Nate Silver’s latest postmortem on the 2016 election is one Bayes might find provocative, and suggests that the respective GOP and Democratic party boffins only lost at some margins which in one case were not properly analyzed at the critical moment.
It was less boat-missing as it was not having a submarine in the battle group.
The cautionary tale should still fall on some larger issues that are less statistical and more unfortunately about comparative advantages between campaigns and their alternatives which have now made us run out of yarn. As always, the skepticism about throwing money at a problem rather than more direct GOTV resources remains.
The continuing story which now seems more apparent was that there was a mutually reinforcing (confirmation bias perhaps) misconception that remains viable concerning physical campaign trail presence in a state. The real work as Nate puts it is in the details.
To some extent, the media’s misconceptions about Electoral College strategy and Clinton’s errors may have reinforced one another.
For the most part, decisions about where to allocate resources should be determined by where states line up relative to one another.
Ultimately the correlation or coordination of face-to-face and media campaigns may have failed in considering as we now know, the need to consider the voter profile of critical districts, more specifically in the Wisconsin Western Upland region districts, among others.
Trump may have “outsmarted” Clinton, but it may be more about Clinton outsmarting herself. There obviously were other factors, some of which are about LIVs and the justifiable need to find villains including 538, but Nate is too smart to run for office.
Error no. 1: Clinton focused too much on close states rather than tipping-point states…
In general, however, the correct strategy5 for a candidate with an overall Electoral College lead can be surprisingly conservative, involving spending time and money in states that seem fairly safe but that could slip in the event of a shift in the race or systematic polling error. In Clinton’s case, that would have included more time in states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Colorado.
Error no. 2: Clinton was overconfident and campaigned in too narrow a range of states…
Clinton played a considerably narrower map than Trump did. In addition to Wisconsin, she also skipped Virginia, Minnesota and New Mexico during the closing stages of the campaign; Trump visited all of those states. And she spent much less time than he did in Colorado.
Apart from Wisconsin, Trump didn’t win any of these states (although he came close in Minnesota). But he had more or less the right strategy given the overall uncertainty in the race.
By one measure, Wisconsin was the most important state in the nation in November. According to FiveThirtyEight’s tipping-point calculation, it was the state that put Donald Trump over the top to 270 electoral votes and the White House. (Or at least arguably it did: Pennsylvania has a competing tipping-point claim.1)
...She probably should have campaigned in a broader range of states. In particular, she should have spent more time in states, such as Wisconsin, where she was narrowly leading in polls but that had the potential to flip to Trump if the election tightened, as it did during the final 10 days of the campaign.
...I come in praise of Trump’s Electoral College approach and in criticism of Clinton’s. Indeed, Trump was pretty close to having an optimal Electoral College strategy as judged by our tipping-point calculation. Clinton made a couple of mistakes, meanwhile. So did campaign reporters, who usually lauded Clinton’s strategy while maligning Trump’s, making essentially the same errors that the Clinton campaign did.