{"id":29802,"date":"2016-12-15T10:22:36","date_gmt":"2016-12-15T16:22:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/?p=29802"},"modified":"2016-12-15T10:22:36","modified_gmt":"2016-12-15T16:22:36","slug":"more-on-how-clinton-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/?p=29802","title":{"rendered":"More on How Clinton Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential race by rewriting the rule book. Conversely, Hillary Clinton seems to have lost the race by simply ignoring the same rule book.<\/p>\n

This Politico piece<\/a> on how Hillary Clinton’s arrogant campaign lost Michigan<\/a> is well worth it’s own link for the rich aroma of schadenfreude wafting off it:<\/p>\n

Politico spoke to a dozen officials working on or with Clinton\u2019s Michigan campaign, and more than a dozen scattered among other battleground states, her Brooklyn headquarters and in Washington who describe an ongoing fight about campaign tactics, an inability to get top leadership to change course.<\/p>\n

Then again, according to senior people in Brooklyn, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook never heard any of those complaints directly from anyone on his state teams before Election Day.<\/p>\n

In results that narrow, Clinton\u2019s loss could be attributed to any number of factors \u2014 FBI Director Jim Comey\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Clinton never even stopped by a United Auto Workers union hall in Michigan, though a person involved with the campaign noted bitterly that the UAW flaked on GOTV commitments in the final days, and that AFSCME never even made any, despite months of appeals.<\/p>\n

The anecdotes are different but the narrative is the same across battlegrounds, where Democratic operatives lament a one-size-fits-all approach drawn entirely from pre-selected data \u2014 operatives spit out \u201cthe model, the model,\u201d as they complain about it \u2014 guiding Mook\u2019s decisions on field, television, everything else. That\u2019s the same data operation, of course, that predicted Clinton would win the Iowa caucuses by 6 percentage points (she scraped by with two-tenths of a point), and that predicted she\u2019d beat Bernie Sanders in Michigan (he won by 1.5 points).<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never seen a campaign like this,\u201d said Virgie Rollins, a Democratic National Committee member and longtime political hand in Michigan who described months of failed attempts to get attention to the collapse she was watching unfold in slow-motion among women and African-American millennials.<\/p>\n

Rollins, the chair emeritus of the Michigan Democratic Women\u2019s Caucus, said requests into Brooklyn for surrogates to come talk to her group were never answered. When they held their events anyway, she said, they also got no response to requests for a little money to help cover costs.<\/p>\n

Rollins doesn\u2019t need a recount to understand why Clinton lost the state.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you don\u2019t reach out to community folk and reach out to precinct campaigns and district organizations that know where the votes are, then you\u2019re going to have problems,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

From the day Clinton released her launch video, the campaign knew she\u2019d struggle with enthusiasm. Yet they didn\u2019t do many of the things voters are used to seeing to give a sense of momentum, insisting that votes didn\u2019t come from campaign literature, door knocking, commitment to vote cards or the standard program of sending absentee ballot applications to likely voters rather than just appealing to the people once they\u2019d already ordered the ballots.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was very surgical and corporate. They had their model, this is how they\u2019re going to do it. Their thing was, \u2018We don\u2019t have to leave [literature] at the doors, everyone knows who Hillary Clinton is,\u2019\u201d said one person involved in the Michigan campaign. \u201cBut in terms of activists, it seems different, it\u2019s maybe they don\u2019t care about us.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cscientifically\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s this illusion that the Clinton campaign had a ground game. The deal is that the Clinton campaign could have had a ground game,\u201d said a former Obama operative in Michigan. \u201cThey had people in the states who were willing to do stuff. But they didn\u2019t provide people anything to do until GOTV.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to Hillary’s final FEC report, the Clinton campaign spent $576,402,561 on the race<\/a>. Don’t think that printing campaign literature, sending volunteers door-to-door or mailing absentee ballots is cost-effective? Fine. But if you have half a billion dollars to spend<\/i> you do it anyway<\/i>. What else are you going to do with the money?<\/p>\n

Well, if you’re Clinton, you spend money running up the popular vote count in places where it doesn’t help get you electoral college votes:<\/p>\n

But there also were millions approved for transfer from Clinton\u2019s campaign for use by the DNC \u2014 which, under a plan devised by Brazile to drum up urban turnout out of fear that Trump would win the popular vote while losing the electoral vote, got dumped into Chicago and New Orleans, far from anywhere that would have made a difference in the election.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And when regional offices tried to go to the DNC for help, they were refused because the Clinton campaign didn’t want them talking to the DNC<\/i>:<\/p>\n

With Clinton\u2019s team ignoring or rejecting requests, Democratic operatives in Michigan and other battleground states might have turned to the DNC. But they couldn\u2019t; they weren\u2019t allowed to ask for help.<\/p>\n

State officials were banned from speaking directly to anyone at the DNC in Washington. (\u201cWelcome to DNC HQ,\u201d 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).<\/p>\n

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\u2019s top brass could approve spending or tactical decisions.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t touch them. Stay away,\u201d 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. \u201cYou can\u2019t be calling those people and making them think something is coming when nothing is.<\/p>\n

Mook himself made a number of those calls.<\/p>\n

To Brooklyn, this was the only way to shut down what they perceived early as an effort to undermine the campaign\u2019s planning, DNC officials playing good cop as they made promises they couldn\u2019t keep to friends in the states, took credit for moves Clinton\u2019s staff already were making, or looked to dig up trouble to use against them later.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So not only did the Clinton campaign have a thermocline of truth to keep unpleasant messages from reaching the top ranks, they created their own and then strengthened it out of turf defense, arrogance, paranoia, and ego. <\/p>\n

As in most of these Clinton 2016 autopsies, all the insider fingers seem to be pointing at campaign manager Robby Mook as the designated scapegoat for their collective failure. And I’m sure he had a hand. But the fact the Clinton campaign was an arrogant, out-of-touch operation reflected the presence of an arrogant, out-of-touch candidate at the very top of it.<\/p>\n

Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential race by rewriting the rule book. Conversely, Hillary Clinton seems to have lost the race by simply ignoring the same rule book. This Politico piece on how Hillary Clinton’s arrogant campaign lost Michigan is well worth it’s own link for the rich aroma of schadenfreude wafting off it: Politico […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":27,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,13],"tags":[2091,2864,2459,2862,779,1437,3444,3676,3675,2877],"class_list":["post-29802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats","category-elections","tag-2016-presidential-race","tag-democrats","tag-dnc","tag-elections","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-michigan","tag-politico","tag-robby-mook","tag-thermocline-of-truth","tag-unions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29802"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29819,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29802\/revisions\/29819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}