How does it feel to be just about the only newspaper pundit in America who saw this coming?

It feels good.

Thanks for asking.

But how did all those other pols and pundits fail to notice what was going on in this campaign?

What was going on was that Donald Trump was stealing the Democratic Party's base from right under their noses.

For as long as I've been following politics, that base was the blue-collar class.

The Democrats were the party of the working man.

The Republicans were the party of the bosses.

Then along comes this guy who's been a boss his whole life - but decides to make a blatant pitch for the working man's vote.

And the Democrats fail to even notice.

In fact their candidate goes out of her way to insult the very people who should be her party's base.

When Hillary Clinton said, "We're going to put a lot of coal miners out of work," every blue-collar worker who heard that had to wonder if his job would be the next to be sacrificed to the God of Global Warming.

Similarly, when Clinton put a quarter of the electorate into her "basket of deplorables," how could she fail to realize that she had just filled a basket with a demographic group that traditionally voted Democratic?

This was as big a mistake as any presidential contender has ever made. But the Democrats convinced themselves they could make up for it by appealing to other constituencies such as environmentalists, feminists and Latinos.

They learned a bit late that there aren't all that many environmentalists, feminists and Latinos in those Rust Belt states where Trump was able to draw a crowd of 30,000 or so just by announcing it on the internet.

Clinton, by comparison, had to offer guest appearances by rock stars like Bruce Springsteen to generate equivalent crowds.

I guess I was the only journalist in attendance Monday night in Philadelphia who noticed that Bruce was singing about a working class that was going to vote for Trump.

I'm sure Bruce himself didn't have a clue. He should try listening to his own music - particularly that song about how the boss tells the factory workers "these jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back."

If Bruce had been paying attention to politics - never his strong suit - he might have realized that Trump was promising to bring those jobs back - while Hillary was promising to train the unemployed workers to put solar panels made in China on each others' houses.

And while we're on the subject of rock-and-roll, the first Trump appearance I attended was a rally in upstate New York not far from the town of Woodstock.

Having attended that festival in my youth, I instantly recognized a similar feeling of people coming together around a shared way of looking at the world.

"He recited his applause lines about jobs and immigration the way a rock star runs through a medley of his greatest hit," I wrote at the time. "The crowd loved it and he avoided any gaffes."

My fellow pundits noticed only the gaffes, not the underlying message.

I also offered this observation about where Trump stood relative to his biggest challenger for the GOP nomination at the time, Texas Senator Ted Cruz:

"Though Cruz polls better than Trump against Clinton in the head-to-head polls, it's hard to see Cruz winning any of the crucial swing states. Both he and Trump would be expected to win the red states, but Trump would seem to have a better chance in swing states in the Rust Belt, where his call for tougher trade rules has resonated."

Those Rust Belt states were where he won this election.

How the Democrats were lulled into complacency about this rather obvious problem will be the enduring question of the 2016 presidential race.

Anyone who drives across a state like Pennsylvania, which I drove through on my way to the convention in Cleveland last summer, would have to notice that the formerly industrial towns along the route were ideal recruiting grounds for the Donald.

I gather the Dems thought they could overcome this by ginning up the urban vote in cities like Philadelphia. But that was always a risky strategy.

If Hillary had been able to get the urban vote, she would have been the nominee in 2008. The lukewarm enthusiasm for Clinton among minorities was another thing the media missed.

The pundits also showed they were totally out of touch with the American worker's economic plight.

Note in the above column the quote from former New York Times editor Jill Abramson on why so many journalists dismissed Trump's chances of winning the GOP nomination:

"Because so many newsrooms are filled with, you know, Ivy Leaguers like me, but a younger version, who haven't, you know, had the time to go live in the South for a couple of years and meet people who are really different."

The South?

A simple trip to my own Ocean County would suffice to meet working people who think they've been screwed by the system.

Ocean County went for Trump by a two-to-one margin, precisely because the people are "really different" from Abramson and Co.

It never seems to occur to the Times crowd that working people might actually be resentful of the politicians and business interests who turn a blind eye to illegal immigration because they want to import a willing work force that is satisfied with lower wages.

Another thing the Times and Washington Post crowd don't understand is that the American people are fed up with the idea of messing around in the Mideast.

Even Bernie Sanders couldn't pound that home to the inside-the-Beltway pundits.

The left-wingers who backed Bernie often sounded like the right-wingers who backed Trump when it came to Clinton's call for confronting Russia militarily over Syria

Few of the pundits seemed to realize that the inside-the-Beltway idea of endless war in the Mideast doesn't appeal to either side of the spectrum after the 15-year interventionist debacle that began on 9/11.

Most of the media ignored Trump's trenchant analysis of Iraq he gave to Esquire Magazine shortly after George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" moment in 2004:

"Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we're in. I would never have handled it that way. Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the country? C'mon. Two minutes after we leave, there's going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over."

That's what happened. Yet Hillary supported that war and the subsequent debacles in Egypt, Libya and Syria.

The media also failed to notice something unusual was going on when Trump took on Jeb Bush at that debate in South Carolina and essentially told him his brother was a clueless idiot when it came to foreign policy.

At the time, the pundits predicted Trump's observation that the Iraq War was a disaster would alienate the GOP base.

Ten years ago it might have had that effect. But these days I rarely meet a Republican who supports the so-called "neo" conservative idea that the U.S. should settle all the world's squabbles.

Few Democrats believe that either - with the prominent exception of the incompetent former secretary of state they nominated for president.

And then there was Russia and its adventures in places like Crimea.

For some reason the media decided Trump was the crazy one for expressing a desire to get along peacefully with a major nuclear power that does not threaten any American interests.

Do you care if Vladimir Putin took Crimea back from Ukraine?

If you're the typical American voter, you don't even know where Crimea is. Nor should you have to. It's not our business.

Watch as the Donald explains that to a British journalist. Note how Trump talks down to the guy as if he's a bit of a slow learner as to American interests.

There was a lot of that going around until Tuesday.

For some reason only they can comprehend, most of my fellow members of the media interpreted Trump's plain-spoken manner as evidence that he didn't know what he was talking about.

Someone didn't know what he was talking about.

But it wasn't Trump.