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[bangbang i'm a timpani]

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michigan-hillary-clinton-trump-232547

Everybody could see Hillary Clinton was cooked in Iowa. So when, a week-and-a-half out, the Service Employees International Union started hearing anxiety out of Michigan, union officials decided to reroute their volunteers, giving a desperate team on the ground around Detroit some hope.

They started prepping meals and organizing hotel rooms.

SEIU — which had wanted to go to Michigan from the beginning, but been ordered not to — dialed Clinton’s top campaign aides to tell them about the new plan. According to several people familiar with the call, Brooklyn was furious.

Turn that bus around, the Clinton team ordered SEIU. Those volunteers needed to stay in Iowa to fool Donald Trump into competing there, not drive to Michigan, where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.

facepalm gifs probably help here.

 

[Escape Goat]

Clinton was playing chess when Trump was playing checkers.

 

[hodayathink]

Except Michigan didn't lose her the election. Pennsylvania did.

Edit: Reading a little bit more, they're trying to use Michigan as an example of her problem everywhere, which I'm not entirely sure I buy, but I understand.

 

[xxracerxx]

Turn that bus around, the Clinton team ordered SEIU. Those volunteers needed to stay in Iowa to fool Donald Trump into competing there, not drive to Michigan, where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.

This reads like a children's book.

 

[Principate]

Clinton was playing chess when Trump was playing checkers.

Twist is Clinton is shit at Chess.

 

[PAULINK]

i think we can all agree that polls are pointless

 

[Goodstyle]

Premise is bullshit. Clinton could have won Michigan and Wisconsin and still lost. It was Penn. that mattered, and she went hard there and still lost.

 

[kirblar]

Premise is bullshit. Clinton could have won Michigan and Wisconsin and still lost. It was Penn. that mattered, and she went hard there and still lost.

The ground game issues appear to have been a nationwide problem.

 

[Dash_Riprock]

Premise is bullshit. Clinton could have won Michigan and Wisconsin and still lost. It was Penn. that mattered, and she went hard there and still lost.

She went to Philly, not any of the rural areas.

This reads like a children's book.

This entire election played out like an episode of Veep.

 

[Mighty Chin]

I don't think she blew the election at all.

 

[SliceSabre]

Premise is bullshit. Clinton could have won Michigan and Wisconsin and still lost. It was Penn. that mattered, and she went hard there and still lost.

This is my thought too.

As someone who lives in Ohio she and her people were here a shit ton and Trump slaughtered her here. I don't believe her not winning is entirely due to not going to every nowheresville, ohio/michigan/wis/penn.

 

[Empty]

i'm really really angry that in what seemed like the longest election in the history of the world the repeated assumption that 'clinton has a fantastic, nearly unbeatable ground game' went entirely unchallenged by press or even by the campaign itself.

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN. too much was riding on the campaigns displays of staggering incompetence and vanity. too much.

 

[diablos991]

Got to look further up the chain: The deal was sealed when she was selected by the DNC.

 

[jfkgoblue]

Premise is bullshit. Clinton could have won Michigan and Wisconsin and still lost. It was Penn. that mattered, and she went hard there and still lost.

But even had she won Penn, she still would have lost due to Wisconsin and Michigan going red, in fact she needed all 3 to go blue to get 270, so let's stop this "Michigan didn't even matter" nonsense

 

[FyreWulff]

Got to look further up the chain: The deal was sealed when she was selected by the DNC.

You mean by a majority of the primary voters?

 

[Blader]

Premise is bullshit. Clinton could have won Michigan and Wisconsin and still lost. It was Penn. that mattered, and she went hard there and still lost.

It's hard to pin the loss on any one state when you look at the surge of rural whites in Florida that came out to vote for Trump. That was the first sign of a bigger national trend.

Florida will be a big problem for Dems in 2020, because even with a record number of Hispanic voters and expected lower turnout among black voters, Dems still could not overcome whites who were breaking for Trump there. There aren't a whole lot of extra non-white voters for Dems to ring out of Florida next time; they'll need to eat into Trump's margin of white voters for 2020.

i'm really really angry that in what seemed like the longest election in the history of the world the repeated assumption that 'clinton has a fantastic, nearly unbeatable ground game' went entirely unchallenged by press or even by the campaign itself.

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN. too much was riding on the campaigns displays of staggering incompetence and vanity. too much.

What's to challenge? If you look at the numbers, she had an enormous ground game and GOTV operation set up. They just fucked in neglecting to allocate much of any of those resources to rural areas.

 

[Goodstyle]

But even had she won Penn, she still would have lost due to Wisconsin and Michigan going red, in fact she needed all 3 to go blue to get 270, so let's stop this "Michigan didn't even matter" nonsense

It really didn't. Hillary's biggest missteps didn't happen during the campaign, they happened before she even ran. The FBI investigation did her in more than anything else.

 

[dave is ok]

Dems keep banking on a demographic shift to save them that might still be a decade or more away.

 

[Dash_Riprock]

I don't think she blew the election at all.

That must be why she's president.

 

[xxracerxx]

That must be why she's president.

That is a shitty metric to go by.

 

[SlimySnake]

where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.

where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.

where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.

where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.

where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.

I swear I feel like some of you were born yesterday and this is your first election. Why would she waste her resources in a state where is she is leading by 5 points? Why would you?

 

[jfkgoblue]

It's hard to pin the loss on any one state when you look at the surge of rural whites in Florida that came out to vote for Trump. That was the first sign of a bigger national trend.

Florida will be a big problem for Dems in 2020, because even with a record number of Hispanic voters and expected lower turnout among black voters, Dems still could not overcome whites who were breaking for Trump there. There aren't a whole lot of extra non-white voters for Dems to ring out of Florida next time; they'll need to eat into Trump's margin of white voters for 2020.

All of the states Trump flipped are huge problems for Dems, with Ohio and Iowa completely lost at this point and the 3 former "blue wall" states continuing on their trend red. Michigan and Wisconsin have been red in everything other than national politics for a while now, it was only a matter of time before they flipped red, and it's doubtful that they flip back soon.

Pennsylvania is still salvageable, but it's also been turning red.

 

[Trojita]

This quote will be a little long, but it is important. I'll try to bold most of the important parts.

“It was very surgical and corporate. They had their model, this is how they’re going to do it. Their thing was, ‘We don’t have to leave [literature] at the doors, everyone knows who Hillary Clinton is,’” said one person involved in the Michigan campaign. “But in terms of activists, it seems different, it’s maybe they don’t care about us.”

Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not “scientifically” significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back.


“There’s this illusion that the Clinton campaign had a ground game. The deal is that the Clinton campaign could have had a ground game,” said a former Obama operative in Michigan. “They had people in the states who were willing to do stuff. But they didn’t provide people anything to do until GOTV.”

The only metric that people involved in the operations say they ever heard headquarters interested in was how many volunteer shifts had been signed up — though the volunteers were never given the now-standard handheld devices to input the responses they got in the field, and Brooklyn mandated that they not worry about data entry. Operatives watched packets of real-time voter information piled up in bins at the coordinated campaign headquarters. The sheets were updated only when they got ripped, or soaked with coffee. Existing packets with notes from the volunteers, including highlighting how much Trump inclination there was among some of the white male union members the Clinton campaign was sure would be with her, were tossed in the garbage.

The Brooklyn command believed that television and limited direct mail and digital efforts were the only way to win over voters, people familiar with the thinking at headquarters said. Guided by polls that showed the Midwestern states safer, the campaign spent, according to one internal estimate, about 3 percent as much in Michigan and Wisconsin as it spent in Florida, Ohio and North Carolina. Most voters in Michigan didn’t see a television ad until the final week.

Most importantly, multiple operatives said, the Clinton campaign dismissed what’s known as in-person “persuasion” — no one was knocking on doors trying to drum up support for the Democratic nominee, which also meant no one was hearing directly from voters aside from voters they’d already assumed were likely Clinton voters, no one tracking how feelings about the race and the candidates were evolving. This left no information to check the polling models against — which might have, for example, showed the campaign that some of the white male union members they had expected to be likely Clinton voters actually veering toward Trump — and no early warning system that the race was turning against them in ways that their daily tracking polls weren’t picking up.

People involved in the Michigan campaign still can’t understand why Brooklyn stayed so sure of the numbers in a state that it also had projected Clinton would win in the primary.

“Especially given what happened in the primary,” said Michigan Democratic Party chairman Brandon Dillon. “We knew that there was going to have to be more attention.”

With Clinton’s team ignoring or rejecting requests, Democratic operatives in Michigan and other battleground states might have turned to the DNC. But they couldn’t; they weren’t allowed to ask for help.

State officials were banned from speaking directly to anyone at the DNC in Washington. (“Welcome to DNC HQ,” read a blue and white sign behind the reception desk in Brooklyn that appeared after the ouster of Debbie Wasserman Schultz just before the July convention).

A presidential campaign taking over the party committee post-convention is standard, but what happened in 2016 was more intense than veterans remember. People at the DNC and in battleground states speak of angry, bitter calls that came in from Brooklyn whenever they caught wind of contact between them, adamant that only the campaign’s top brass could approve spending or tactical decisions.

“Don’t touch them. Stay away,” one person on the other end of the call remembered Clinton campaign states director Marlon Marshall saying after hearing about a rogue conversation between a battleground operative and an official at the DNC. “You can’t be calling those people and making them think something is coming when nothing is.

This was a PRESIDENTIAL campaign by a seasoned Politician. Holy shit.

 

[Dash_Riprock]

That is a shitty metric to go by.

We can bitch all day about Russia and the Electoral College, none of that would have mattered had the Hillary Campaign not assumed they had this in the bag and wasted time and resources trying to flip red states. Hubris lost this election.

This quote will be a little long, but it is important. I'll try to bold most of the important parts.





This was a PRESIDENTIAL campaign by a seasoned Politician. Holy shit.

Disgusting.

 

[whyamihere]

Premise is bullshit. Clinton could have won Michigan and Wisconsin and still lost. It was Penn. that mattered, and she went hard there and still lost.

Yup. I mean, mistakes were made, but winning Wisconsin and Michigan wouldn't have done shit.

We can bitch all day about Russia and the Electoral College, none of that would have mattered had the Hillary Campaign not assumed they had this in the bag and wasted time and resources trying to flip red states. Hubris lost this election.

Again, wouldn't have mattered. They spent so much time and money in PA and still lost it. It was a bigger messaging problem, not just taking this state for granted.

 

[Torokil]

If GAF ran a campaign.txt

 

[Trojita]

Premise is bullshit. Clinton could have won Michigan and Wisconsin and still lost. It was Penn. that mattered, and she went hard there and still lost.

Between Philadelphia, a small slice of Harrisburg, and Pittsburgh there wasn't a damn sense of any engagement.

 

[Torokil]

I swear I feel like some of you were born yesterday and this is your first election. Why would she waste her resources in a state where is she is leading by 5 points? Why would you?

Because she lost Michigan in the primary when she was leading the polls by 20 points. And told union members to fuck off back to the cornfields when they were screaming at the campaign in Brookyln to get some help in the state.

 

[jfkgoblue]

It really didn't. Hillary's biggest missteps didn't happen during the campaign, they happened before she even ran. The FBI investigation did her in more than anything else.

That's ignoring the observed trend of the Rust belt(with the exception of Illinois due to Chicago) has been shifting red for some time. If Trump does an alright job in the eyes of the voters, even Minnesota won't be safe come 2020, and that's been a Democrat stronghold for decades, but was pretty close this election.

 

[Phased]

While I understand why they chose to ignore middle America given how the polls looked, it ended up being their undoing.

It really seems like the same team behind her 2016 run was the team behind her 08 run and they made exactly the same mistakes that contributed to her losing to Obama back then. Learned nothing.

 

[whyamihere]

Because she lost Michigan in the primary when she was leading the polls by 20 points. And told union members to fuck off back to the cornfields when they were screaming at the campaign in Brookyln to get some help in the state.

I mean, polling in the primary is usually not as good as the polling in the general. So those two things are not really related at all.

While I understand why they chose to ignore middle America given how the polls looked, it ended up being their undoing.

It really seems like the same team behind her 2016 run was the team behind her 08 run and they made exactly the same mistakes that contributed to her losing to Obama back then. Learned nothing.

Nope. Most of the people on her team were from Obama. She had their data team. Didn't help.

 

[Principate]

I swear I feel like some of you were born yesterday and this is your first election. Why would she waste her resources in a state where is she is leading by 5 points? Why would you?

That's how losers screw up because polls aren't always as representative as you or I like especially with the early warning signs of a shock brexit victory. There's a reason why it's said assumption is the mother of all fuck ups.

 

[GoldenEye 007]

I swear I feel like some of you were born yesterday and this is your first election. Why would she waste her resources in a state where is she is leading by 5 points? Why would you?

Because the campaign should have known better. They should have pieced together their incorrect data from the primaries where Bernie performed better than expected and where she outright lost Michigan. The campaign should have put stock in the people actually on the ground begging for in-person support.

And as for after the fact, you also have to ask why the hell the Trump team had better and more accurate data in key areas. There is zero excuse for that.

 

[whyamihere]

That's how losers screw up because polls aren't always as representative as you or I like especially with the early warning signs of a shock brexit victory. There's a reason why it's said assumption is the mother of all fuck ups.

There was no shock Brexit victory. The polls were close the entire time. People refused to see that. That's different than in the US election, where the polls were never close.

 

[Laevateinn]

Hopefully Trump's win drains the swamp of shitty DNC consultants.

 

[Dash_Riprock]

While I understand why they chose to ignore middle America given how the polls looked, it ended up being their undoing.

It really seems like the same team behind her 2016 run was the team behind her 08 run and they made exactly the same mistakes that contributed to her losing to Obama back then. Learned nothing.

Wasn't much of her team made of former Obama Campaigners?

 

[Principate]

There was no shock Brexit victory. The polls were close the entire time. People refused to see that. That's different than in the US election, where the polls were never close.

Yes there was it's called exist polls, which tended to be the most accurate and were well wrong.

 

[jfkgoblue]

Wasn't much of her team made of former Obama Campaigners?

Obama himself called out her terrible campaigning

 

[whyamihere]

Wasn't much of her team made of former Obama Campaigners?

Yes. Mook was from 08, but he also won her the caucus in NV in 08.

 

[Trojita]

Obama himself called out her terrible campaigning

Bill and Obama both asked why the campaign wasn't going to small towns.

 

[whyamihere]

Yes there was it's called exist polls, which tended to be the most accurate and were well wrong.

No. Exit polls are not as accurate as real polls. We all know that. The polls before Brexit showed a close race. No one in the pundit class decided to listen to that. People shouldn't have been shocked. That was very different than the US election where polls showed no real reason to see what happened.

Bill and Obama both asked why the campaign wasn't going to small towns.

This is the real point.

 

[bachikarn]

I swear I feel like some of you were born yesterday and this is your first election. Why would she waste her resources in a state where is she is leading by 5 points? Why would you?

Because it is even dumber to waste resources in Iowa to try and trick Trump?

I really support using data, but if your data is so completely wrong, I have no sympathy. There were clearly assumptions being being that were completely wrong. You can't say they could never have anticipated the polls being very wrong given what happened in the Michigan primary.


You have to understand the accuracy of your data if you are going to absolutely all in with it. Basically the classic robustness vs optimisation problem.

 

[PantherLotus]

Be wary of any explanatory journalism from Politico that doesn't include a heavy dose of self-reflection in their own culpability:

In results that narrow, Clinton’s loss could be attributed to any number of factors — FBI Director Jim Comey’s letter shifting late deciders, the lack of a compelling economic message, the apparent Russian hacking. But heartbroken and frustrated in-state battleground operatives worry that a lesson being missed is a simple one: Get the basics of campaigning right.

You're gonna mention all that and not the part about Politico heavily pushing the They're Both Bad bullshit?

 

[Principate]

Obama himself called out her terrible campaigning

Pretty much which is all that needs to be said of her handling of the whole thing. you don't rely entirely on polls because guess what they're accuracy depends on their sampling and can be wrong from time to time and in this case that lost her the election by quite a sizeable margin.

 

[jfkgoblue]

Yes there was it's called exist polls, which tended to be the most accurate and were well wrong.

Exit polls are notoriously inaccurate, if they were even a little accurate Bush would never have won reelection

 

[The Albatross]

I swear I feel like some of you were born yesterday and this is your first election. Why would she waste her resources in a state where is she is leading by 5 points? Why would you?

Because her models had proven demonstrably wrong in the primaries, and Democratic models of the 2014 congressional elections had also proven to be wrong. On the other hand, the primaries showed awful strong evidence that Clinton performed poorly in working class areas.

Perhaps you don't completely structure late-run campaign strategies around broken data models.

 

[Blader]

All of the states Trump flipped are huge problems for Dems, with Ohio and Iowa completely lost at this point and the 3 former "blue wall" states continuing on their trend red. Michigan and Wisconsin have been red in everything other than national politics for a while now, it was only a matter of time before they flipped red, and it's doubtful that they flip back soon.

Pennsylvania is still salvageable, but it's also been turning red.

Right, but the margins in PA, WI and MI are small enough, with many of those voters having gone for Obama twice before, that I don't think they can be written off for completely. Hell, even Ohio might be salvageable (I agree that Iowa is likely a lost cause now).

The reason I highlight Florida as the biggest problem child is there's no more room left to grow there.

 

[whyamihere]

Pretty much which is all that needs to be said of her handling of the whole thing. you don't rely entirely on polls because guess what they're accuracy depends on their sampling and can be wrong from time to time and in this case that lost her the election by quite a sizeable margin.

She actually lost the election by an incredibly small margin. That's not to say that there weren't huge mistakes made or it shouldn't have been that close, but if we're going to learn from this, we have to be accurate about what happened.

 

[Principate]

No. Exit polls are not as accurate as real polls. We all know that. The polls before Brexit showed a close race. No one in the pundit class decided to listen to that. People shouldn't have been shocked. That was very different than the US election where polls showed no real reason to see what happened.



This is the real point.

We all know what, what exactly is your basis for that statement, exit polls have been very accurate for the past 3 general elections.

 

[kirblar]

I swear I feel like some of you were born yesterday and this is your first election. Why would she waste her resources in a state where is she is leading by 5 points? Why would you?

There's a baseline level of organization/resources/management that we assumed would be present that wasn't there. It's stuff you have to do.