The more I thought about it last night, I believe the AC will be just that...someone unexpectedly out of nowhere, the "underdog us vs them mentality" like we've seen in Hollywood movies like "Rocky", etc. I believe we saw a PREVIEW of this...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-victory-stunned-even-gop-digital-team-081014018.htmlTrump’s victory stunned even GOP digital teamNo one saw this coming. Not the Trump campaign. Not the Republican National Committee.
The best data inside the Trump campaign and the RNC had Donald Trump’s chances of winning the presidency as a one-in-five proposition.
Last Friday, the RNC gathered a handful of reporters inside its Capitol Hill headquarters in Washington to share what its most up-to-date election model showed.
RNC staffers thought Trump would win 240 Electoral College votes, 30 short of the 270 needed to win. They cautioned reporters that these numbers could change. And it was noteworthy that their projections were more optimistic than much of the public polling. But Trump was down 2 points in Florida, down 2 points in Iowa, down 2 points in New Hampshire and down 3 points in Wisconsin. Trump won Florida, won Iowa, won Wisconsin, and as of the publishing of this story was in a tight race for New Hampshire.
The best data inside the Trump campaign was just as pessimistic.
Even the most optimistic models run by Cambridge Analytica for Trump showed him losing. But as Cambridge’s Matt Oczkowski tweeted late Tuesday, Trump’s support and turnout among rural voters was 10 percentage points higher than they had expected.
Even the fact that the RNC held the data briefing was evidence it thought Trump was likely to lose. Staffers wanted journalists to be able to report that their information was accurate in order to protect one of their chief assets in what most thought would be a fight for control of the party after Trump’s loss.But Trump’s surprise victory was just one of the many things that did not go according to plan for the RNC and its chairman, Reince Priebus, in the 2016 campaign.
Priebus, the RNC chairman for six years now, was powerless to stop Donald Trump — who was not the first choice of a majority of Republican primary voters — from becoming the party’s presidential nominee. Then, when Priebus did put his finger on the scales, it was to push Trump over the hump, helping secure the nomination for a candidate who took the recommendations Priebus and the RNC made in 2013 for a more positive, inclusive and conservative party, and threw them out the window.
But even if the leaders of the RNC — like most in the GOP establishment — thought that a Trump nomination would be a debacle in most ways, they also thought they saw a silver lining.
Trump’s lack of a campaign infrastructure allowed the RNC to run more of the presidential campaign than is normal. The RNC’s resulting gains in data and technology would have helped it in a fight for the soul of the party, even if Trump would have been able to use a massive RNC-built data file to help him wage war against the party from the outside.
When the Republican primary narrowed to Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, most Republicans did not think either could win the general election against Hillary Clinton. The RNC concluded at some point that there was a way to make lemonade with Trump as nominee.