We all have in-built biases. Confront people with the exact same set of facts and they’ll come to completely different conclusions, because of pre-existing ideas and prejudices which influence the way we all perceive, understand, and assimilate information. So, what are mine?

Status quo bias

A common thread to my mistaken predictions is clearly an expectation that the status quo will endure. I grew up in an era of stable governments with large majorities; I came of age politically when a million people marched against the Iraq war yet failed to stop it, and two years later, Blair won a third term. Has all of this led me to believe that continuity and stability are the natural order of things? That attacks on “the system” are doomed to fail? Did things like the Scottish referendum help to bolster this sentiment?

I thought Brexit and Trump would be such massive shocks to the system, that I discounted the possibility of them happening at all.

Expertise bias

I have a doctorate in Mathematics and place a high level of trust in experts. For this reason, perhaps I was too ready to believe pollsters, Big Data, and the application of statistics which showed that Clinton would win. Or, at least, given that Clinton may well end up winning the popular vote, I did not stop to wonder how polling leads might convert into Electoral College votes. In the EU referendum, I put too much faith in voters swinging back behind Remain in the final week, in the same way opposition leads can vanish close to polling day.

Ideal world bias

And, deep down, I am an optimist. I thought Brexit and Trump would lose partly because I wanted them to. I thought that they were both self-evidently bad ideas, and hence others would see the same.

Just wrong

So those of us who thought Hillary Clinton would win were sadly proved wrong.

But an unedifying dynamic since the election has been a number of Corbyn supporters who think Clinton’s defeat vindicates their politics in some way, and have been happily putting the boot into “centrists”.

Such people would previously have howled at anyone drawing comparisons between Corbyn and Trump, and yet now Trump has won, it is suddenly acceptable to do so. Finding similarities between the Labour leader and Donald Trump is now positively de rigeur, because it can be held up to demonstrate how Corbyn can triumph here.

Is that a lesson from Trump’s victory? That Jeremy Corbyn can produce a similar surprise?

This argument, it seems, rests on two points. One, that the polls just can’t be trusted and are best ignored. And two, that Corbyn, like Trump, is an outsider, fighting against a corrupt establishment and a rigged economic system.

I would argue that this analysis is flawed. I agree that opinion polls must, now more than ever, be taken with a pinch of salt; but Conservative leads in October were 9, 14, 16, 17 and 18 points. The polling companies haven’t got everything right of late, but it would be astonishing if they were out by this order of magnitude. There is a difference between being skeptical of polls and psephological nihilism.

As for Corbyn being an outsider like Trump; while this is true to an extent, a closer British analogue is surely UKIP. The pendulum is swinging towards the right, not the left; towards crackdowns on immigration, towards authoritanism, away from social liberalism. Northern parliamentary seats look worryingly like the rustbelt states where Clinton’s dreams were fatally tarnished.

Corbyn’s analysis is wrong. Trump voters don’t want to overthrow the system, and they certainly don’t want to replace it with socialism; those voting on economic grounds just want the system to work for them. And to attempt to explain Donald Trump’s victory purely in economic terms is to shift the debate onto a terrain the left feels happier fighting on, rather than facing the situation as it actually is.