Ilya Naymushin/TPX Images of the Day/Reuters
Even the Republican National Committee’s internal polling showed Donald Trump losing Tuesday’s election. But not everyone got it wrong. Here are the people who said that Donald Trump would win the general election or took him seriously enough to accurately predict, early in his candidacy, the manner in which he would be able to beat Hillary Clinton if he did win:
1. Conservative Virginia radio host John Fredericks. According to CNN archival research wizard Andrew Kaczynski, Fredericks said in April 2015—before Trump had even announced his candidacy—that he would win if he ran.*
2 The legendary Bill Mitchell. The human-resources professional and part-time podcaster essentially made himself a new career by tweeting with evangelical zeal about the inevitability of Trump’s victory. A Twitter search of his account for “Trump” and “win” indicates that he was predicting as early as July 2015 that Trump would win the general election “easily.”
3. Scott Adams. The Dilbert creator wrote in August 2015 that Trump would win if Hillary had scandal trouble. Slate interviewed him about it later; Adams said that his “background as a trained hypnotist” helped him understand Trump’s skills as a salesman and alpha-male “Master Persuader.” (You can’t win ‘em all, though: Adams also said in 2015 that there was no chance that Trump would pick “some desiccated governor” as his running mate.)
4. Alaskan radio host Tom Anderson. Anderson also wrote in August 2015 that Trump would win, a judgment he based on the unprecedented enthusiasm with which his show’s listeners and callers had reacted to the Republican’s candidacy.
5. Felix Salmon of Fusion. Salmon wrote in February 2015 that Trump could win the general election by appealing to Americans for whom “little has improved under Barack Obama” and drawing in “people who just didn’t care about politics at all before Trump came along.” Pretty much!
6. Michael Moore. America’s foremost white male Rust Belt liberal wrote in July about the potential of the white male Rust Belt vote to put Trump over the top.
7. Allan Lichtman. The American University professor whose system of presidential predictions is based on historic and economic factors rather than polls was saying as early as September that Trump would win (though he appears to have predicted that Trump would win the popular vote, which didn’t happen).
8. Sanjiv Rai. An Oct. 28 CNBC article reported on a system of social media engagement analysis developed by Rai, a tech entrepreneur, which predicted a Trump victory.
9. The Russian polar bear above predicted a Trump win by choosing to bite a Donald Trump flag planted in a pumpkin instead of a Hillary Clinton flag planted in a pumpkin.
10. A Chinese monkey. I guess a Chinese monkey also said that Trump would win.
11. B.E. Lewis, Kelle Sutliff, and Uversa Oumbajuah. They are psychics, and they predicted that Donald Trump would become president, and he did—so put that in your secular pipe and smoke it, smug liberals.
You can let me know which prognosticators I’ve missed on Twitter at @benmathislilley.
*Correction, Nov. 11, 2016: This post originally misspelled Andrew Kaczynski’s last name.
