re: #254 darthstar

Thanksgiving’s over so we can disagree about politics again. Some of you may recall my bitching through August and September about Hillary not campaigning on the issues - that she was playing Trump’s game of character assassination…something he was far better at because he didn’t care if he was right or not.

I felt the very same thing during the campaign - I kept wondering, where on earth are the blanket ads with reasons to vote FOR Hillary? Where, during the DNC, was the condemnation of GOP obstruction and the “Obama could have done so much more with a cooperative congress, so make sure HRC has one”? Instead, it was all trump, all the time, even giving loathsome creatures like Paul Ryan an out (that “Trump doesn’t really represent GOPers” rubbish)

And then there’s this, which is tantamount to campaign malpractice: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Turns out Clinton’s ground game sucked.

A labor organizer in Ohio, who wished to remain anonymous, reports that Clinton’s early GOTV effort there focused on Republicans in the mistaken belief a significant number of them could be peeled away. This play largely failed. And it also involved serious opportunity costs: traditional Democratic constituencies like African Americans and the white working class were neglected, and Clinton ended up badly under-performing Obama among both groups, especially in the Rust Belt.
…
Instead, the Clinton campaign went all in on TV ads. Meanwhile, field offices suffered. In 2012 the Obama campaign had 789 field offices; this time around, Clinton only had 489 nationwide.

It gets worse. With too few people on the ground and the local knowledge of grassroots activists being shunned, the campaign apparently started feeding garbage to its computers and thus got garbage in return.

The computer-obsessed Clinton campaign — having lost touch with people but not big data — seems to have inadvertently turned out Trump voters!

And weren’t we even expressing concerns about GOP crossover a few months ago, as well? That it was a bad idea since those people, even if they did vote for HRC at the top of the ticket, would go GOP all the way down?