Tuesday’s election defied virtually all expert opinion confidently put forth on traditional media channels. As many pundits have since accurately, albeit belatedly, noted, the outcome was a complete rejection of the country’s political establishment. More than that, it was a repudiation of the centralized, elite-driven information network that wrongly believed it still held a monopoly on public opinion. The result of this year’s presidential election is a stark indicator that the dominance of newspapers and cable television has passed, and that the new barometer of the public mood is social media—which Donald Trump understood better than any of the analysts and commentators who predicted his defeat.
