The trouble with 2016 began in 2014.

A full two years ago, the presidential election was already underway. Hillary Clinton gathered strength for a long-planned second try at history as a crowded field of Republicans lined up donors and Donald Trump sat in his boardroom plotting a campaign to become the world’s most powerful person.


What followed were 24 of the ugliest months in modern political history. Trump tore the traditional script to pieces, harnessing a populism driven by working-class, mostly white insecurity that has carried him to within a whisker of the White House. In the process, he has turned the GOP inside out, rejecting its conservative principles, trampling respected Republican leaders and mainstreaming the far-right fringe. On the other side, Bernie Sanders rode a progressive populism across 50 states and forced the most conventional of Democratic centrists to the left — even when it meant renouncing positions she had held for years.

Two surprise-filled primaries yielded a general-election circus that included Russian cyberattacks, insults against U.S. troops and their families, violent protests at political rallies, domestic terrorism, the reemergence of white supremacists, public admission of sexual assault, allegations of abuse, FBI investigations, hundreds of lies, and lawsuits that will stretch well beyond Election Day.

It all ends Tuesday. But before it does, POLITICO looks back at an election that Official Washington never saw coming — and that will affect the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the White House, Congress, the media and the American people for years, even decades, to come.

Here are 16 lists of 16 things about the contest that was 2016.

1. The 16 worst predictions of 2016

2. The 16 ads that mattered in 2016

3. The 16 surprises that shifted the 2016 contest

4. The 16 falsehoods spewed by Trump and Clinton

5. The 16 breakout media stars of 2016

6. The 16 battlegrounds that will decide the election

7. The 16 photos that captured the defining moments of 2016

8. The 16 most revelatory Clinton emails

9. The 16 insults that redefined acceptable political rhetoric

10. The 16 statements that would have destroyed another candidate

11. The 16 numbers that mattered in 2016

12. The 16 moments that defined the battle for the Senate

13. The 16 moments that defined the battle for the House

14. The 16 stories that changed the 2016 race

15. The 16 Republicans who abandoned Trump after the tape

16. The 16 reactions from world leaders stunned by this election

