Trump beats the forecasts

Event · 2016 CE · in North America

Against most forecasts, Donald Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by under a point each, and with them the presidency, while losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.

In the guided tours

• Political upsets: Ten US elections that went against the odds or turned the country over, and how the map changed with them, from Jefferson's revolution of 1800 to 2016.

Related

• The Republican Revolution (1994 CE): In the midterm elections Republicans gained 54 seats and the House for the first time in 40 years. Speaker Tom Foley lost his own seat, the first sitting Speaker defeated since 1862.
• Reagan's landslide (1980 CE): Ronald Reagan, in a race the polls had close, carried 44 states against President Jimmy Carter, and Republicans took the Senate for the first time since the 1950s.
• Watergate scandal (1972–1974 CE): Political scandal over a break-in at the Democratic headquarters and its cover-up, which led to President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974.
• Dewey Defeats Truman (1948 CE): Written off by the polls and the papers, Harry Truman beat Thomas Dewey. At St. Louis Union Station he held up the Chicago Tribune that had printed his defeat.
• Eva Perón (1919 CE – 1952 CE): Argentine First Lady and political figure, known as Evita, who championed labour rights and women's suffrage.
• ANC founded (1912 CE): Founded in Bloemfontein in January 1912 as the South African Native National Congress to defend the rights of Black South Africans.
• The Bull Moose split (1912 CE): Denied the Republican nomination, Theodore Roosevelt ran for his new Progressive Party, beating the sitting president, Taft, but splitting the vote and handing the presidency to Woodrow Wilson.
• The Communist Manifesto (1848 CE): Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote this political pamphlet while Marx lived in Brussels; it was published in London in February 1848.
• Polk, the dark horse (1844 CE): The Democrats meeting in Baltimore passed over their favourites and chose James K. Polk on the ninth ballot, the first “dark horse”. He beat Henry Clay on a promise to annex Texas and take Oregon.
• Two Treatises of Government (1689 CE): John Locke's work, published anonymously in London in 1689, argued that government rests on the consent of the governed and must protect life, liberty and property.

Around the same time and place

• Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 CE – 1968 CE): Baptist minister from Atlanta and leader of the civil rights movement who championed nonviolent protest; Nobel Peace Prize 1964; assassinated in 1968.
• Apollo 11 launch (1969 CE): Apollo 11 launched from Kennedy Space Center on 16 July 1969; four days later Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon.
• September 11 attacks (2001 CE): Al-Qaeda hijackers crashed airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and a fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people.
• Civil rights movement (1954–1968 CE): Mass movement to end racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans, using protests, boycotts and legal challenges.
• Voyager program (1977 CE): NASA program that launched the twin probes Voyager 1 and 2 from Cape Canaveral in 1977. Both flew past Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 2 went on to Uranus and Neptune, and both later reached interstellar space.
• Human Genome Project (1990–2003 CE): An international research project, led in the US by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, that set out in 1990 to map the human genome. It declared the sequence essentially complete in 2003.
• Great Migration (c. 1910–1970 CE): About six million African Americans left the rural South for cities in the North and West, escaping Jim Crow segregation and seeking industrial work; Chicago was a principal destination for migrants from the Mississippi Delta.
• Woodstock (1969 CE): A music festival held on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, in August 1969 that drew more than 400,000 people. Featuring artists such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, it became a symbol of the 1960s counterculture.

More on Wikipedia.