Let’s admit it. The Clinton campaign was a clusterfrack of hubris and poor strategy and disorganization and missed opportunities as far as the eye can see.
I don’t want to beat a dead horse—or maybe I do---but for every report that I read about how absolutely negligent the Clinton campaign was, I just want to scream. Wikileaks and the FBI and voter ID laws, these are certainly all factors in the election and to be clear, absent any of them, this squeaker of a race would possibly have been a squeaker in Clinton’s favor.
But putting all that aside---NONE of those factors likely cost as many votes as did the ineptness of the campaign in general.
Politico notes:
From the day Clinton released her launch video, the campaign knew she’d struggle with enthusiasm. Yet they didn’t do many of the things voters are used to seeing to give a sense of momentum, insisting that votes didn’t come from campaign literature, door knocking, commitment to vote cards or the standard program of sending absentee ballot applications to likely voters rather than just appealing to the people once they’d already ordered the ballots.
“It was very surgical and corporate. They had their model, this is how they’re going to do it. Their thing was, ‘We don’t have to leave [literature] at the doors, everyone knows who Hillary Clinton is,’” said one person involved in the Michigan campaign. “But in terms of activists, it seems different, it’s maybe they don’t care about us.”
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.”
Robby Mook probably feels a knife in his back after this article but I found it enraging all over again.
I don’t want to discourage the lobbying of electors because Donald Trump truly will be the worst president of all time and a disaster to avoid, but I just can’t work myself up to the same level of outrage about this election knowing how fully and obviously the Clinton campaign dropped the fucking ball. And with so much at stake.