Truth be told, the only people who really were fooled were the ones who had been busy fooling themselves. At the point a wildly overconfident Hillary team were announcing proudly that they were moving the action to Arizona (where the heavy donors were, not the votes, but nobody seems to have pointed that out) the entire Rust Belt was slipping away. Wisconsin, where her sole appearance had been canceled due to the Orlando shooting, went for Trump. Had she made so much as a single visit there it was just close enough where she might have salvaged the state. But nobody told her it was slipping away because they didn't think it important to measure it. This is political hubris on a very high order.
It took that campaign staff less than 24 hours to concoct the Russia fable, again according to the book Shattered. It was meddling, it was hacking, it was sexism, it was every possible excuse other than the obvious unacceptability and incompetence of the candidate herself. They're still spinning the same self-serving fantasies, and the media who had egg on their face starting at just about 8:00 PM Eastern time on election night, are still repeating them, or were until it became apparent that if there were any Russian issue it was on the part of the Democrats, not the Republicans. That story is now flopping on the shoreline gasping for air, as it should have been seven months ago.
What's missing from the discussion is just how close the election was and how easily things could have gone the other way.
People who are now saying they weren't surprised very well could have been if a few thousand votes had been different.
Great post. Election night was glorious. We were expecting and prepared for a Trump victory. I bought 2 bottles of champagne the weekend before the election.