Sean Trende: “What occurred wasn’t a failure of the polls. As with Brexit, it was a failure of punditry. Pundits saw Clinton with a 1.9 percent lead in Pennsylvania and assumed she would win. The correct interpretation was that, if Clinton’s actual vote share were just one point lower and Trump’s just one point higher, Trump would be tied or even a bit ahead.”

“Instead, people gravitated toward unreliable approaches such as reading the tea leaves on early voting or putting faith in Big Blue Walls, while ignoring things like the high number of undecided voters. They selected these data points rather than other possible indicators, such as the significant late break in the generic ballot that could have led them in a different direction. To be blunt, people saw what they wanted to see, and then found the data to support that view.”

“I hate it that people feel this way.”

— Speaker Paul Ryan, in an interview on CNN, when told millions of people are terrified of President-elect Donald Trump.

A new Washington Post-ABC poll finds 74% of all Americans say they accept the election of Donald Trump as legitimate while 18% do not.

A 58% majority of Clinton supporters say they accept Trump’s election, while 33% do not.

“It was supposed to be the year of the Latino voter. Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, white rural voters had an even bigger moment,” Politico reports.

“Now Democrats are second-guessing the campaign’s decision to largely surrender the rural vote to the GOP. With their eyes turned anxiously to 2018, they’re urging a new strategy to reach out to rural voters to stave off another bloodbath when a slew of farm-state Democrats face tough reelection battles.”

“I am heartbroken.”

— Hillary Clinton, quoted by the Washington Post, “with a sad laugh.”

In a phone call with donors, Hillary Clinton “cast blame for her surprise election loss on the announcement by the FBI director, James B. Comey, days before the election that he had revived the inquiry into her use of a private email server,” the New York Times reports.

Clinton said Comey’s letter to Congress had prevented her from ending the campaign with an optimistic closing argument.

Said Clinton: “There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful… our analysis is that Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum.”

Elizabeth Drew: “Throughout the campaign, blinders kept most of us from taking aboard a lot of what we were seeing: Hillary Clinton wasn’t giving people a reason to vote for her. ‘Stronger together’ meant what? It’s been reported that for much of the fall Bill Clinton worried that the leaders of his wife’s campaign were too fixated on their supposedly fearsome get-out-the-vote drive and were failing to craft a coherent message for her, and he chewed on the staff about this. Why Hillary Clinton didn’t develop a message is a puzzle. The reconstructions to come of her campaign should tell us why.”

Paul Krugman: “First of all, remember that elections determine who gets the power, not who offers the truth. The Trump campaign was unprecedented in its dishonesty; the fact that the lies didn’t exact a political price, that they even resonated with a large bloc of voters, doesn’t make them any less false. No, our inner cities aren’t war zones with record crime. No, we aren’t the highest-taxed nation in the world. No, climate change isn’t a hoax promoted by the Chinese.”

“So if you’re tempted to concede that the alt-right’s vision of the world might have some truth to it, don’t. Lies are lies, no matter how much power backs them up.”