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Broadly speaking I agree with Silver here - what you lose when you weaponize the polls is their ability to warn you about negative trends in time to address them, specifically in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. And what you lose when you weaponize the media is their function to honestly reflect what your campaign looks like to the undecided voter. Understand though that these were the fault of neither the pollsters or the media, they were the fault of a campaign staff too imbued with its own sense of inevitability to recognize the warning signs, or a candidate similarly besotted who overruled any warning from her staff. I don't know which of the latter it was, perhaps both.

But Trump's campaign wasn't anything spectacularly original, in fact, it was entirely old-school: rallies and speeches that blew the top off the arenas. Hillary was playing it "smart" in the meantime: her campaign was focused on milking money from wealthy donors and to hell with the unwashed, they'd just come around. Only they didn't. And the upshot was those bathetic scenes of shocked Hillary acolytes watching the returns in the arena, their candidate ensconced in a five-star hotel room, far too engaged in an alcoholic stupor to connect with the voter as she had been all along. A sordid end to a sordid and unworthy campaign, and the end of any "inevitability" illusions.

And the upshot was those bathetic scenes of shocked Hillary acolytes watching the returns in the arena, their candidate ensconced in a five-star hotel room, far too engaged in an alcoholic stupor to connect with the voter as she had been all along.

Ooh, ooh - that's some of the best written porn I've ever read - say it again! Say it again!

:-)

I agree with your assessment. The one interesting idea I took out of the article was ... on one hand, Trump campaign could do nothing right, according to MSM, so they didn’t care where they campaigned, they knew the NYT would say it was wrong, stupid and showed their campaign was doomed.

On the other hand, because Clinton campaign wanted and enjoyed their slavish media support, they tended not to go into (or campaign or rally) in states that would have raised “uh-ohs” by the media. States such as Wi, Pa, Iowa, Mi, etc. Obviously states that turned everything around for Trump. So in a bizarre, non-intuitive way, the media made it easier for Trump to do whatever he thought he needed to do, while restricting Hillary to stay out of the questionable states.

Also, in a general way the MSM hurt Hillary on election night, I believe, because or their over the top fake polling that showed Hillary with 5 or 8 or 12 point leads nationally and similar leads in most battlegrounds. I believe many Hillary supporters, and Hillary leaners (same people now rioting in streets) didn’t bother to vote, because Hillary had it “in the bag.”