So why the surprise?

Some here have said “enthusiasm!”.

I think they are onto something, but not in the way they are thinking.

trump’s numbers don’t seem to fit a “greater enthusiasm” model, in the sense that he drove any more voters to vote for him than Romney had achieved (as a proportion of the eligible voters).

INSTEAD, enthusiasm plummeted for clinton vs obama in 2008 and 2012.

The polls give us incomplete information.

There ought to be polls that measure “enthusiasm” relative to some baseline, as an indicator of turnout. Perhaps, it could be published alongside the regular polls.

Baking that information into the “likely voter” count and leaving a “margin of error” to account for the differences +/- leaves too much off the table for the rest of us to have clear expectations – i.e. it leaves those in the media to set, through their filter.

a) no body is speculating that the popular vote wouldn’t be different if the election were held on that basis.

b) it absolutely is important to understand that trump had not received an overwhelming majority of votes, nor did he attract an unusually large number of votes vs prior GOP candidates (relative to eligible votes). Why? Because it speaks to the nature of his win.

Does he have a mandate to implement all that he promised – IOW were people voting FOR those policies (whatever interpretation that may be of what he actually promised), or were they largely AGAINST clinton (and obama’s dem policies)?

We can get clues by the size of margins, the margins proportionate to the electorate, and margins compared to other GOP candidates (i.e. trump’s coattail effect).

As mentioned before, it looks like trump simultaneously added prior dem voters from the rust belt, while lost as many or more other prior / likely GOP voters.

All point to an electorate largely AGAINST clinton, and somewhat more pro GOP than pro trump.
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“All Trump has to do to be successful is to let the people get back to ignoring the government except for every April 15th. “

That’s a very conservative view of the world, and one I’d like to see.

I don’t think the rust belt trump voters want that. They want a little more active government, but on their behalf.

Since there’s no way to know who would have gotten the popular vote, all the conjecture is just pure guesswork. Would Trump have gotten another 10 or 20% of New York or California if he had run adds and had rallies there? It’s fun to talk about but it really doesn’t matter as to the legitimacy of the winner.

The other point I’d like to make is that only a very small percentage of the Trump voters were actually for him. And a lot of them didn’t care about Clinton one way or the other either. I think the vast majority were voting against the ruling elite and Trump and Clinton just happened to be the candidates that were available. To me this was America’s Brexit vote and the polls missed it for the same reasons they missed the Brexit vote.

The only thing this vote was a mandate for was to get government out of people’s daily lives. They just want to get back to the days of making a living, being left alone and trying to make their children’s lives better than theirs. The government, except for a very few exceptional years has been intruding more and more into everyone’s daily lives and screwing things up royally.

All Trump has to do to be successful is to let the people get back to ignoring the government except for every April 15th. Will he do that? Your guess is as good as mine but he’ll be a lot more likely to do it than Clinton or Obama. We should know pretty soon.

Graphic from BI on historic turnout percentages to 2012:
https://static1.businessinsider.com/image/58239ee346e27a2e008b5d42-960/bi-graphics_voter%20turnout.png

For some reason, from 1970s to about 2000 voter turnout had only been hovering around 55% +/- 2%, if I’m eyeballing it correctly.

Using that as a baseline for historic turnout, looks like 2016 is within “normal range”.

But, in the era of more sophisticated, targeted GOTV operations, it is the lowest since 2004.
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538 uses a similar chart to the business insider, but says this…

“About 57 percent of eligible voters cast ballots this year, down from 58.6 percent in 2012 and 61.6 percent in 2008, which was the highest mark in 40 years.”
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There may be some room for the relative popular vote count, though it seems clinton may well retain her lead…

“…more than 4 million votes remain uncounted, more than half of them in California”
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voter-turnout-fell-especially-in-states-that-clinton-won/

“In 14 states, down-ballot candidates received more votes than presidential candidates – even when you factor in third-party candidates. “
http://www.businessinsider.com/more-votes-for-down-ballot-than-president-2016-11

These states were:

Alaska
Indiana
Kansas
Missouri
Montana
New Hampshire
North Carolina
North Dakota
Oregon
Vermont
Washington
Wisconsin
West Virginia
Wyoming

“In the last presidential election, 35.5 million voters requested absentee ballots, but only 27.9 million absentee votes were counted, according to a study by Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He calculated that 3.9 million ballots requested by voters never reached them; that another 2.9 million ballots received by voters did not make it back to election officials; and that election officials rejected 800,000 ballots. That suggests an overall failure rate of as much as 21 percent.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html

I’m with you on that.

I cannot believe that counting them is a cost issue, as the incremental cost has to be rather minuscule vs the cost borne through to the point of collecting those ballots.

Having a policy like that might make sense if one wants to discourage all but the most ardent supporters to vote absentee.