Editor’s note: OBSERVER staff writer Amanda Dedie reached out to Dr. David Rankin, chair of the Department of Politics and International Affairs at the State University of New York at Fredonia, after the presidential elections for additional insight into how things fell into place. Here are his comments.

OBSERVER: Are you surprised by the results? What were you anticipating the results being, and do they match up with what actually happened?

Dr. DAVID RANKIN: Like most political pundits and analysts who had been collecting electoral data and reviewing the numerous state polls in identified battleground states, I felt that Trump’s odds of winning the presidential election heading into Election Day were highly unlikely.

Many predictive models put Trump’s probability of winning anywhere from 10 to 25 percent. And even though Trump and some of his supporters used the faulty polls on the UK Brexit vote as an analogy, the Electoral College is not the same as a national referendum-as Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Al Gore in 2000 experienced-winning the national popular vote but still losing the all-important electoral vote.

Thus, the odds were really stacked against Trump in that he had to pick up a number of larger states in which he was trailing, had a very narrow lead, or some combination thereof in recent polls, including perceived must win states for Trump like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, and Ohio, while holding suddenly vulnerable but typically reliable Republican states like Arizona and Georgia. No Republican has ever won the presidency without Ohio and no Democrat since JFK. Clinton, on the other hand, had more room for error, with a perceived numerical electoral count advantage already with secure Democratic states like New York, California, and Illinois alone accounting for over 100 of the necessary 270 needed to win the majority. The fact that Trump not only ran the table on the must win states, but also picked up Michigan and Wisconsin took all election forecasts by surprise, and you could see the genuine shock on the faces of election night media analysts as Trump won Florida, then North Carolina, and finally closed the deal late into the night with Pennsylvania-a state thought to be out of Trump’s reach.

OBSERVER: How did Trump lose the popular vote, but win the electoral college?

RANKIN: Of the few scenarios analysts offered for an improbable Trump victory was the possibility of losing the popular vote while winning the electoral vote. The reason for this stems from the increasing Democratic strengths in the more populated metropolitan areas such as Chicago/Cook County where Clinton won 74 percent of the vote, Los Angeles 72 percent, Seattle/King County 74 percent. Overall, Clinton won 59 percent of the urban areas across the U.S., which accounted for 34 percent of the national vote. In states like New York, where rural upstate voted 57 percent for Trump (Chautauqua County 59 percent for Trump), this 17 percent of the total vote is overwhelmed by New York City alone with 35 percent of the state’s voting population supporting Clinton with 79 percent of the vote.

Republicans, on the other hand, have dominated the less populated states with a higher relative rural population, which has turned the middle of the American map and south a deep Republican red for decades. Trump won 62 percent of the rural area vote, which only accounted for 17 percent of the national vote but a relatively higher number of needed electoral votes. The identified battleground states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, are a combination of demographic dynamics that benefit both Republicans and Democrats. In 2016, Trump won these four states, and narrowly lost Virginia, mainly because Clinton carried the heavily populated northern Virginia greater Washington, D.C., area, made up of a higher concentration of college educated and minority voters, which have been trending solidly Democratic.

But Clinton really lost the election in the so-called Rust Belt, not only losing the bellwether state of Ohio, but sealing her electoral fate by also losing Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan-states that Democrats hadn’t lost together since Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984. Although Trump only gained 10 percent of the vote in his home city of Manhattan, his messaging on the economy, trade, and jobs seemed to resonate with what have been increasingly disaffected voters across rural and struggling areas of industrial rust belt America. In Ohio, half of voters agreed that international trade takes away US jobs and Trump won 68 percent of these voters. In Pennsylvania, 65 percent thought the national economy was not good or poor, and Trump won 67 percent of these voters. Of the Michigan voters who thought the local job market was worse than four years ago, Trump won 71 percent of their vote.

Overall, a big story of election night was high voter turnout among white non-college educated voters that strongly supported Trump by nearly 40 points over Clinton. And although Clinton won by 13 points among women, she lost white women to Trump by 10 points, compounded by also narrowly losing white college graduates and with only 51 percent of support from white female college graduates. She also did worse than Obama with the Latino vote, at 65 percent, with lower African American turnout and support than for Obama that was particularly critical in close contests. Hillary Clinton also lost the important suburban vote to Trump in these states, which makes up some 50 percent of the voting population.

Ironically, it was Bill Clinton’s ability to regain the Reagan Democrats in the Great Lakes region that was critical to his wins in 1992 and 1996, and Obama also won many of these voters back in 2008 after the Bush years. But with 69 percent of voters nationwide dissatisfied or angry with the federal government, the setting was not good for a perceived establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton with highly visible ties to Washington, D.C. In fact, the Clinton campaign should have paid more attention to their convincing loss to Bernie Sanders in the Michigan primary as a harbinger of the electoral concerns that would contribute to her loss, but Hillary Clinton didn’t visit Wisconsin once during the general election and only Michigan when it was apparently too late.

OBSERVER: How will this election, its results, its campaigning practices, its winner, etc. impact future elections?

RANKIN: Trump’s victory surprised so many observers because it confounded a number of recent trends, including the perceived importance of campaign spending and organization. Yet Trump beat back the early challenge of a more heavily funded and party favorite Jeb Bush and was vastly outspent in the general election by the highly disciplined Hillary Clinton campaign. Moreover, the Clinton campaign applied much of the data analytics that seemed to work so well in targeting and turning out Obama voters, and had seasoned campaign operatives running state organizations. With the politically inexperienced Trump and an at times volatile campaign winning in a way that no other modern campaign had, it has some questioning the standard campaign assumptions.

However, as a recognized media personality Trump benefited from the extensive media curiosity paid to his campaign, increasing in intensity with his early successes and arguably even from the negative media attention showered upon him throughout the election. Despite all of their best efforts and grassroots support, no such media attention was paid to Bernie Sanders, or later extended to third party candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. So it remains to be seen whether Trump’s electoral success can be applied to other campaigns or was just a unique combination of forces.

But once Trump had broken firmly onto the national media political scene, his outsider rhetoric did connect with a certain disenfranchised audience, as Sanders also had in the Democratic primaries. Propelled by the record distrust of political and media institutions that had been increasing and growing for decades, such anti-establishment voter sentiment was only compounded and exacerbated by the economic insecurities and perceived inequities of many Americans, particularly in Upper Midwest states where an ultimate symbol of the political establishment Clinton would lose. As long as such economic dynamics persist, both parties will likely be impacted in their campaign strategies, messaging and approaches. In the post-mortem analysis, many Democrats are bemoaning the lack of a coherent economic message delivered by Clinton, while Republicans who had distanced themselves from Trump are now embracing his surprising win that brought Republicans the most significant unified control of the White House and Congress since 1928 — four years before FDR’s New Deal Coalition led to a long reign of Democratic control.

Democrats thought they had a clear demographic advantage in presidential elections based on the Obama coalition electoral successes, and changing populations that have turned once Republican strongholds Virginia and North Carolina, and perhaps even Georgia and Texas into more competitive states for Democrats. On the other hand, Trump’s success in the Rust Belt demonstrates that Democrats are more vulnerable than they had anticipated and will likely need to figure out how to deliver an economic message that appeals to voters who were once, and apparently still, a critical part of Democratic pathways to winning the Electoral College

OBSERVER: What do you anticipate Trump’s win will mean for America?

RANKIN: Many people understandably remain focused on and concerned by the extreme polarization and divisiveness expressed throughout the election, much of it delivered by the president-elect, but also magnified by the nature of the media coverage.  However, from Sanders’ surprising success in the Democratic primaries to Trump’s shocking electoral defeat of Republican and Democratic leaders, large swaths of the public mood suggest a great discontent with politics as usual and a Washington disconnect with the diverse people it purportedly represents.

Like Trump’s surprising win, this is a new place for America, but also a surprisingly familiar one as we go through the constitutional transition of power after a bruising but democratic election.  Trump’s unexpected run to the presidency, from real estate developer turned reality TV celebrity, was in many ways born in his public back-and-forth personal tussle with Barack Obama on the question of the president’s legitimacy. Obama, in turn, would raise serious public questions about Trump’s fitness to be president and Commander-in-Chief.  But as the dust settles in the tumultuous aftermath of Election Night, Obama has tried to set a tone for the nation in stating “we are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country. The peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy.” And as Hillary Clinton highlighted in her concession speech, “Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power and we don’t just respect that, we cherish it. It also enshrines other things: the rule of law, the principle that we are equal in rights and dignity, freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values too and we must defend them.”

Whatever one thinks or anticipates of Trump’s election as 45th president of the United States, it’s also important to understand that American democracy doesn’t begin and end with the presidential election every four years. The true strength of our democracy depends on the depth of our engagement in it.