Jim Messina: “I’ve come to hate public polling, period. In the 2012 race we focused on a ‘golden report,’ which included 62,000 simulations to determine Mr. Obama’s chances of winning battleground states. It included state tracking polls and nightly calls from volunteers, but no national tracking polls. [On the day before the election,] I assured the president that the golden report was predicting a victory, with 332 electoral votes. On Election Day, that was the exact number of electoral votes the president won.”
“Today, campaigns can target voters so well that they can personalize conversations. That is the only way, when any candidate asks about the state of the race, to offer a true assessment. Hillary Clinton can do that. To my knowledge, Donald J. Trump, who has bragged that he doesn’t care about data in campaigns, can’t.”
For more, listen to our interview with Messina who told us two months ago “this campaign was always going to be close.”
