For example, a standard path to victory for Harris was to win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But those states are pretty similar to each other and their results are correlated. If you think Trump is going to win, you could have just awarded him one of those states, but that isn't actually a likely outcome due to their similarity. Whatever hypothetical reason that would explain Trump being underestimated in Michigan likely also applies to Wisconsin. The reverse is also true, if Harris won one of those, it was likely she would win the other. Therefore predicting Trump winning both Wisconsin and Michigan is not nearly as bold of a prediction as winning one and not the other. Considering the way that every swing state went to Trump makes it very easy to predict all 50 states, because the only actual prediction you need to reach that conclusion is that Trump will outperform his polling (or like I said before, Harris to underperform).

It seems like ABC has wiped the full 538 predictions from the web, but look at this chart of their predictions[1]. They have Trump winning by roughly his margin of victory as the most likely of any individual outcome. It doesn't mean he was favored, it is just the way all these state results are correlated to each other. If Trump were to win, the manner in which he did is not surprising.

[1] - https://i.abcnewsfe.com/a/ff20d77c-0734-48d0-b9b3-72eb9bec8a...

My own sense is a fair number of people were predicting Harris to win because that's what they wanted to be true – people on the centre-left who said she was in trouble would be attacked for dragging their own side down rather than taken seriously – and other people saw that and didn't want to be attacked so they kept quiet. And it was a "shock to many, many informed people" because journalists and pundits were subject to the same phenomenon. Polling averages showed a race which was either 50-50 or with Trump slightly ahead, yet many Democrats were confident Harris would win.

I don't think it was always like this. I think if someone on the centre-left said in 2008 or 2012 that they thought Obama was in trouble, people may well have disagreed (correctly, as it turned out), but their opinion would not have received the same strong negative emotional reaction.

I just don't think the 2024 election was a particularly good one to demonstrate predictive skill due to the results all being relatively uniformly off expectations. You would need to accurately predict different states swinging in different directions to show an actual interesting insight. But that wasn't possible this election because Trump mostly just beat his poll numbers by a relatively consistent amount across the board, not giving any opportunity to hit multiple different uncorrelated outcomes.

[1] - https://i.abcnewsfe.com/a/ff20d77c-0734-48d0-b9b3-72eb9bec8a...