Maybe you should ask some of us unintelligent people.

I think it was a combination of many things.

First of all there are the party loyalists, who will vote for thei party's candidate no matter who it is or how awful a person they are.

The media no longer provide informative news, but rather provides entertaining news. So, yhou basically get a very misinformed electorate.

This country suffers from "celebrity worship", meaning the famous and/or rich peopel are just not expected to be held accountable for what they do. No matter how much they do wrong or how outrageously they behave they get away with it because it entertains people. Usually a celebrity is only taken down if their notoriety becomes too expensive to maintain. Charlie Sheen would be an example of becoming too expensive, or no longer profitable, to handle.

Voter apathy. most Americans have more liberal values, but most eligible voters just don't vote because they don't think it makes any difference. So a minority of conservative fanatics get their people elected to office.

A lack of an agreement on liberal values. It has been said that republicans agree and then fall into lock step like marching Nazis, but trying to get democrats to agree is like trying to herd a group of house cats. The difference is that republicans generally like to e told what to do, while democrats liek to think independently.

Those are just of the top of my head. If I spent few days on it, I could probably come up with a really long list of reasons that contributed to what happened. The point is that it was not just any one thing or even just two things, but many things combined.

I think this is a complicated question, though a lot of people have tried to give it a simple answer. My take is that several main things contributed:

• neither major party has truly supported working families, labor, or small business for decades, disenfranchising rural, lower income people who wanted a serious change, no matter what

• DJT pandered to these groups with a populist message, telling them exactly what they've been waiting to hear

• DJT is good at reading a crowd, and some people respond positively to his speech patterns, even when he says absolutely nothing and is entirely incoherent

• DJT was able to attract the alt-right and other hate groups by saying outlandish things about marginalized groups, but keeping his statements vague enough to deny ill intent

• many conservatives like him specifically because he's reviled by liberals; it's a middle finger to what they consider to be values that have been forced upon them for years

• he lost the popular vote by a huge margin, and the districts he won were mostly within the margin of error pollsters predicted, even though the odds were low he'd win (but low odds doesn't mean zero chance)

• the electoral college didn't do its job, in my estimation; the reason for its existence is to prevent the general population from making severe mistakes (e.g., electing a narcissistic, inexperienced person to the presidency who proved over and over that he lacks the fundamental understanding of government and of the office to faithfully uphold the responsibilities of the position)

• HRC was an extremely weak candidate for the Democrats, and was seen by many as coronated by the party before the primary campaigning ever started, and a lot of people who would have voted for Bernie Sanders felt HRC wasn't someone they could support and either didn't vote at all or voted for a third-party candidate

• it seems likely that Russian influences played a role on social media in dividing people and playing up ideological differences

• evangelicals are a large voting bloc and, while it's not unique to this election, have only one interest — abortion — and will support anyone who purports to be against abortion

I'm sure there are other reasons, but these are the factors that stand out to me.