Well, you cannot say I did not warn you. Now that we have US President-elect Donald Trump, I feel entitled to remind you that, in my previous column, when many were assuming that rival candidate Hillary Clinton would triumph, I wrote: “Don’t fool yourselves – Trump could still win”. But I can only brag a little, because I did not say he would win. I actually thought that Clinton had the edge but I was very uneasy. She had as many, and as profound, negatives as Trump. She was, in fact, the only conceivable Democratic Party candidate who could lose against Trump, which she duly did. This election was, as someone in America very shrewdly and sharply remarked, a case of the “evil of the two lessers”. Another humorous but sharply insightful observation was made at the beginning of this year, by a Republican Party political consultant (whose name, alas, I forget): “The central issue of this election is authenticity: Trump has too much and Clinton has none at all!”

Certainly, the opinion pollsters have continued their dismal and international streak of getting it wrong. Wrong about the 2015 British general election and, this year, wrong about the British referendum on membership of the European Union, wrong about the peace plan referendum in Colombia and now wrong about the US Presidential election. And, note, the Republicans also did better than expected in the simultaneous Congressional elections (for one-third of the Senate and all of the House of Representatives). However, polls commissioned by the Los Angeles Times newspaper and by the Investors Business Daily almost always showed Trump in the lead. But these were generally dismissed as “outliers” and pretty much ignored.

There was a bright spot for the pollsters, however. Following their failure in 2015 regarding the British general election, the idea that political betting markets were at least as good as opinion polls, if not better, in predicting election outcomes, gained quite a bit of traction. But, if the opinion polls for the British referendum and US elections this year were wrong, the political betting markets were catastrophically wrong. Political betting markets have, as predictors of election results, been totally discredited. Still, it is clear that opinion polls must, henceforth, be taken with a sizeable pinch of salt. They obviously have their uses, but they equally obviously have been overrated in the prediction stakes. However, they can be enormously valuable after the event, when used to ask people how they actually voted, and why.

Those of you with teenage daughters, or who are fans of science fiction, will fully understand when I say that the outcome of the US election can be seen, without too much distortion, as a nonviolent and electoral version of The Hunger Games, in which the disadvantaged Districts rose up against the rich, sophisticated, but smug, self-righteous and exploitative Capitol. Trump won because he stormed to victory in states that had traditionally been Democratic strongholds but which have been suffering economically (and so, socially) since at least the 2008 Great Recession, as well as in Republican fastnesses. That Trump is himself a billionaire, one of America’s economic and social elite, is irrelevant, and to criticise his voters because they cast their ballots for a rich man is silly. Throughout history, such uprisings, as well as violent revolutions, have almost always been led by members of the elite. They are, after all, the ones with the time, the money and especially the education necessary to fulfil the leadership role.

The outcome of the election has left both of America’s major political parties in disarray. The standard-bearer for the Republicans is a populist, not a conservative: these are very different things. For example, US conservatives believe in a ‘Small State’, but Trump seems to prefer a ‘Big State’; conservatives want the powers of the executive curbed, Trump wants them enlarged. Where does that leave conservatives in the Republican party? Will Republican Senators and Congressmen/women remain true to American conservatism or will a significant number, under pressure from party activists and other circumstances, switch to Trumpian populism? Will the Republican Party remain a conservative party or become a populist party?

As for the Democrats, the electoral spine around which they have gathered their coalition of constituencies since the 1930s – the white working class – has been shattered. It is still an important voting bloc (as this election emphasised). Can the Democrats win it back? And, if so, how do they win it back? Or do they have to try and create a new electoral coalition? And how do they do that? Do they move left? Or seek to occupy the centre? Or even move right? The Democratic Party was once more conservative (with a small c) than the Republicans. Or is all this thinking irrelevant now? Is the era of right-centre-left in politics now over? Populism, after all, is a phenomenon that stands outside the right-centre-left political spectrum; populists can, and do, use ideas, policies and jargon from the right or left or both when it suits them.

So, in a couple of months, we shall have President Trump. There has not been so much uncertainty about an incoming President’s policies since, I would guess, the nineteenth century. So, where does that leave us? Well, I think that typically British- understated admonition from the Second World War, which recently regained popularity (and inspired all sorts of humorous variations) is now especially applicable and should be observed: “Keep Calm and Carry On.”