Clinton’s Malpractice

Stan Greenberg: “The Trump presidency concentrates the mind on the malpractice that helped put him in office.  For me, the most glaring examples include the Clinton campaign’s over-dependence on technical analytics; its failure to run campaigns to win the battleground states; the decision to focus on the rainbow base and identity politics at the expense of the working class; and the failure to address the candidate’s growing ‘trust problem,’ to learn from events and reposition.”

“Clinton’s own campaign memoir, What Happened, came out the day I was finalizing this article. She acknowledged possible errors on handling of the economy, but not these areas of malpractice.”

“The campaign relied far too heavily on something that campaign technicians call ‘data analytics.’ This refers to the use of models built from a database of the country’s 200 million–voters, including turnout history and demographic and consumer information, updated daily by an automated poll asking for vote preference to project the election result. But when campaign developments overtake the model’s assumptions, you get surprised by the voters—and this happened repeatedly.”

“Astonishingly, the 2016 Clinton campaign conducted no state polls in the final three weeks of the general election and relied primarily on data analytics to project turnout and the state vote. They paid little attention to qualitative focus groups or feedback from the field, and their brief daily analytics poll didn’t measure which candidate was defining the election or getting people engaged.”