• A Putin - Trump Summit Meeting?
• Putin: Russia stands ready to restore relations with U.S.

President-elect Donald Trump was right all along. He had a silent majority. The media, the pollsters and Republican elites never saw it - even though it was right in front of them the whole time.
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-- "Confirmation bias" is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing theories. Since he came down that escalator at Trump Tower 17 months ago, many elites could never fully visualize Trump as the president of the United States. That made it very hard to see him winning the nomination - until he did - or winning the White House - until he did. Confirmation bias does not mean one preferred a particular outcome. Rather, it is a condition of psychology: All human beings tend to put a premium on information that validates their existing expectations and downplay new data points that undermine them.
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-- That said, Trump's own internal models were wrong too. Staffers at the Republican National Committee were telling reporters that Trump would win 240 Electoral College votes. "The best data inside the Trump campaign and the RNC had his chances of winning the presidency as a 1 in 5 proposition," Yahoo's Jon Ward reports.

-- Looking back, there was so much anecdotal evidence: All those guys at the bar in a hollowed out Ohio steel town who did not know a single Clinton supporter. The two dozen independents at a Pirates-Reds baseball game in Pittsburgh who talked how much they love Bill but loathe Hillary. The conservatives in rural Selma, North Carolina, who said they stayed home four years ago but would vote for Trump.

There were also so many red flags of lagging enthusiasm for Clinton: The paid canvasser for the Clinton campaign at The Ohio State University who could not find a single person to commit to support her during his shift in Columbus. The African Americans in Raleigh this past weekend who wanted to vote early and supported Clinton but gave up because the lines were too long. The North Carolina college students down the road who said they were probably going to vote for her - but also described her as a pathological liar. In Richmond, there were no yard signs for Clinton in places that were full of Obama signs four years ago.
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-- Recalcitrant Republicans definitely came home in the final days. Trump won 88 percent of self-identified Republicans. He wound up doing better than expected in places like the Milwaukee suburbs, where there had been strong pockets of Never Trump resistance. He wound up garnering 60 percent of white men and 52 percent of white women, according to the exit polls. He even won college-educated whites!
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-- Trump's Rust Belt and rural strategies were smarter than he got credit for. He really ran up the score outside of urban areas everywhere. ...

-- The Clinton campaign blew it. Top officials on the campaign became way too overconfident and complacent. They believed their own spin. They were measuring the drapes. They had too much confidence in their models, and they chastised anyone who doubted them as bedwetters. Hillary lost the primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan, but she invested little in shoring up her support there until the 11th hour. Her team clearly failed to see the race tightening in both places.