Posted on 10/10/2017 10:57:28 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Why did Hillary Clinton lose the election?
There are numerous reasons fair game for finger-pointing, but to truly leverage any of those elements required data and know-how. Russia clearly used both to help influence an election. They and others may have used that knowledge to spread fake news.
One of the best catalysts for spreading the message — fake or otherwise — and reaching voters at the heart of their concerns was Facebook, which was right there with the campaigns, trying to help. But did one campaign accept more help than other other and, in doing so, help to sabotage their own presidential aspirations?
Reaching heartland voters on the topics they cared about, like infrastructure, required a Ph.D. in social media, data mechanics tools, and ad delivery. It's in that last department — getting ads in front of the right eyeballs — where the Clinton campaign may have lost its edge, at least according to one member of the team that helped Donald Trump take the White House.
Trump Campaign Digital Director Brad Parscale told 60 Minutes this week that when he emailed Facebook asking for “every single secret button, click, technology you have,” the social network agreed to send its staffers to sit with the Trump campaign advertising and data operation. This quality time reportedly happened as frequently as five days a week.
According to Parscale, the Clinton campaign was offered a similar set of embeds and turned them down.
In a single day, Parscale’s operation averaged 50,000-to-60,000 ads a day. He claims he was even able to choose the individual Facebook employees who would work with his operation based on whether they leaned Republican or Democrat. (He says he chose all Republicans, naturally.)
It was Parscale’s job to make the ads and figure out what was going to make people react, but his data game was certainly strengthened by Facebook employees who sat next to him explaining exactly how to use their tools to make that happen.
Facebook, however, disputes some of these claims. In an update to its Oct. 2 "Hard Questions: Russian Ads Delivered to Congress" post, Facebook says both campaigns were offered the same tools and they "had teams assigned to both."
Parscale's assertions to 60 Minutes that the Facebook employees worked with him full-time, and the more explosive claim that they let him hand-pick embeds by political affiliation, don't hold up. From the post:
"The campaigns did not get to 'hand pick' the people who worked with them from Facebook. And no one from Facebook was assigned full-time to the Trump campaign, or full-time to the Clinton campaign. Both campaigns approached things differently and used different amounts of support."
Facebook's comments mirror those of Twitter, which offered similar help to both campaigns:
Twitter provides nonpartisan ad sales resources to advertisers around the world, helping them use our ad sales platform efficiently. In 2016 we offered such resources to both the Clinton and Trump campaigns, as well as gubernatorial and Senate races across both parties."
One thing is clear from Facebook's response. One camp, either Trump or Clinton, didn't take as much advantage of Facebook was offering. Based on what Parscale claims — and considering he's already been caught in at least one possible lie, we have to take it all with a grain of salt — it wasn't the Trump camp. His campaign sounded especially eager to tap into the power of Facebook's ad-targeting tools.
What's also unclear is the extent to which Facebook's assistance actually helped.
At least at the start of the campaign, Clinton and Trump were on a level playing field. Both campaigns had data operations. Clinton reportedly built her own.
“I was very proud of my data and analytics team. They were largely veterans of the Obama campaigns, ’08, ’12, and then we brought in new people and brought in a lot of new expertise to build the next generation,” she told Walt Mossberg at this year’s Code Conference.
In reality, however, her data game wasn’t nearly as strong as what was coming out of the Trump campaign.
Clinton contends that Cambridge Analytica played a role here and essentially handed Trump’s team even more powerful data and personality-based targeting tools.
Clinton said she was aware that “the other side” had content farms and was using them to deliver “false content… in a very personalized way, both sort of above the radar and below." She also knew that a lot of this false information and news about her was flowing through Facebook.
Not helping matters was the Democratic National Committee, which was in bad shape. “I mean it was bankrupt, it was on the verge of insolvency, its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong,” she told Recode's Walt Mossberg. And so there was no data operation for Clinton to inherit.
Suffice to say Clinton had no confidence in the DNC’s data game, and she was worried about the powerful Republican data operation and its potential to impact voters via platforms like Facebook. Did that spur her to lean on Facebook's team as Parscale claims he did? There's no clear answer here, and we may never know.
But if Clinton had won, it's quite possible it would have been her digital director extolling the virtues of Facebook's ad tools on 60 Minutes.
Parscale painted a compelling picture for 60 minutes of how good those Facebook tools are for crafting and recrafting messages until you trigger the right response. The same issue ad, for instance, could be served thousands of times with slightly different art, colors, text. It could also deliver ads focusing on different topics to people living next door to each other. Imagine the impact this might have on gerrymandered swing states where you can map an issue to align with known voting blocks (gerrymandering tends to group people of certain party affiliations and ideologies).
Clinton's team probably didn't take the same kind of advantage of those tools, but the disparity between Clinton and Trump's approach in this area may have been one of degrees.
With so many factors at play and the scope of Russian interference in the election still being discovered, it’s hard to point to how Clinton campaign used or didn't use Facebook embeds as a singular contributing factor in her loss, but it’s also hard to deny that it didn’t have some impact.
“Russian interference in the election” is a bizarre and unsubstantiated allegation at best.
If a butterfly flies by one hundred miles away did they ruin your picnic?
Hillary Clinton lost the election, because she did not inspire voters.
Hollywood does not mean voters.
The entertainment industry, does not mean voters.
Hillary had every segment of American “opinion” makers in her corner. Every single one. She had every newspaper. She had every media outlet. All the movies were rooting for her.
What Hillary did not have, was voters.
Every single Trump event, was an overload. He stacked stadiums. He had complete packed arenas, everywhere, from very early.
He had people. Real people. Even democrats. He WON.
Because people liked him.
He is for America. He is for building things in America. He is for a successful America.
How many presidents, in both parties, have been for America for the last twenty years?
How many?
Trump won, because he is for our own country.
It is simple. He had the right message. America first.
It has been over one entire generation, since anyone said the things he has said.
In either party.
Enough of the “fake news” mantra.
Hitlery Rotten Clinton lost because she was a lousy candidate, Americans had Clinton fatigue (and Bush fatigue), and she is corrupt AF.
There, I fixed it.
But did not Clinton control Wasserman-Schultz and the DNC? Is her team not to blame for the condition of the DNC?
I suggest that the Clinton team only talked to other people in MA-NY-DC-LA-SF. All their information on Harrisburg or Peoria or Colorado Springs was filtered through friends in the beltway. The only Republicans they knew were beltway Republicans. The only Bernie people they knew were beltway Bernies.
They lived in a distorted view of reality. They really thought that they were the inevitable direction of history ... it was their time ... the result of natural evolution.
The result was that they did none of the things that predecessors Dick Morris, Carville, Axelrod had done as those three predecessors were not under the impression that their candidate was inevitable.
In Dec 2014, immediately after the Nov 2014 tsunami, attention turned to the 2016 presidential race. The #1 sentiment in all polls, in all social media, in all blogs and chat rooms and letters to the editor was singular:
No more Bush. No more Clinton.
Neither Jeb nor Hillary would recognize that barrier. Neither had a strategy to mitigate that barrier or flip it to their advantage. Contrast that with Axelrod. Axelrod had a candidate with a lot of negatives. Axelrod expertly flipped his candidate's negatives to be positives. Trump, Lewandowski, Conway, etal flipped Trump's negatives to be positives. That is what competent campaign strategists/managers do. Hillary and her people refused to see reality.
Hillary did absolutely nothing to mitigate "No more Clinton". She ran as the candidate of the past, with experience and knowledge of the past. She did not run as the candidate of the future. Throughout all past presidential campaigns, when there is a choice between the candidate of the past and the candidate of the future, the future wins.
Consider a litany of events.
I'm with her was the campaign slogan chosen for the Hillary campaign long before she officially announced. Most candidates say I'm with you or I'm with the middle class or I'm with hard working Americans. I'm with her made Hillary seem very arrogant and conceited and not caring about the rest of us. Of course, most politicians have those traits. The difference is that most politicians fake an interest in others. Not Hillary. Not her campaign slogan.
In the primaries Trump tagged Jeb low energy. In voters minds, Bush and Clinton were two peas in the same pod ... both throwbacks to the past. When Hillary demonstrated low energy voters associated Hillary with Jeb... both losers. Hillary's conduct during Benghazi spoke of low energy. Her conduct in disagreeing with Obama on certain aspects of foreign policy spoke of low energy.
Then, after not campaigning in August, the photo appeared of Hillary being thrown into a van like a side of beef. That confirmed she was worse than low energy and not up to the rigor of the office. A competent Hillary campaign manager would have designed photo ops to pre-empt the low energy association with Jeb.
Escalation is a winning strategy that is used often. Start with an understatement... an allegation of a minor point. The opponent won't respond. Define the opponent with that image. Then escalate from minor to major definition of the candidate.
Rahm Emmanuel did this expertly in Illinois. McSweeney is extreme on minor issue A that swings no votes. McSweeney does not respond. McSweeney is extreme on minor issue B. McSweeney does not respond. McSweeney is an extremist, out of the mainstream. McSweeney's goose is cooked.
Conclusion: A litany of mistakes by Hillary Clinton herself, and by her hand picked campaign staff and hand picked DNC staff made her campaign a loser.
Note that this analysis is devoid of ideology and issues. It is all about strategy and tactics. I maintain that with the right strategy and tactics, a candidate of any ideology can win. A Reagan or Obama, or Trump or even Hillary can win. But with the wrong strategy and wrong tactics a candidate loses, regardless of ideology and issues. Smart strategy and smart tactics is to cherry pick issues and ideology to benefit your candidate.
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