this is "gps," the global public square, i'm fareed zakaria coming to you live from new york. today we will, of course, tackle the stunning results of america's election. president-elect donald j. trump. >> i pledge to every citizen of our land that i will be president for all americans. >> just how did it happen? >> i'm sorry that we did not win this election. >> what does it mean for the future of the left and the right? i'll ask david dream nick, here

in -- david remnick, neera teenan. why didn't the pundits see this coming? >> all of the models have hillary clinton ahead just by varying degrees. >> this week we will do a postmortem. then syria, isis, russia, china, what will president trump do about all these foreign policy challenges. i have a great panel to discuss. first, here's my take. for those of us who opposed donald trump the response to tuesday's vote could be anger or honest reflection and i'm not by nature an angry person so i'll try the latter. donald trump remade the political map with a huge surge of support from working class whites, particularly in rural communities. let me be honest -- this is a

world that i don't know and many people probably don't know have well and that's part of the problem. we have all managed to ignore rural america and the pain of economic hardship and social dislocation it has faced over the last few decades. the big divide in america today is urban versus rural. there's an essay on the a tier y'all web site "cracked" by david wong who grew up in a small town in illinois and it gives voice to the rage of rural americans. the whole goddnaned world revolves around america's cities. most songs, movies, shows, games are all about new york or l.a. or chicago or some fantasy version of them. all the hot new industries are in hip cities. if you live in rural america, that effing sucks. to those ignored suffering people, donald trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. are you a-holes listening now"

writes wong. we are. over the last three decades, america has sorted itself into a highly efficient meritocracy where people from all walks of life can move up the ladder of achievement and income, usually ending up in cities. it's a better way than using race or gender or blood lines as a path to wealth and power, but it does create its own problems. as with any system, there will be people who don't asend to ce the top and because it's a meritocracy, it's easy to believe this is justified, that they deserve it. a meritocracy can be blind to the fact that some people don't make it because they were unlucky, up against tough odds, more profoundly it can be morally blind. even those who score poorly on tests or have bad work habits are human beings deserving of attention and success. the republicans' great success in rural communities is that even though they advocate economic policies that would not help people, indeed, policies

that often hurt them, they demonstrate respect by identifying with them culturally, religiously, emotionally. so the great sin of the modern left is elitism. is but there is another sin that was highlighted in this election -- racism. i know makes many uncomfortable but hear me out. donald trump won among whites without a college degree by a staggering 39 points, according to exit polls. but he won those with a college education by four points as well. he won working class whites but also middle-class whites. and here is the key point. trump is not unusual. right wing populism is on the rise across a vary variety of western countries. it's rising in countries in northern europe where economic growth has been robust. it is rising in countries like germany where manufacturing jobs have stayed very strong. in france where the state provides many protections for the working class. the one common trait in all

these places is that a white majority population faces a recent influx of immigrants. perhaps the phenomenon might be better described as a reaction to cultural change, but it often expresses itself simply as hostility to people who are different and are usually brown and black. consider, for example, that 72% of registered republican voters still doubt that barack obama was born in the united states. this is according to an august nbc poll. donald trump's political skill was to speak defiantly about both these sensitive issues -- elitism and race -- in a simple, direct, politically incorrect way that connected with white voters, particularly white men. but in doing so, he also terrified tens of millions of other americans. we should have a serious conversation about elitism and rural communities, but let's

also not shy away from a conversation about race. there are other ignored and suffering people in america as well. we all need to be listening to each other now. for more, go to cnn.com/fareed and read my "washington post" column this week. let's get started. . i have a great panel. david remnick is the editor-in-chief of the "new yorker." he published a piece online at 2:40 a.m. on wednesday as election returns kept rolling in. that piece "an american tragedy" went viral. neera tanden was co-chair of the clinton/kaine transition, her job is president and ceo of the center for american progress. dan seener was a spokesman in the bush 43 administration and a

senior foreign policy advisor to the romney/ryan campaign in 2012. in toronto, conrad black is a columnist for the national post, he's also that newspaper's founder. conrad, let me begin with you since you supported donald trump and therefore i think i owe it to you to give us your theory of the case. what -- how do you explain trump's victory. >> i think some of the factors you made certainly played in it but i think that there was no real argument put forward for the reelection of the democrats and their entire campaign consisted of an attack on donald trump as a racist and sexist and possibly a warmonger and inciter of domestic violence. none of those allegations is true. and he responded to them by torquing up references to mrs. clinton's ethical problems and the clintons so-called pay to

pay problems and so we got a singularly it have tune aive the campaign and it escalated right to the end but the facts are that donald trump is not a sexist and he's not a racist. he won the republican nomination over the established figures in that party, the bush family and others, but also the far right led by senator cruz by pitching it somewhat to the people you mention mentioned but all he said was he wanted a border in the south. he was opposed to illegal immigration, he was opposed to the admission of terrorists. he's not a racist. he has a good record as an equal opportunity edge ployer and he certainly isn't a sexist. that 11-year-old tape while it was disgusting was like the normal routine conversation of lyndon johnson and we didn't talk about that thing very much in those days. now, the times have changed but

those attacks on him were unreasonable and the american public feel -- and there's lots of evidence and i think they have the right to believe it -- the last ten years have been comparative decline of the united states in the world under both parties and under legislative and executive branches of both parties and they're very upset about it and donald pitched good old-fashioned patriotism. not jingo, not any sort of imperialism and not any superiority of any one, just this isn't good government, it's time for a change and we have to stop trade pacts that import unemployment and immigration that creates unfair competition for jobs. it was portrayed by his opponents as a racist campaign and in the end that did not work because it was not true. >> dan, what's striking to me is from all accounts the trump campaign did not expect to win.

paul ryan did not expect him to win. you were very close to paul ryan. one of the reasons paul ryan told republicans, detach yourself from trump if you have to, the everyone was surprised and what do you think accounts for it? >> for the surprise? >> yup. >> first of all, all the polling was off and i think, look, i'm not surprised by the surge in white working class voters and to be clear. i don't think it's just white working class, it was a middle-class revolt as well. we oversimplify these things. so i'm not surprised by that. but what i was surprised about and what the republican leadership was surprised about was the complete collapse of the obama coalition. we just assumed obama voters would turn out in the numbers they did in 2008 and 2012. it takes 700 counties in the country that voted for obama in 2008 and 2012. a third of them -- a third --

voted for trump. in cities like philadelphia and detroit and milwaukee which -- where you had a surge of voters in 2012 which helped defeat mitt romney, numbers were way off. so the big question for me is not the white working class and white middle-class revolt. it was why the obama coalition didn't work out. >> neera, as of now there are millions of ballots yet to be counted but as of now trump got a million votes less than mitt romney but hillary clinton got five million votes less than obama. does that tell you something? >> absolutely. and i want to recognize that there was democratic turnoff. there was depression, particularly among some african-americans. there was surges amongst latinos but there was definitely some dropoff. i think we have to see a lot of votes are still out, it may well be that hillary wins the popular vote by a million, million and a

half but we have to recognize that president obama did a lot better than secretary clinton with white working class voters and white -- many white middle-class voters. her particular dropoff was with white working class voters and so he did better in 2012 with white -- he lost them but not by as much and the democratic party has to recognize that we have to have a better economic message and a better reform message. i think donald trump did better in this campaign than many expected because he had an anti-status quo message. and i think that's critical for us going forward. >> david remnick, you, if i'm allowed to, you saw president obama yesterday. what's his interpretation? i know you're writing about this. but give us a preview. >> i think i'll wait until i write about it. as you can imagine, he's trying to buck up his white house and i think also his supporters out in the world but i think even if we can acknowledge that there is a

deep-seeded feeling, anti-elite feeling in the country that has been present not just in the last year but for quite a while because of globalism and all its effects and i think we can acknowledge that hillary clinton while i think would have been a good -- in my mind would have been an excellent president in so ways was flawed and i don't think muckraking helped her in this contrast. i didn't think it was necessary for her to make tens of millions of dollars the way she and her husband did and that was easy fodder for the republicans. when i listen to conrad black describe donald trump, i think i'm hallucinating. when i hear him described as not a sexist, not a racist, not playing on white fears, not arousing hate, when i -- when he's described in a kind of normalized way as someone in absolute possession of policy knowledge, as someone who somehow is in the acceptable

range of rhetoric i think i'm hallucinating and i fear for our country and i don't think it's unreason to believe do so and of course i accept the results of the election. of course i do. at the same time, i also know that vladimir putin played a distinct role in this election and that's outrageous. and we've normalized it already. less an a week after the election is over suddenly washington is going about its business talking about who's going to get what jobs. you would think mitt romney had won. it's -- it's ah- ee's a hallucit i don't think we can indulge that but if you are serious about serious opposition in this country or journalism or whatever your role is to play than the time is now. >> conrad, let me give you a chance to respond briefly but, you know, just to david's point, you did say those things and i'm wondering how do you square that with the ban on all muslim musl

religious tests, the comments about the -- the policy plans to deport 11 million people, the comments about mexicans as rapists, the argument about -- >> the show is only an hour long, fareed. >> exactly. i'm wondering -- these were not just an off-color remark made on a 10-year-old videotape. these were policies he proposed. >> i thought i was hallucinating when president obama marched around the campaign trail in the last week accusing donald trump of being a friend of the ku klux klan. i followed elections since the second one between general eisenhower and governor steven son and i thought that was possibly the nastiest moust outrageous charge that any president made in a campaign in my time. it became a very nasty vie tune aive the election because the democrats had no campaign except

the sort of thing that mr. remnick just said. now trump walked back all those points. he's not expelling 11 million illegal migrants. he's not doing that. he's not saying he's doing that. he's been relatively clear in that if you listen to him. and he made an initial shock statement in the early primaries in a number of these things. they were outrageous, they were bombastic but instead of permitting the normal flexibility which i admit would be straining the latitudes of saying well, it's just flex, but instead of doing any of that, those things were seized upon with a kind of sadistic amplification system by his opponents precisely because they had no campaign for the reelection of the democrats. the democratic record is not a good one and the republican record of the george w. bush administration wasn't a good one, those were not successful presidencies. >> can i stop you on that, conrad? i want to get to everybody. dan, here's the point and i

think if conrad were right this would have been a vote in favor of all outsiders against all insiders but it's not, it's a republican sweep. >> no, no, if you actually look at where republicans are -- when obama was first year president, democrats had 670 sena0 senate now they have 48. they had close to 30 governorships, now they have 15 so it is an up-and-down ballot sweep but it's a big republican win. it's partly a big republican win because in a sense trump ran against both parties, so he became this vessel to take on the system and republicans, the party, has never been stronger, oddly. it's the beneficiary of this. >> he was running against the clintons, the bushes and the obamas. >> right. i agree. he's run against the whole system. it remains to be seen how he will govern. if he works with paul ryan and mitch mcconnell and lets them advance ideas they've been working on for some time it could be a constructive first year. if he resorts to some of the

ways he campaigned it will not be. we have to be intellectually honest about that. >> neera and david -- >> can i make a quick point which is to david's point, we've had five days of protests in the country. people are fearful. there has been a rise of hate rhetoric people are seeing language against african-americans, against latinos, against women all throughout the country and for five days president-elect trump could have said something to stop to give those people some sense that this will not be the beginning, this will be the end of that rhetoric. he has chosen not to and i think that proves conrad black is wrong about this language. i think this is who donald trump is. i hope i'm wrong. i hope he will spend some time trying to cool the waters but i think that is part and parcel of why he won and why steve bannon is likely to play an important role in the white house and something that we should -- we need to work against. >> steve bannon, who is a central figure in the alt-right

information universe that has shattered the traditional information universe, i understand that, but the role that people like steve bannon has played make them fearful. but somehow institutions modify his rhetoric, modify his behavior. he has the good sense to appoint people when necessary. but if he goes the way rudy giuliani and chris christie. if he runs a predictable presidency that's something to be anxious about.

>> we'll be back in a moment with a whole new panel, this time to talk about trump and the world, what can we figure out about his foreign policy by reading the tea leaves? . big day? ah, the usual. moved some new cars. hauled a bunch of steel. kept the supermarket shelves stocked. made sure everyone got their latest gadgets. what's up for the next shift? ah, nothing much. just keeping the lights on. (laugh) nice.

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welcome back to a live edition of the global public square. when president trump takes the oath of office, he will inherit an america and a world facing multiple trouble spots -- iraq, syria, isis, there's terrorism more generally, russia's ambitions on its western border, china's ambition in the south china sea. how will this man with no foreign policy experience handle that? well, james woolsey joins us from miami, the former cia director is a member of trump's transition team. ian brehmer is the president and founder of the eurasia group and ann marie slaughter is the president and ceo of the think tank new america, she was the director of policy planning at

the state department under secretary clinton and president obama. jim, let me start with you. i was wondering, there are so many questions i think people have about what a president trump will do but i wondered if you could start with one of name has intrigued me which is even in this last five days donald trump went out of his way to be nice to putin, he said putin sent him a beautiful letter. russia seems to have played some role in this election. all the intelligence agencies believe that the russians were behind the hack. they have been playing similar roles in eastern europe. they have an -- in crimannexed . the europeans are nervous. what do you think the attitude will be in russia towards a trump administration? >> i don't know but i'll say what i think about it which is that i believe there are a

number of circumstances in which one wants to be cordial to foreign a foreign country that is causing difficulties. i've negotiated with russians four times on arms control treaties and there are times in which being reasonably friendly is a good move and there are a number of other times in which it's not. but because he says something friendly i don't think one should assume that's a major policy decision. roosevelt used to call stalin uncle joe during the middle of world war ii and stalin killed more people than anyone in human history. sometimes you have to work to get along with countries you disagree with or have big problems with and it may be easier to talk to them if you're getting along on other things. >> ian brehmer, what do you think about u.s./russian relations, you travel a lot.

european, particularly east europeans are very worried. what i heard in places like poland and ukraine is eastern europe is going to be sacrificed at the altar of a kind of putin/trump bromance. >> some people that way. of course hungary's president actually is an admirer of putin and you have people like niej l farage taking a selfie. i think the obama administration failed on russia and this is a place where trump can turn it around. it was the republicans that said they were going to strip out under trump support for arming ukraine. despite the fact that most wanted to keep it there. it was trump that said the russians don't have anyone in southeast ukraine, trump hates the idea of the u.s. exceptionalism, that's really

music to putin's ears so they're going to work much more closely together and i expect that u.s. sanctions under trump against russia are going to diminish but there's no question that will make other countries uneasy because it's the idea of shared values that brought the europeans and americans so close together and that's what trump will throw away. he views alliances as much more transactional, the way he views his business and his marriages. it has -- it doesn't have to do with underlying values, it these do with are we both getting something out of the deal? and if that regard if he can sit down with putin and get something done, that's great and if europeans aren't paying as much for defense, they're not important. that's a repute united nations of the way the u.s. has engaged in foreign policy for decades now. >> i want to start with where jim woolsey started. you asked him a question about what trump thought and he said "i don't know what trump thinks, i won't predict." i'll tell you what i think. there are many different people around trump who think very differently so mike flynn, who

advised him through the campaign, absolutely says russia is a country we can do business with, we should be focusing on isis above all, we and the russians should sit down and do business. there are others who feel very differently about russia and we have no idea because we don't know who he's going to appoint in foreign policy. the one thing i think we can be certain of is that he will not support any kind of aide to moderate syrians. he will sit down with putin and carve up syria, or put assad in power, stop supporting the moderates and go all out focusing on isis and that, i think, is something he's been very consistent on and his advisors are consistent on. >> more broadly, what do you think should happen as i say you're right, you can't predict what will happen but what do you think should happen this that's different in the struggle against isis. slowly but surely isis has been squeezed financially.

it has been decimated, it's lost more than half its territory. it appears on the verge of losing mosul, it hasn't even been able to do much in the way of spectacular terror attacks recently. is this kind of slow and steady grind that involves others -- the iraqis and the kurds forces -- is that the right approach or should we be doing something more dramatic? >> it's making some progress and that's good because we really have to take out isis in its homeland of iraq and syria. we can't let them have the caliphate. we need to defeat them and defeat them very soundly in the battle for mosul and the rest. that has been going a bit better than it was for some time over the course of the last few weeks. and that should continue. we should not hold up short of knocking isis completely out of business. the harder task is going to be to defeat them out in the the 60

countries where they are present in one way or another and that is the base rock from which they will launch small and individual actions, and some of them extremely horrible, in order to shock us as well as to kill us. and i think that we have to work with our friends and allies on best practices to take isis out of action out around the world. and that is going to entail some types of intrusion into people's businesses and companies and organizations that would not be appropriate except in wartime. but i think we have to admit, as trotsky once said, you may not be interested in war but war may be interested in you. this war is interested in us and it's not just skirmishes with a terrorist group, it's war.

it's twoor t ee's war to the der point of view. we have to defeat them all around the world. >> is there anything more that can be done -- let me start with you, ann marie -- with this threat of terrorism? it's real. what strikes me about it is the danger to the western world seems to be these lone wolf attacks or small groups, often local, often radicalized alienated young men. i imagine we'll be able to defeat isis but what do you do about that the next time you have a crazy couple or a jihadi couple somewhere in the united states or france who decide to launch an attack? >> barack obama's response was isis itself is not an existential threat to the united states, we will do everything we can to contain it but what we'll actually do is emphasize this is not a war on islam, we will work with american muslim communities

and we will fight that threat through intelligence. i think trump is in a very different place, you heard it, there's the view that this is world war iii against radical islamic terrorism and remember he kept beating up on obama for not naming it. he does think it's more versus islam and oddly he conflated that with iran because iran is actually opposed to isis but if you listen to mike flynn he says iran is the major enemy. mike flynn has suggested overthrowing the islamic republic of iran and we know trump is hostile to iran so i don't think he's going to focus on the threat that's more dangerous to us which are these lone wolves and much more on fighting islam, fighting extremist islamist which is will make us less safe. >> i think of course there's going to continue to be a significant military response and i agree with jim that that's had some progress and it will continue to but it can't only be a military response.

the danger under trump is the potential that the united states becomes a place where muslims living within our borders are unwelcome. certainly the rhetoric we've seen consistently through the campaign would make them feel that way. it's harder to fight terror in france or belgium because there are large muslim populations that are not integrated in the broader country, they don't feel like they're part of it so if you try to engage in surveillance it's very hard for your own agents to get inside. now that hasn't been as much of a problem in the united states but it's likely to become one if we continue down this path, if people like newt gingrich continue with the sort of rhetoric that says we need a revival of the un-american activities committee which would be a desperate repudiation of the values that the united states was built on but something we've done before and could do again so we have to hear what trump is intending to do in terms of these people that do live within the united states and they're citizens.

>> jim, let me ask you about that contradiction that ann-marine talked about. you've always been very tough on iran and i wanted to know what you think donald trump's attitude should be on iran because there is this contradiction. he says the iran deal is terrible, he's implied he will renegotiate it or tear it up which is more difficult to do because it's a u.n. security council deal not just a u.s. deal. but at the same time he says my number one focus is isis, anyone who is fighting isis we should ally with. well the number one country outside of the region outside of the iraqis that are fighting isis is iran. iran has been in the forefront of fighting isis, they are really enemy number one because they are the dreaded shiite power that isis has been rebelled against. so how can you be in favor of everyone battling isis and at the same time deeply opposed to iran. >> well, we had a lot of americans during world war ii who realized -- as did franklin

roosevelt -- that we had to fight the nazis first but at some point we were going to have to deal with the communists and it took us 45, 50 years to win world war ii and to defeat the soviets in the cold war. on a smaller scale, in a sense, this is the kind of problem we face. it's two totalitarian movements and one of them is of an immediate concern and the other is of the long-term and study and, i think, deeper concern. >> but if that's the case if i can just interrupt you if that's the case to follow your analogy should we in the short term be nice to iran to help defeat isis and then turn on them? it seems to me to be odd to be simultaneously against isis and its principal opponent. >> that's a tactical question. my judgment is no that we don't want to ease up on either iran or isis now but iran will probably have a nuclear weapon well before the ten years that

is forecast under this agreement. i think the president-elect is right. as far as i'm concerned this is the worst single international agreement the united states has ever signed and it is not, i think, implementable because not all parts of it have been filed with all parties so it doesn't really take effect yet if you follow its terms. i think the verification provisions are thoroughly rotten. i've negotiated four times on arms control agreements with the soviets and eastern europe and i think anybody who came back with this agreement to washington and said look what i just negotiated should hang his head in shame. it's truly rotten. >> anne-marie, you can't abrogate it entirely because you're not going to get back u.n. security council sanctions because those other countries -- russia, china -- won't comply so

all it would mean presumably is americans can put back sanctions unilaterally but iranians could then start enriching again, right? they can go down the path of weaponizing again. >> absolutely. essentially the horse has left the barn on the iran agreement in the sense of the billions of dollars that have gone back to the iranian government. all this will accomplish is that european business, russian business, chinese business will be doing business in iraq and u.s. business won't and the other piece is that iran can say if the united states isn't holding up its part of the agreement we won't hold up ours. so then you have an iran that can support terrorism around the world and an iran that is pursuing a nuclear weapon. but i have to say this is crazy talk. this is not world war ii. we are not in a world war ii moment and the other thing we know about trump is he did read the american people to say no more wars of choice, no more

putting boots on the ground in the middle east so you're not going to reconcile a man who says we're going to stay home with this apocalyptic vision. >> 15 seconds. what is the single-most important thing that happens in the trump administration first term? >> i think it's the fact that we may not be in world war ii but it is the end of pax americana and american allies are going to be hedging. this is going to be a radically more unstable geopolitical environment. next on "gps," how did everyone -- including me -- get tuesday's election so wrong? i will be joined by the same two prognosticators who joined me last week to eat some crow. crohn's disease. erate i didn't think there was anything else to talk about. but then i realized there was. so, i finally broke the silence with my doctor about what i was experiencing. he said humira is for people like me who have tried other medications but still experience the symptoms of moderate to severe crohn's disease.

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regular viewers will remember i had two guests last sunday who offered their best expert predictions about the elections -- one from 538 and one from the "new york times" up shot. at the end of the segment we offered electoral college positions. take a look. i'm going ask you now, i'm going to go with sam, 312.

what's your -- you must have a electoral vote count you figured out. >> i'll go with 318. >> i'll go with 322. >> to be clear, these were all electoral college votes we thought hillary clinton would get, we didn't even think about, trump, we were, of course, absolutely wrong, so was everyone else, so the question is why? harry anton is a senior political writer and analyst with 538 and nate cohn is a writer for the "new york times" up shot. so very simply, why were we wrong? >> well, i think the polls, that's the reason why. polls indicated hillary clinton was a favorite over donald trump but the thing we didn't articulate as well although i think our web site did a decent job was the uncertainty around that estimate so even if we had the mean estimate being 318, 312 and 322, the tail should have been considerably longer. >> the tail means the possibility of an outlier event? >> that's exactly right. >> but the first point you made is important to understand. not to get you off the hook but

models are based on input. >> that's right. >> and in a sense it may be fair to say since the polls were wrong -- garbage in, garbage out. here's my question, though, this was not just a few polls. in the last five months i'm guessing there were about 150, 200 polls done. maybe trump was up in 15, 20 of those. hillary was up in the vast majority. vast, vast, vast majority. why were they so wrong? >> it's hard to say at this point but i think it's worth clarifying how they were wrong. it seems to me that the preponderance of the eviden preponderance of the polling error were found in the upper midwest of the united states. there were no polls that showed trump winning in wisconsin. the national polls don't look that bad, clinton will win the popular vote, the national poll said she was ahead by three or four. >> let's stop. a lot of people look at the "l.a. times" tracking poll, the

one poll people say got it right. the "l.a. times" poll had trump winning by five, winning the popular vote by five. he lost it by one so that's a six-point error, more than a lot of the polls that supposedly got it wrong. keep going, why did the polls get the upper midwest wrong. >> i think what those states have in common is they have a large white working class population and in those same states clinton was expected to do quite well in traditionally republican areas like the milwaukee suburbs or western michigan. >> traditional democratic areas? >> no, republican areas. so the last poll out of wisconsin from marquette shows a close race in the milwaukee suburbs. polling in michigan showed clinton competitive in western michig michigan, traditionally the most conservative part of the state and on the last day of the campaignclinton stopped in western michigan. that was the way she was going to make up with losses in white working class voters. so two basic possibilities, someone that those republican voters came home at the end of the race and decided they

couldn't vote for clinton. perhaps comey was a factor or maybe it was a natural tendency as they moved back towards their natural affiliation oar the polls underestimated the strength of clinton's lead -- trump's lead among white working class voters in the outlying parts of those states and i don't think we have enough data to be sure. >> why would a poll underestimate it? >> can i rule one thing snout i don't think it's a shy trump voter effect. there are -- the reason i think that is because the polls underestimated all of the republican candidates in these state, unless you think there's a shy toomey effect or shy johnson effect which i don't buy. one possibility that i've heard that i'm kind of convinced by is that it's possible the polls just underestimated the proportion of the electorate in these states that doesn't have a college degree. >> that is larger than we think. >> larger than we think. i'll note this is a hard thing to figure out, the exit poll and the census and voter file are

the three main ways we have to understand the electorate. the biggest place they disagree on how educated the electorate is. the exit polls think it's half, the census says around a third and the voter file which is what the campaigns use doesn't have education. >> and this is important, it seems to me because if you look at the recovery, if you look at the charts of unemployment -- of employment, what is striking is that the chart for people with college degrees is very strikingly high, about eight and a half million jobs created for people with college degrees. for people without college degrees in america in the last eight years i think 80,000 jobs have been created. essentially they're still a recession. >> if you look at the state that had the largest polling area it was west virginia. west virginia and north dakota which are two states that aren't in the midwest but they have fracking, they have coal, there are a lot of people in west virginia who don't have college degrees and there wouldn't be -- why would anyone in west virginia be shy to say they were voting for trump? that's where trump rolled in the

primary. i think there's something very much to that, that there's something going on with non-college whites weather it be in west virginia or wisconsin or maine or rhode island, you're talking about rural new england. there just -- something happened there that the pollsters didn't figure out and i do also -- will also point out another place where if you chart it without where there were the largest errors, it was normally red areas where republicans roll free. if you look at a state like alabama or mississippi. in mississippi i think what was the margin, nearly -- >> 12? >> 16 points. it grew from the last time with barack obama. barack obama got a much larger vote from african-americans but also white voters without a college degree, there were a lot of those in mississippi so we saw it across the entire map. i think there was just something going on where the pollsters missed it. >> what about the issue of the comey affect. the part that i remember, 538 had a very good point that

undecided voters a week before the election were at about 12%, 13%. it's normally 2%, 3%, so you had almost four times as many undecided voters. i wonder whether those are people -- a, that could be where your shy trump voter is. they were leaping toward trump. i'm assuming the polling models took those undecideds and split them about the way the electorate -- >> they split them evenly but they added to the uncertainty and that was part of the reason why we had trump at a 30% chance of winning, say, than other estimates that might have been considerably higher. >> but presumably they didn't split 50-50. they split heavily for trump. probably, although we'll need numbers afterwards to understand that. what i should point south that clinton was dropping or her lead was dropping, trump was rising, that was why her lead was shrinking pre-comey. comey perhaps accelerated that but in the final weekend it seemed as though clinton was having a slight recovery but that might have been a fake out.

often times the polls taken a week before the election are more accurate than the polls taken immediately before because there's a phenomenon that occurs where all pollsters converge to one kind of number. there were a lot of plus fours, plus threes, plus fives. that's a little statistical anomaly. it should have been a wider range. maybe they were pollsters who fudge it hd the numbers a bit. >> give wherein trump won, if the democrats nominated bernie sanders, do the polls suggest he would have won? >> that's a good question. i think it took so much going wrong for clinton -- and so much did go wrong for clinton -- that it's hard for me to argue someone else would have lost it. and bernie did undoubtedly do better than clinton in areas that cost her the election. >> and no wikileaks, no comey, no e-mails. >> i think that's a distinct stability, there would have been a tradeoff in the suburbs potentially but clinton didn't do so well in the suburbs. part of the reason why clinton was thought to have an advantage

is she was going to win over well-educated republicans who couldn't stand trump. that didn't happen in the end in battleground states and that's the area where i would have told you maybe bernie couldn't have done that. but if clinton didn't take advantage of that opportunity, i don't see any reason why bernie would have -- >> the real reason we thought sandersn wouldn't do as well is because we thought ideology would matter but trump proved some of the things we thought mattered wouldn't, people wanted an outsider, sanders matches that. i don't know if he would have won but, heck, he couldn't have done that much worse than clinton did, someone who was the most unpopular candidate in modern american history. >> great to have you both on. thank you. thank you. next on "gps," president-elect president-elect trump will be the second president without any experience foef served either as the military or an elected official. who was the first? i'll tell you when we come back. that's because with fingerhut.com

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>> i've just received a call from secretary clinton. [ cheers and applause ] donald trump made history on tuesday becoming the most anti-establishment candidate, as he calls it, to win the presidency. it brings me to my question of the week -- which of the following presidents like trump was elected without previously serving as either an elected official or u.s. army general? was it william henry harrison, zachary taylor, william howard taft, or herbert hoover? stay tuned and we'll tell you the correct answer. this week's book of the week is a long essay by george packer in the "new yorker" titled "hillary clinton and the populist revolt." i thought it was the single-best piece on the politics behind this election and even though it's technically about clinton, it is still vitally relevant. now for the last look. there were a lot of "what ifs" thrown around this week.

what if hillary spent more time in the midwest? what if she focused more on working-class whites? what if the polls had been slightly more on point? well, we thought we'd add a comparative what if. what if america had a presidential system like most other countries in the world? hillary clinton lost the election but it now seems she has won the popular vote. presidential candidates have lost the presidency after winning the popular vote five times in the history of the united states. in 1824 when andrew jackson lost to john quincy adams, in 1876 when samuel tilden lost to rutherford b. heys, in 1888 when grover cleveland lost to benjamin harrison and since 2000 it's happened twice in 16 years. the first time, of course, in 2000 when al gore lost to george w. bush and this year. some vehemently reject calls to change the electoral college system while others say it's time to amend the constitution. it's been seriously proposed many times -- in fact, less than

50 years ago a resolution, had it passed the final hurdle, could have changed the course of history. in 1969, legislators submitted a proposal to congress suggesting the direction of a president and vice president. in cases when no candidate received more than 40% of the vote, a runoff would be required. the resolution was endorsed by president nixon, passed the house of representatives, but was filibustered and killed in the senate the next year. had it passed, it would have been the first major constitutional change in the electoral vote system many more than 150 years and it would have resulted in the election of the first female president in 2016. the correct answer to our gps challenge question was, d, herbert hoover. hoover became the 31st president after serving as the director of the u.s. food administration during world war i and then as the secretary of commerce. the others would w no elected experience were zachary taylor,

ulysses s. grant and dwight david eisenhower, however all three men were victorious generals. if you guessed william howard taft, he was elected as a judge to ohio's superior court prior to his presidency. but you still get points. thanks to all of you for being part of my program. i will see you next week. hey, i'm brian stelter, time for a special edition of "reliable sources." this is our weekly look at the story behind the story, how the media really works, how the news gets made. a special welcome to our viewers here in the u.s. and all around the world on cnn international. first, something different. before i get to the tease, before i tell you about the great show we have in store today, let's level with each other. tuesday night was the culmination of one of the biggest media failures in many years. most journalists heading into tuesday night believing hillary clinton would be elected president at the end of the night. and most viewers had the same