Interesting story in the Daily Beast today titled: “Team Bernie: Hillary ‘F*cking Ignored’ Us in Swing States.” The article tells a story of many former Bernie campaign people screaming that the Hillary Campaign was in trouble in key swing states, offering to help, but mostly being ignored.
This is not about Hillary, except to the extent she chose the top people of her campaign. It’s about a campaign that thought it knew it all, and failed Hillary and us.
In the final months of the brutal and chaotic 2016 campaign, there were plenty of Democratic activists freaking out about Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (the three states that ultimately cost the Democrats the White House) and Clinton’s fatal shortcomings there. Many of them were envoys of the Sanders camp who wanted to help fix those problems, including Clinton’s difficulties with the block of the mythical “white-working-class,” economically anxious voters who Sanders had championed during the primaries.
“They fucking ignored us on all these [three] battleground states [while] we were sounding the alarm for months,” Nomiki Konst, a progressive activist and former Sanders surrogate who served on the 2016 Democratic National Committee platform committee
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“The math that they lost on, is the math we won on,” Konst said. “So we wrote out a plan, and sent it to them, telling them to stop thinking you’re going to get this ‘Obama coalition,’ it’s not going to happen.”
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“I offered to help and never heard back from anybody—quite frankly, I wasn’t surprised,” Robert Becker, a veteran organizer who ran Iowa and Michigan operations for the Sanders presidential campaign, told The Daily Beast.
“There was no outreach to me… but I did get a call three weeks out [from Election Day] from someone who was in the DNC sounding the alarm [about Michigan],” he said. “They didn’t feel like they were getting strong support from [unions members]… I mean, these trade deals that were going on for decades that were enabled by the Democratic Party in large part, they hurt. [The Clinton campaign] didn’t address the anger about this. We picked up on that during the primary. People were furious at these bad trade deals. We were connecting with those voters in Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin… Everyone’s trying to point a finger as to what went wrong, and I just point to the operational malpractice.”
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“For me this is not about Hillary Clinton, this is about Hillary Clinton’s staff becoming too insular, too professional where regular working-class folks did not matter to them,” Kleeb said. “She had too many people [on her campaign] wearing Prada going into pollster meetings, not enough of us.”
Daily Beast: "Team Bernie: Hillary ‘F*cking Ignored’ Us in Swing States"
The best campaign money could buy. They sliced and diced voters, heavy analytics. On paper, she won easily.
The debacle has many causes. 80,000 votes in three states.
We need to learn from this. If there is a next time.