First off, it’s clear the Clinton campaign neglected the industrial mid-west.
In Michigan alone, a senior battleground state operative told HuffPost that the state party and local officials were running at roughly one-tenth the paid canvasser capacity that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) had when he ran for president in 2004. Desperate for more human capital, the state party and local officials ended up raising $300,000 themselves to pay 500 people to help canvass in the election’s closing weeks.
Here is the campaign’s post-mortem:
A senior official from Clinton’s campaign noted that they did have a large staff presence in Michigan and Wisconsin (200 and 180 people respectively) while also stressing that one of the reasons they didn’t do more was, in part, because of psychological games they were playing with the Trump campaign. They recognized that Michigan, for example, was a vulnerable state and felt that if they could keep Trump away ― by acting overly confident about their chances ― they would win it by a small margin and with a marginal resource allocation.
That is quite a terrible explanation. It sounds like they were too damn smart for their own good and don’t know it.
What made it all worse, is that Trump exploited this neglect relentlessly:
While the Republican candidate aggressively courted white workers in the Rust Belt, Clinton neglected to make a single visit to Wisconsin during the general-election campaign; in the race’s closing weeks, her campaign aired more advertisements in the city of Omaha than in Michigan and Wisconsin combined.
While Obama tailored much of his messaging in 2012 to the concerns of white workers in the Midwest — painting Mitt Romney as a callous plutocrat, championing his party’s support of the auto bailout — Clinton focused her paid media on Trump’s vulgarity and lack of expertise, rather than on his history of exploiting contractors and conning consumers.
Clinton failed to go to these states and ask for their votes. This is quite a basic political failure. Here’s Obama on the subject:
"I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa, it was because I spent 87 days going to every small town, and fair, and fish fry, and VFW hall. And there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points," Obama explained. "There're some counties that maybe I won that people didn't expect — because people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for and who you were fighting for.
Look, there are many other reasons for the poor performance. Here are three:
- Clinton campaigned in poll-tested position papers not poetry. It’s tough to get people excited about an 85 point plan. You have to win first on message, then pull out the legislative outline.
- The Democratic party has failed to protect voting rights in Wisconsin, North Carolina and a hundred other places by giving up on competing at the state/local level. We need to stop focusing on the presidency and support candidates at the local/state level.
- All that time and energy spent on high-dollar donors and fundraisers served to validate Trump’s attacks. That time could have been directed at retail campaigning rather than giving donors the photo-ops they wanted to impress their friends.
But the primary reason for the electoral college loss was neglecting the states where Trump eked out narrow victories and won the electoral vote as an anti-establishment candidate. This is why Hillary Clinton won a convincing majority of the popular vote and still lost the election. Local Democrats tried to warn the campaign and say they were rebuffed.
End result: we lost Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, all states that had voted for Democrats consistently for 30 years.
One word on trying to blame this on racism. Trump certainly attracted voters with appeals to xenophobia and racism, maybe they were even the majority among those who voted for him. But I do not believe the lesson we should learn from this is that we should put forward racist and/or sexist candidates to win. Nor do I think we will shame working class voters into voting for us by accusing them of racism and/or sexism. For those who believe appealing to the working class means we’re ignoring racism, I would ask why they excuse the campaign’s big push to appeal to suburban voters? As if soccer moms don’t start screaming bloody murder when minority enrollment in their kids’ school hits 20 or 30%.
Clinton’s neglect of these states was understandable. The polling told her — and us — that she didn’t need to worry about them. But it’s odd to conclude, after her campaign deliberately chose to neglect those areas, that she never had a chance to win them, anyway, because her campaign was too anti-racist for this cruel world. — NY Mag