The election of Donald Trump to the office of president is historically important in multiple ways. I doubt the mainstream media have ever before been so inaccurate in predicting the outcome of an election. The NYT, for example, predicted Clinton had an 85% chance to win. Reuters/Ipsos gave her a 90% chance of winning. The Huffington Post gave her a 98.1% chance of winning. These predictions were largely based on polling data. The vast majority of polls put Clinton ahead of Trump, with only a few outliers such as the USC/Los Angeles Time poll predicting a Trump victory.

There was however one individual – Helmut Norpoth, a professor of political science at Stony Brook University – who correctly predicted the outcome of the election. He used a statistical model that has only been wrong once in 104 years to predict a 97 percent to 99 percent chance of Trump winning. The interesting thing about his model is that it used a system of markers to predict the outcome, such as general electoral cycles and the candidates performance in the primaries and ignored the polling data.

This is only the second time since the beginning of the 20th century that a candidate has spent half as much money on campaigning as their opponent and won the white house, with the Trump campaign spending 247.5 million USD compared to the Clinton campaign’s expenditure of 497.5 million USD. Lyndon B Johnson (8.8 million USD) did beat Goldwater (16 Million USD) in 1964, but he at least had the advantage of incumbent status (following the assassination of JFK), whereas Trump never held political or military office before announcing his candidacy.

So how did he do it? Looking at the exit poll run by the NYT we can see that Trump increased the republican share of the vote in a number of important areas when compared with the 2012 election. In terms of minority voters, Trump gained 9 points with black voters, 8 points with hispanic voters and 11 points with asian voters. In terms of income brackets, Trump gained 15 points with voters on under $30 000 per annum and 6 points with voters on $30 000-$45 000 per annum. He managed to create a new constituency of voters that included the traditional republican base and cut into the democratic base in these important areas. This seems to counteract the narrative that it was racism that put Donald Trump in the white house and given that 44% of all women also voted for trump, clearly there is a large contingent of american women who do not think he is so misogynistic that they could not vote for him.

So if it wasn’t racism and sexism that put Trump in the white house, what was it? I think the most significant factor is his gain with low and middle income voters. Clearly something about Trumps message on jobs and the economy resonated with such voters. Both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn seem to have reached the conclusion that Trump successfully tapped into the anger of a working and middle class whose quality of life has been declining steadily for several decades. He did particularly well in “rust belt” states where the loss of manufacturing has led to a significant decline in opportunities to work and living standards. I think this was probably a major significant factor in Trump’s ability to cut into the “blue wall” and reach 270 electoral college votes. Whether or not you think Trump will make a good president, it is undoubtedly the case that people saw him as a “change” candidate and saw Clinton as an “establishment” candidate. Significantly only 14% of voters in the NYT exit poll thought a Clinton presidency could bring needed changed compared with 83% of voters who thought the same of Donald Trump.