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No analyst will ever understand what happened if his fundamental premise is that people who voted for Trump have something wrong with them. Nor if they were motivated by "anxieties". Nor if "fluke" is involved. Trump's was a conventional victory in a conventional race over opponents who thought they were unique and historically inevitable, and to whom special rules applied, and whose press bought into it hook, line, and sinker. And quite obviously still do a year later.

Why "everyone" missed the "surge" presupposes that there was a significant surge to begin with, and that pre-election public polls were not (as they were) products of wishful thinking and public relations. That's as may be, but the most cogent explanation of why the Clinton campaign missed the correct numbers in their private, "internal" polls is that they stopped looking. Hubris will do that.

What is most arresting when reading this sort of journalistic navel-gazing is what is missing: did the author ever attempt to find out what made Trump voters tick by simply asking them? The notions that they were motivated by "anxieties", racism, sexism, cultural recidivism, etc, etc, are not observations, they are speculation and amateur psychiatric diagnosis. Nobody should still be asking those questions, and anyone who still is wasn't looking for straight answers in the first place and probably isn't now.

The Clinton campaign missed the correct numbers because she and they dismissed us as an irredeemable basket of Deplorables. When one has that attitude about at least half the electorate, of course key trends will go unnoticed. The Left and its media shills still have that attitude about us. To which my response is most definitely impolite.

No analyst will ever understand what happened if his fundamental premise is that people who voted for Trump have something wrong with them.

A far more salient question would be why so many people enthusiastically supported Hillary despite her decades-long record of deceit and corruption? A record now even more sordid with the revelations since the election. And we are just scratching the surface.