Not so very long ago, it was common wisdom among the commentariat, whether online or on TV, that Hillary Clinton was about to usher in a game changing landslide victory for Democrats in the 2016 election. Great minds explained in great detail why her victory, and that of her party, were inevitable this election cycle. A few examples will suffice:

Jason Easley of PoliticusUSA (8/31/2016):

Moody’s analytics model has correctly predicted every presidential election since 1980, and their data forecasts a Democratic landslide in 2016.

According to Dan White who is the senior economist at Moody’s Analytics:

Our Moody’s Analytics election model now predicts a Democratic electoral landslide in the 2016 presidential vote. A small change in the forecast data in August has swung the outcome from the statistical tie predicted in July, to a razor-edge ballot outcome that nevertheless gives the incumbent party 326 electoral votes to the Republican challenger’s 212.

San Francisco Chronicle article, "Democrats see Clinton landslide, takeover of Congress on horizon." (10/12/2016):

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has been predicting a Democratic takeover of the House every two years since she lost the speakership in 2010. The San Francisco Democrat has been wildly off base each time. Now even Republicans think she could be right. [...]

The ground began to shift toward a potential Clinton landslide about 2½ weeks ago when Republican nominee Donald Trump began a disastrous slide in the polls. Among a multitude of missteps and revelations, Trump bragged that not paying taxes “makes me smart,” and was caught boasting on a 2005 tape about groping women. New polls now show deep-red states such as Georgia drifting within Democratic range. [...]

As Trump hemorrhages critical blocs of swing voters, he is becoming isolated to his narrow base of fervent Republican supporters. That puts Republican politicians down-ballot from Trump in an impossible box: abandon their nominee and with him their own base voters, or stick with Trump and face retribution from the rest of the electorate. [...]

“The ground is moving fast, as we speak,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin, who has been traveling the country in an outreach effort to young voters. Swalwell said Trump “never misled us about his intentions,” so Republicans who now want to disown him are “going to pay a price for that because they didn’t have the courage to stand up to him early.

“I don't think there’s anywhere for them to hide.”

Martin Longman of Booman Tribune, "Here Comes the Landslide" (10/19/2016):

Among political prognosticators, there have been two main camps in this election. One camp argued that the country has become rigidly polarized to a point where any Republican or Democratic nominee starts out with 40% support and the battle is only over the 20% of voters who don’t align with either side. The other camp, represented by me, argued that there was nothing permanent about our relatively stable red/blue state split and that we’re reaching an inflection point where one side or the other would decisively “win the argument.” [...]

... For more than two years, I’ve been identifying signs that this could well be a landslide election, and I predicted that it wouldn’t be a close election with even more confidence than I predicted that the Democrats would win.

As Nancy pointed out, the polls are now pointing in the direction of a Reagan-sized blowout. Among the signs to look for are evidence that red states are going to fall into Clinton’s arms, that Trump is cratering below the 40% floor, and that Clinton is polling above 50% in the four-way race with a healthy number of undecideds still out there.

For now, though, it looks like I was right. This is not going to be another red state/blue state election. Trump has lost the argument.

If you want more evidence of premature elation over Clinton and the Democratic Party's prospects, feel free to check out the following links: Clinton Consolidates Lead Among Democrats, Trump Not Gaining Republicans; How Big Is Clinton’s Lead?; Florida spirals away from Trump. There are quite a few more, especially if you are willing to look back during the summer months when pundits dreamed of the Clinton machine steamrolling over Trump and the GOP in an electoral win of epic proportions.

So what went wrong? How did so many of these very bright, well-educated people get things so terribly wrong? So wrong in fact that many of them can respond only with paroxysms of outrage and venom against millennials, white men, third party voters, and, of course, Bernie Sanders and his mythical sexist "Bernie Bros."

I can only offer up my gut feeling for what its worth. As I see it, many of these people were very invested in a Clinton victory on both an emotional and financial level. Thus, they rarely looked outside their own echo chamber, much less talked to those who had strong negative opinions of Hillary Clinton, both as a candidate and party standard bearer, much less as a deeply flawed, corrupt human being. They reinforced the facile analysis that dominated corporate media, which emphasized Trump's negatives (of which there were many), and ignored the very real scandals that the wikileaks disclosures revealed regarding Clinton. They believed the polls that often had a built in bias for Clinton.

But this year we saw something different: Almost all the swing state polls overscored Clinton’s numbers by two to six percent. This error is called “systematic” or “correlated error.” Since it affected most or all polls, it was probably caused by some common disrupting factor or factors that were outside the well-established and hitherto reliable poll methodology itself.

In my opinion, far too many of them only looked at data that was favorable to Clinton, data which confirmed their own bias and prejudices, and ignored or disputed any information that suggested a Clinton victory was far from a sure thing. They ignored Trump's populist message that clearly resonated with the large crowds he continued to draw at his public appearances. In short, they believed their own bullshit.

The question now remains, are any of these people going to change course and reflect on why they missed the outcome of this election so egregiously, or are they just going to continue to double down, and point the finger at anyone but the Democratic Party, the media, the Clinton campaign, and of course, at themselves and their own role in creating the false perception that there was no way in hell a rude, crude, and and socially unacceptable degenerate like Donald Trump could possibly prevail? The current signs, unfortunately, are not good. And that is a shame, because, as Sanders' proved this year, there is an enthusiastic and growing number of people in our country to whom a true progressive agenda is very appealing, people who turned out in massive numbers to hear him speak before the DNC emasculated him.

People are hungry for authentic politicians, people such as Bernie Sanders, who have a record of fighting for the rights of everyone who suffers under the oppression of the pro-austerity, neo-liberal policies favored by the establishments of both major parties. Neo-liberal policies that benefit only wealthy elites and transnational corporations at the expense of the middle class and the poor, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation or any other category into which they wish to place us. Many of the people in those "flyover states" who turned to Trump, the faux populist and demagogue, did so out of desperation. They would have voted for Sanders had they been given given the chance.

It is precisely because the Democratic Party's establishment made certain that Sanders would not be given an equal chance to win the nomination, and actively worked against his campaign, using all means fair and foul to ensure Hillary would be selected as its the nominee, that Trump won. Making her their candidate directly led to the situation in which we now find ourselves: a federal government completely controlled by the one party, the GOP, that has always attracted and welcomed into its ranks, racists, sexists, white supremacists and bigots of every stripe.

Perhaps the "bubble people" will come to their senses, and realize it wasn't our backing of the only real progressive in the race that spoiled Hillary's victory. We are not responsible for her multiple failures on the campaign trail that ended up giving power to a man they consider a "fascist" and "Nazi". Their concern for the lives of vulnerable populations (the very people they so blithely incorporate into their so-called "multicultural coalition") would have been better served had they supported Sanders from the beginning.

Instead they chose to willfully turn a blind eye to Clinton's numerous flaws and misdeeds. They actively supported and propped up one of the most deceitful, disliked, corrupt and distrusted politicians to have ever been nominated by any party in our Nation's history. That is their cross to bear, not ours. The sooner they come to terms with their own role in this disaster, the better. If not, and if they support the rotted husk of the Democratic Party as it is presently constituted, they will find themselves on the wrong side of history, to the detriment of all who dream of a better, more just and more sustainable world.