Ever since November, I’ve tried to figure out what signs I missed of the Trump victory. I was sitting on the couch, watching Showtime’s The Circus tonight when it hit me. The sign I missed. The one thing that should have told me “This media narrative of inevitability may not be quite right”.

It was late in the summer of 2016. The conventions were over, and Tim Kaine was holding an event for Hillary Clinton in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the supposed epicenter of her midwestern support. I had snagged myself a press pass, and taken the train in from Chicago that morning.

There was nothing really wrong with the rally. It was well-organized. It was staged nicely. There was a crowd. When I think back to every political rally I’d ever been to though, I realize now it was missing one thing: a line.

This was the man who would supposedly be our vice president in three months (or at least vice president-elect), but the small space they’d set aside for the crowd was not even close to full.

At a small townhall to see Donald Trump months earlier, the line had stretched out the building and through the quadrangle of the campus we were on. At the two Bernie Sanders events I attended, the line stretches for what seemed like miles. I was told in the latter of the two that between six and twelve thousand people were online for a venue that seated less than a tenth of that.

In the dead of winter, I’d seen Bill Clinton and Caroline Kennedy draw crowds of hundreds that were willing to wait hours in the cold to see them. Yet, in a supposed Democratic stronghold on a beautiful day in July or August, one of the two principle candidates of the ticket couldn’t even draw two hundred.

I don’t want to insinuate that the size of the crowd of the VP candidate months before the election is the best indicator of eventual electoral performance, but I do feel that this was a warning sign I shouldn’t have missed.