to do so a second time. They did.
If the eggheads weren’t so drunk on polls, they would have asked themselves over the summer why all the polls on the Brexit vote were wrong. Similarly, they would have questioned why the polls on the peace deal championed by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos were all wrong; his side was slated to win by a margin of better than 2-1.
Another factor that should have meant something to the eggheads was the survey this fall that showed that 75 percent of the public said the media are biased against Trump. If they can’t understand what that means, they should retire.
Among those who blew it was University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato: “Sabato’s Final Call: Hillary Wins Big, 50-50 Senate.” Here’s another keeper: “Emerson College Polling Predicts Massive Electoral Win for Clinton.” Reuters told us, “Clinton Has a 90 Percent Chance of Winning.” Huffington Post was even dumber, claiming, “98% Chance of a Clinton Win.” The same website also ran a piece by an Ivy professor titled, “Yes, Folks, It’s President Hillary.”
If these sages were lawyers, they would be disbarred for incompetence.
On election day, a poll produced for ABC told us that early voting heavily favored Clinton, 51-43 percent. Slate, the left-wing website, boasted that it teamed with a novel pollster to offer brand new insights on voter behavior, rendering accurate projections in real time. It was another monumental failure.
One might have thought that the folks at Politico would have connected the dots on election day when it reported that those who had already voted said that more than anything else, they wanted “strong leadership.” Yet it posted a picture of Trump saying it would take a “miracle” for him to win. Has anyone ever credited Hillary with “strong leadership”?
One egghead who at least admitted he lives in an intellectual ghetto is David Brooks of the New York Times. He confessed in April that he had spent “large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata—in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own.”
I wrote to him commending him for his honesty, offering a tonic. “Now you need to visit a working-class pub and meet real people—their anger explains their draw to Trump.” Alas, there is no evidence that he ever left his carrel in the library.
Politico recently had two stories saying how the Anthony Weiner Wikileaks story really hurt Hillary. Her camp is blaming Comey. They should instead blame her for using her private server. Had she not done so, the FBI wouldn’t have seized the computer owned by Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin.
It was the NYPD that alerted the FBI—it was looking for child porn on Weiner’s laptop—and it was me who filed a formal complaint against Weiner for suspected child sexual abuse. I suspect the eggheads would call that karma. Cheers!
