Hillary Clinton wants to blame the Russians for her loss. It’s easy to see why. Stories like this from Politico paint her campaign’s decisions as questionable:
Everybody could see Hillary Clinton was cooked in Iowa. So when, a week-and-a-half out, the Service Employees International Union started hearing anxiety out of Michigan, union officials decided to reroute their volunteers, giving a desperate team on the ground around Detroit some hope.
They started prepping meals and organizing hotel rooms.
SEIU — which had wanted to go to Michigan from the beginning, but been ordered not to — dialed Clinton’s top campaign aides to tell them about the new plan. According to several people familiar with the call, Brooklyn was furious.
Turn that bus around, the Clinton team ordered SEIU. Those volunteers needed to stay in Iowa to fool Donald Trump into competing there, not drive to Michigan, where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.
Michigan organizers were shocked. It was the latest case of Brooklyn ignoring on-the-ground intel and pleas for help in a race that they felt slipping away at the end.
“They believed they were more experienced, which they were. They believed they were smarter, which they weren’t,” said Donnie Fowler, who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee during the final months of the campaign. “They believed they had better information, which they didn’t.”
After a couple presidential cycles of pain where the people at the top of McCain and Romney’s teams were insulated, tone-deaf, and relying on stupid data instead of obvious intel from the ground, this story is gratifying. So the Democrats can be as stupid as Republicans. That takes some doing.
Michigan was always gettable. If the voter fraud in Detroit gets cleaned up, Michigan will truly become a swing state. The same would happen in Pennsylvania, if Philadelphia’s corruption were stopped.
Pennsylvania will also be gettable with inspiring rhetoric by Hillary probably pushing voters to Trump:
Just spit-balling here, but maybe she shouldn’t have gleefully promised to “put a lot of coal miners out of work?” https://t.co/3TWvsHGBMI
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) December 14, 2016
Back to Michigan:
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 “scientifically” 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.
“There’s this illusion that the Clinton campaign had a ground game. The deal is that the Clinton campaign could have had a ground game,” said a former Obama operative in Michigan. “They had people in the states who were willing to do stuff. But they didn’t provide people anything to do until GOTV.”
If that doesn’t warm the cockles of your heart, nothing will.
Donald Trump worked harder to get votes where they mattered. That much was obvious. He flew all over, talked to anyone willing to listen and just worked, worked, worked.
This should be a lesson for future campaigns who insist on ignoring Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania: Hard work there can pay off.
Exit question: Did Hillary’s team count on voter fraud in Detroit to win the election? Is that why they didn’t bother?
