this is "gps," the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. 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 recommend remnick, near ra teenen and more. why didn't the pundits see this coming? we got predictions last week. >> all of the models have hillary clinton ahead, it's 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. but 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 very 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 satirical website "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 -- world revolves around america's cities," he wrote. 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 f'ing sucks, he wrote. 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 ascend to 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, they were 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 respect. the republicans' great success in rural communities has been

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. but there is also 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 variety of western countries. it is 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. and let's get started. let's keep digging into the politics of trump's american surprise. i have a great panel. david remnick is the editor-in-chief of the "new yorker." a biographer of president obama. he published a piece online at 2:40 a.m. on wednesday as the election returns kept rolling in. that piece "an american tragedy" went viral. neera tanden was co-chair of the clinton/kaine transition, her day job is president and ceo of the center for american progress.

dan senor was a spokesman in the bush 43 administration and a senior foreign policy advisor to the romney/ryan campaign in 2012. and 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. how do you explain trump's victory? >> i think that some of the factors you mentioned, fareed, 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 a 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 vituperative 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 mentioned. but all he really 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 employer. 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 sort of thing very much in those days. now, the times have changed. but those attacks on him were unreasonable and the american public feel -- i believe 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 anyone. 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 senor, 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. everyone was surprised and what do you think accounts for it? >> for the surprise? >> yes. >> 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 segment of the electorate that sort of surged. what i was surprised about and what the republican leadership was surprised about was the complete collapse of the obama coalition. we just assumed that obama voters would turn out in the numbers that they did in 2008 and 2012. you take 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 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 sort of white working class and white middle-class revolt. it was why the obama coalition didn't work out. >> neera, when you look at it, 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 5 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 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, 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, out 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 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 to 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 than 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 that mitt romney had won. it's a hallucination. but i don't think we can indulge that and i don't think if you are serious about opposition in this country or serious journalism or whatever the role is to play, then 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 muslims, a religious test, the comments about 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 ten-year-old videotape. these were actual 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 klu klux klan. i've followed elections since the second one between general eisenhower and governor stevenson, and i thought that was possibly the nastiest most outrageous charge that any president made in a campaign in my time. it became a very nasty,

vituperative election both ways 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 on 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 politics. 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 just 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 60 senate seats, 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 is 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. it remains to be seen -- >> he was running against the clintons, the bushes, and the obamas. >> right. i agree. he's running 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, very quickly. >> 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 that 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 of the times and the post and cc and all that, i understand that. but the role that people like steve bannon has played make them fearful. somehow institutions modify his rhetoric, modify his behavior. that perhaps he has the good sense to appoint people that i wouldn't appoint necessarily or approve of but that, as a conservative, he would. but if he goes the way of rudy giuliani and chris christie and flynn and steve bannon, then i think that we can't normalize this discussion. i think that we're looking at a very radical, unpredictable, chaotic presidency, and that's something to be profoundly

anxious about. >> we will leave it at that. we'll be back to all of you. 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? telling ingredients to showing where they come from. beyond assuming the source is safe... to knowing it is. beyond asking for trust... to earning it. because, honestly, our pets deserve it. beyond. natural pet food. i am totally blind. i lost my sight in afghanistan.

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welcome back to a live edition of the global public square. when president trump takes the oath of office at the west front of the united states capitol, he will inherit an america and world facing multiple trouble spots. there's 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 bremmer 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 them that has intrigued me, which is, even within these last five days, donald trump went out of his way to be nice to putin. he said that 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 annexed crimea. the europeans are very anxious. what do you think should and will be president trump's

attitude toward russia? >> 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 have 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 that's a major policy decision. roosevelt used to call stalin uncle joe during the middle of world war ii, and stalin at that pint had 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 bremmer, what do you think about u.s./russian

relations? as you know, 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. >> well, some feel that way. of course, hungary's president actually is an admirer of putin and you have people like nigel farage who was jut taking a selfie with trump just blocks from here, a big supporter of putin, et cetera. i think the obama administration failed on russia and this is a place where trump can turn it around. that relationship is going to be better. it was of course the republicans that said they were going to trip out under trump support for arming ukraine with their platform, despite the fact that most of the republicans wanted to keep it there.

it was trump that said that ukraine is basically russian anyway. that 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 really views alliances as much more transactional, the way he views his business and the way he views his marriages. it doesn't have to do with underlying values, it these do with are we both getting something out of the deal? and in 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 repudiation of how 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 aid 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. >> jim, more broadly, what do you think -- you know, what do you think should happen? you're right, you can't predict what will happen but what do you think should happen that's different in the struggle

against isis? because slowly but surely isis has been squeezed. financially it has been decimated. it has lost more than half its territory. it appears on the territory 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 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 i think 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 some skirmishes with a terrorist group, it's war. it's war to the death from their 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. there is isis. but what strikes me about it is that the real danger to the western world seems to be these lone wolf attacks or small groups, often locals, often radicalized kind of 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? >> so 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 actually just 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 conflates 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 even suggested overthrowing the islamic republic of raab iran. and we know that 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 islamists, which 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. i think 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 in belgium because their 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, oh, we need a revival of the unamerican activities committee, which would be a desperate repudiation of the values that the united states was actually 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 all of these people that do live within the united states and they're citizens. >> jim, let me ask you about that contradiction that ann-marie 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 that he would 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 rebeling 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 then 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 steady 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 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 is truly rotten. >> ann marie, what happens if a president trump -- as i say, you can't really abrogate it entirely because you're not going to get back u.n. security

council sanctions because those other countries, russia, china, will not comply. all it would mean presumably is americans can put back sanctions unilaterally, but the iranians could then start enriching again, right? they can go down the path of weaponizing again. >> absolutely. you i mean, 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 iran and u.s. business won't. and, yes, 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 the worst of both worlds. 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. that goes beyond assuming ingredients are safe... to knowing they are. going beyond expectations... because our pets deserve it. beyond. natural pet food.

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our 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" upshot. at the end of the segment, we all offered electoral college positions. take a look. >> so i'm going to ask you now,

i'll put -- i'm goingi into go h sam, 312. you must have an electoral vote count you've 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 pretty much 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" upshot. so, very simply, why were we wrong? >> well, i think the polls, that's the reason why. the polls had indicated that 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 all so wrong? >> i think 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 polling error were found in the upper midwest and rural northeastern part 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 by 1.5, 2 points. the national poll said she was

ahead by 3 or 4. >> let's stop. a lot of people look at the "l.a. times" tracking poll, the one poll people say got it right. well, actually, "the l.a. times" poll had trump winning by 5, winning the popular vote by 5. he lost it by 1. so that's a six-point error, more than a lot of the polls that supposedly got it wrong. but 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. like the last poll out of wisconsin from marquette, which is a good poll, showed a close race in the milwaukee suburbs. polling in michigan showed clinton competitive in western michigan, traditionally the most conservative part of the state. and on the last day of the campaign clinton stopped in western michigan. that was the way she was going to make up for these huge losses in the white working class voters. so two basic possibilities,

one 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. or the polls underestimated the strength of clinton's lead -- rather, 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 out? i don't think it's a shy trump voter effect. the reason i think that is because the polls underestimated all of the republican candidates in tease states, unless you think there's a shy toomey effect or shy johnson effect, which i don't really buy. i think it's complicated. 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. >> that it's larger than we think. i'll note this is a hard thing

to figure out, the exit polls and the census and voter file are the three main ways we have to understand the electorate. the biggest place they disagree on is 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 really important it seems to me because if you look at the recovery, if you look at charts of employment, what is striking is that the chart for people with college degrees is very strikingly high, about 8.5 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 in 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 just 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. something happened there that the pollsters didn't quite figure out and i do also -- will also point out another place where if you chart out 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? >> i think it was 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 are 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 effect? 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%, i wonder whether those are people, a, that could be where the shy trump voter is. they are telling the polls they were undecided but leaning towards trump. i'm assuming the polling numbers took the undecided and split them about the way the electorate. >> they also added to the uncertainty and that was part of the reason we had trump at a 30% chance of winning and other estimates that might have been considerably higher. >> but presumably they didn't split 50/50, they split heavily for trump. >> we'll need numbers afterwards to really understand that. i should point out clinton was dropping or her lead was dropping precomey, comy perhaps accelerated that but in the

final weekend it seemed as though clinton was having a slight recovery. that might have been a little fakeout. often polls taken a week before the election are more accurate than immediately before because there's a phenomenon that occurs where they all verge to one number. there was a lot of plus fours and threes and fives, that's a little statistical anomaly. maybe there were pollsters who fudged the numbers a little bit. >> if the democrats had nominated bernie sanders, does the polling suggest he would have won? >> that's a really good question. it so much so much going wrong for clinton and so much did go wrong for clinton that it's hard for me to argue that someone else would have lost it. and bernie did undoubtedly do better than clinton in a lot of areas that cost her election. >> no comey e-mails. >> that's a distinct possibility. there would have been a tradeoff in the suburbs but clinton do so

well in the suburbs. she was going to win over these well educated republicans who couldn't stand trump. that didn't happen in the end and that was the area where i would have told you maybe bernie couldn't have done that. if clinton didn't take advantage of that opportunity, i don't see any reason why bernie would have -- the real reason we thought sanders wouldn't do as well, we thought ideology mattered a lot. people really just wanted someone who was a fresh face, kind of outsider. sanders matches that. i don't know if he would have won but he couldn't have done that much worse than clinton did against someone who was the most unpopular candidate in modern american history. >> president-elect donald trump will be the second president in the history of the united states to serve without any experience, either in the military or as an elected official. who was the first? my question of the week when we come back. i lost my sight in afghanistan. if you're totally blind, you may also be struggling with non-24.

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i just received a call from secretary clinton. >> donald trump made history on tuesday becoming the most anti-establishment candidate as he calls it to win the presidency. and it brings me to my question of the week. which of 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. this week's book of the week is a long essay by george packer in the new yorker, tightened 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. and now for the last look, there

were a lot of what ifs thrown around this week. what if hillary had spent more time in the midwest? what if she focused more on working class whites? what if the polls tb slightly more on point? we thought we would 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. >> they 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 adam and tilden lost to hayes and since then twice in 16 years. first time in 2000 when al gore lost to george w. bush and this year. some vehemently reject calls to change the electoral college system and 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 history. in 1969 legislators submitted a proposal to congress suggesting the direct election of a president and vice president. in cases where 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 in 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 with no elected experience was zachary taylor, grant and dwight david eisenhower. all three men were victorious generals. if you guessed william howard taft, he was elected as a judge to ohio superior court prior to his presidency but you still get points. thanks for being part of my program this week. i'll see you next week. >> hello, everyone, i'm fredericka whitfield, donald trump soon to make his first big decision as president-elect. trump's campaign manager telling -- one of networks this morning the announcement is imminent. >> it is imminent, means coming soon and perhaps means mr. trump is making a lot of important decisions, i think he can't go wrong with