Clearly that was the case with 20/20 hindsight. But, living here in the "great North State", many Dems locally were smug, and expecting a Hillary win, AND a Cooper win.
I think this was borne out of 2 things: (1) they live in an echo chamber of their own making, so didn't believe the Trump movement was as large as it was; and (2) they also BELIEVED they had created or motivated enough ADDITIONAL Hillary/Cooper voters through the voter-ID issue; the HB2 issue; and the BLM movement (on top of the normal/expected absentee voter fraud).
I don't believe that any polls picked up on the true Trump surge and, even if they had Trump ahead on election day, they expected it to be much tighter than the actual vote turned out to be.
As to why Hillary went nuts when she learned she'd lost NC, I think that is a result of staff "survivor bias". That is, she only kept staff around that told her what she wanted to hear. Therefore, the long-term, loyal staff that took her to election day likely DID know she wasn't likely to win in NC, but they weren't going to tell her that. So, to her, it was totally unexpected. She had long-term staff, and at times honest staff. She didn't have any long-term honest staff.
Dems were smug all over... modern “liberals” are always smug, they think they know better than everyone else everything.... If only the world was as wonderful as they are everything would be great... that’s not a modern thing, that goes back at least to the 60s.
They Absolutely were living in echo chambers, and bought into their own press... not only in NC, but nationally.
This is the problem, the POLLS were flagrantly off, and blindingly so, because of a multitude of reasons.... 1) the voters Trump was bringing were people who were filtered out by the “likely” voter filter... If you didn’t vote in the last 2 elections, it doesn’t matter how much you tell a pollster you are going to vote, they are going to mark you unlikely... so huge swaths of disaffected and disengaged voters who Trump was re-engaging were not being captured in the polling... 2) The polls were by and large push polling/gas lighting, they weren’t honest polling. Pollsters were oversampling groups to prop up hillary, and they were doing it across the board... it was psy ops 101. Show Hillary up big everywhere to deject Trump supporters... Every and I do mean EVERY poll that showed Hillary up BIG nationally, or doing better than Obama locally were flat out LIES... ever single one of them... if you looked at the internals (when they published them) you could see the flagrant manipulation.
The fundamental Truth was simply this... Hillary was going to nationally underperform Obama, and she had ZERO chance of taking any state Obama lost in 12... this was reality out of the gate... She also had ZERO shot at OH or IA... the play that these were ever in play for her were laughable from the get go.
Now as to NC... Obama lost NC by 80k votes in 12, Hillary had ZERO SHOT at it... secondly, the early voting numbers which were published (by party breakdown) and available long before Tuesday confirmed Hillary had absolutely ZERO chance at NC.
So, the only way Hillary could be sitting there election night thinking she had a prayer at NC was either she was being lied to, or she thought she had some sort of fix to throw it her way... the facts on the ground... 2 completely different set of indicators, 1 broad and available from the start... and the other exact and precise right before election day showed that she had no shot.
TO her credit, NC is one of the places where she actually did outperform Obama... but it wasn’t nearly enough to have won the state, she wouldn’t even have beat Romney with her extra 20k votes over Obama 12..
NC was NEVER, EVER in play by any honest evaluation.... Not once.