On the morning of November 9, 2016, I pulled into the faculty parking lot of my school since 1987. I was tired as I was up late; yesterday was Election Day and I stayed up as late as I could knowing I would crash in a haze of fatigue in the last class or two of the day. Sometime the night before, rather late, my future wife Kim woke and told me “Donald Trump won. You told me he wasn’t going to win.” I didn’t tell her, or my students, anything that Nate Silver and nearly every poll was already saying.

When I emerged from a hallway to enter the area called “the Commons” near the main entrance to our school, eight to ten students repeated Kim’s words. They were anxious to get my analysis, which flattered me, but I told them to wait until class. In my shirt pocket on a 3 x 5 index card was the information I had already perused on my laptop over coffee at home.

As America became more polarized, I took great pains to try to not express my political views unless asked. I NEVER NEVER NEVER tried to influence my students. The times meant I walked down the middle and if questioned, responded with “are you asking Mr., Heinz or Cary Heinz,” Sometimes this was difficult as we usually did something with current events every day.

Technology allowed me to place images from my laptop to the white board on the wall via a device called a ‘data projector.’ That was one of the newer developments I enjoyed because I began my career with chalk.

Election night is to me what the Super Bowl is to others. I have out a fresh new 8 x 14 legal pad, color pens, a calculator and channel my inner nerd to the ‘nth’ degree. I keep a running tab of the electoral college, and jump around listening to the best talking heads make observations and possibly predictions. It didn’t take a genius to figure out how Donald Trump upset Hillary Clinton and the expectations of nearly every prognosticator from sea to shing sea.

My analysis of his victory was simple. Donald Trump didn’t win the election, Hillary Clinton LOST it. Her uber data driven campaign OVERESTIMATED turnout. Sorry Robby Mook and others, the truth hurts. I told the kids something like this “The Clinton campaign expected that African American men in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee (east to west) would be as excited about voting for a sixty-eight-year-old white grandmother as they were a hip fifty-one-year-old black man.”

I could click from state and city turnout numbers to prove my point. I shall not bore you with statistics. Donald Trump won by just 77,000 or so votes in the so-called ‘Blue Wall’ of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio.” African American turnout was down 7% nationally, do the math. Approximately 13.8 million people voted in those three states and 0.006 percent of the vote made the difference. I know it is more complicated than that, but you don’t have to be the lovechild of James Carville and Karl Rove to figure that out.

Lessons were learned, take NOTHING for granted.