And once again, as I've constantly stressed, I'm speaking about this moment in time as that is generally what people are referring to when comparing presidents at any given moment in time. E.g. you would not say Bush was a popular president, yet he had an average approval rating of 49.4%, which was even higher than Obama. The thing that confounds it is averages -- his popularity shot to near 100% after 9/11 from which it started a long slow downward slide as the 'rally around the flag' effect waned. And similar for Obama. He is an absolutely phenomenal and charismatic speaker and he seemed to be living up to his promises at first, which made him tremendously popular. But as it became clear that his early actions belied his actual character, his popularity waned -- leaving him, moment for moment, pretty comparable to Trump at this point in time.

Yet if you polled people on these issues I think there's no doubt that perception vs reality would be incredibly skewed. And for this I think both the social media and the media have played major roles. And this distortion of reality is not productive for a healthy democracy.

Imagine a thought experiment. We're able to do something 100 times, each on a consecutive day, but without any knowledge of what happened on previous days affecting the future, and without any future information or events affecting original 'intent'. If you played a sports game 100 times you'd generally get a wide distribution of results. But if you ran the election 100 times, you're generally going to get the same result.

The point here is that Trump winning did not indicate a 'low probability' event. It indicated a dramatic failing in sampling. Why was this? The 'art' in sampling is not only obtaining a representative sample, but actually determining what a representative sample even is. And the radicalization of our society is making this more and more difficult. The media was running bits literally comparing Trump to Hitler, individuals have been assaulted, robbed, and denied service simply because somebody became aware they supported Trump, and even business leaders have been harassed to no end for doing things that could be seen as supportive of Trump. Like you mention even pollsters that didn't cheerlead a completely crushing Clinton victory "got shit" -- that's all just completely absurd! This creates a chilling effect where individuals are going to be less inclined to respond, and/or respond honestly, when queried about their views. Then pollsters are left to rely on incorrect information which hampers not only sampling but even in the determination of a representative sample.

And the point of all of this now is that presumably most pollsters have tried to change their ways. But this will be the first election where that will be put to the test. So unbiased aggregation is more informative than ever. 538's "adjustments" were based on past polls before we had such social extremism, and by relying on them alone for their first real test - well, that's a huge leap of faith.