Even if Clinton manages to come out with a lead in the popular vote when California’s results are added to the evening’s totals¹, the results are a stunning repudiation to pollsters, the punditocracy, the mainstream media, professionals in both major parties, and most important, to Hillary Clinton herself.

I seriously considered shorting the market first thing yesterday morning, and have the e-mail record to prove it. And this wasn’t confirmation bias since I decided not to vote for any Presidential candidate.

It was based on the fact that every single bit of anecdotal information I had from real people ran against what experts and the polls were saying. For instance, the overwhelming majority of Hispanics I ran into, once I gave them latitude to express their views by saying I hated both candidates, made clear they were seriously entertaining a Trump vote, including a van driver in Dallas. The upper income, 30s to middle aged guys in my gym, all of whom save one had been Sanders voters, were voting for Trump (I added another one to that tally tonight). A 70 year old college educated friend in Dallas, never married, who’d lived ten years in New York running a major department at Christies and joked that she was the only one of her girlfriends not to carry a gun in her purse, said apologetically that she thought both candidates were terrible but Trump might be a tiny bit less terrible. The 40-ish partner from Apollo who sat next to me on the plane to Dallas (a rare sighting, private equity partners rarely slum by flying commercial) was reading the New York Post and checking Drudge on his iPhone and thus clearly not going to vote for Clinton.

So even though my sample was small (and I have more examples), it said the closeted Trump voter was a real phenomenon and likely bigger than anyone was allowing for.

The election outcome was based not just on Clinton being a terrible candidate on the merits, but on the abjectly poor conduct of the Clinton campaign.

Let us not forget that Clinton had every advantage: Presidential campaign experience, the full backing of her party, a much bigger ground apparatus, oodles of experts and surrogates, the Mighty Wurlitzer of the media behind her, an opponent widely deemed to be world-class terrible – utterly unqualified, undisciplined, offensive, with a mother lode of scandals – and what historically was deemed the most important asset of all, a large lead in fundraising.

Yet Clinton was a lousy campaigner and strategist. By all accounts, she was a micromanager who regularly overrode her staff’s advice. All the big-ticket Madison Avenue spin-meistering could not get the dogs to eat enough dog food.

You don’t win voters by telling them they are stupid and beneath contempt. That is tantamount to saying you have no intention of representing them

You don’t win voters by failing to offer a positive vision and selling only fear

You don’t win voters by trying to get them to believe you’ll suddenly behave differently and take positions contrary to the ones you’ve held for decades to extract cash from the the richest and most powerful

You don’t win voters with a record of failing upward

You don’t win voters by saying your opponent is a sleaze, even when undeniably true, when you are at least as sleazy yourself.