Clinton Pollster Explains Clinton Loss Another Democrat admits the failure of identity politics. James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-pollster-explains-clinton-loss-1506119763
What happened in 2016? Longtime Clinton family adviser Stanley Greenberg has a very different answer than Hillary Clinton. While the former secretary of State is on a book tour blaming a long list of people outside her campaign, this week Mr. Greenberg is explaining what went wrong on the inside. And it has a lot to do with ignoring the concerns of Middle America.
Mr. Greenberg was Bill Clinton’s pollster during his winning election campaign in 1992, has worked for other Democratic presidential candidates in the years since, and seems to have offered plenty of advice to Mrs. Clinton and her campaign team in 2016. By and large, they ignored it.
In the magazine American Prospect this week, Mr. Greenberg writes:
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.
Mr. Greenberg’s postmortem details the campaign’s blind faith in its computer models, even though they had often failed in the primaries to accurately measure the strength of rival Bernie Sanders. According to the author:
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.
Beyond the reliance on flawed analytics was a flawed strategy, says Mr. Greenberg:
Clinton and the campaign acted as if “demographics is destiny” and that a “rainbow coalition” was bound to govern. Yes, there is a growing “Rising American Electorate,” but Page Gardner and I wrote at the outset of this election, you must give people a compelling reason to vote and I have demonstrated for my entire career that a candidate must target white working-class voters too.
Not surprisingly, Clinton took her biggest hit in Michigan, where she failed to campaign in Macomb County, the archetypal white working-class county. That was the opposite of her husband’s approach. Bill Clinton visibly campaigned in Macomb, the black community in Detroit, and elsewhere. CONTINUE ATSITE
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