It was an election season where the race was polling around 50/50 pretty much throughout. Even when one candidate had a lead, with margins of error, no they didn’t. A ~50% probability of losing is huge, even if many polls did show her slightly ahead. Consider a 20-sided die. 9 sides are red, 11 are blue. You wouldn’t be surprised if you rolled red.
News media has no idea how to talk about polls because they don’t want to talk about probability, they want to talk about which number is bigger as if it’s a scoreboard. I didn’t want him to win, but the polls weren’t wrong.
He probably gave them a membership to the jelly of the month club instead of a Christmas bonus.