In a excellent and revealing cover story the Huffington Post has interviewed many of the volunteers and paid officials in the Clinton Campaign in the key Midwestern States she lost last Tuesday. What they have revealed is not pretty.
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. By that point, however, they were operating in the dark. One organizer said that in a precinct in Flint, they were sent to a burned down trailer park. No one had taken it off the list of places to visit because no one had been there until the final weekend. Clinton lost the state by 12,000 votes.
Clinton and the campaign ignored operations in key states. Instead focusing on ad spends in Arizona and Texas.
Even worse was the campaigning indications in these historically ignored and poor communities which have been battered by poverty and lead poisoning
The campaign’s state office argued additionally for prominent African-American surrogates to help in Milwaukee. “There are only so many times you can get folks excited about Chelsea Clinton,” explained one Wisconsin Democrat. But President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama didn’t come. Nor did Hillary Clinton after the July Democratic convention. She would go on to lose the state, hampered by lower turnout in precisely the place that had operatives worried. Clinton got 289,000 votes in Milwaukee County compared to the 328,000 that Obama won in 2012.
Instead the campaign focused on campaigning in states like Nebraska, Iowa, and Ohio. States where it was well known they were trailing by margins they would likely not make up by election day.
The team also failed to reach out to other voters beyond their base and as a result of their total ignorance of rural areas they could not see the reduced margins that would lead to their downfall.
According to one longtime grassroots campaign operative who was involved in the 2016 cycle, leadership was focused predominantly on turning out their own voters and not on persuading others to come on board. This was a perfectly logical strategic decision, considering the massive voter registration advantage that Democrats enjoy. But it meant that the Clinton campaign wasn’t able to anticipate the surge in Trump support in the rural areas because they weren’t having conversations with voters there.
Much has been made of Clinton’s poor judgment and the facts seem to lay out the case for it in the face one of the biggest boondoggles in the history of presidential campaigns. One that has pushed the world to a tipping point and could mean the end of Democracy not only in America but in Europe as well. Democratic supporters should realize that it could all have been prevented.
For as the article itself clearly lays out.
“Hillary Clinton had [a huge volunteer base]. It just wasn’t always in the places they needed it to be.”