For a certain kind of woman in Manhattan or Brooklyn, or Santa Monica or Minneapolis, for that matter, Tuesday began with a bright spirit, a pantsuit — a popular show of sartorial support for Hillary Clinton — and a promise to children brought into voting booths that the next morning they would wake up in a country that had elected its first female president.

That this sort of woman didn’t know anyone with a fondness for Donald J. Trump, or at any rate couldn’t fathom how any woman, in particular, could develop such a thing, only served to affirm the conclusions of big data that had put Mrs. Clinton ahead.

In December 1972, the film critic Pauline Kael, famously acknowledging her urbane parochialism, said that in her corner of the world she knew only one person who had voted for Richard M. Nixon. In the days leading up to this presidential election, many women in New York City would not have been able to name a single person they had ever met — not at Eataly or Barneys or Naral fund-raisers — who was voting for Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, or even considering it.

But excitement over Mr. Trump’s election was confined not merely to the distant, vast American territory of the Waffle House. In New York State’s 62nd Assembly District on Staten Island, Mr. Trump defeated Mrs. Clinton, his Democratic counterpart, by a rate of three to one. According to preliminary exit poll data from CNN, Mr. Trump held a considerable lead over Mrs. Clinton among white women nationally. In Tottenville, a prosperous area on the southern tip of Staten Island, nearly every white woman I approached on Wednesday was eager to tell me how thrilled she was about his victory.