During the afternoon of the presidential election, I exchanged emails with a friend in the White House to try to assess how things looked on their end. I heard back that they were cautiously optimistic about the presidential race but increasingly concerned about the prospects for winning the Senate. I told my friend that things looked good in Pennsylvania from everything I could observe. Turnout was very high at my suburban Philadelphia precinct, and reporting from friends in the city indicated excellent voter participation. There was no sign in the southeastern part of the state that Clinton was about to suffer a 10% or greater drop-off of Obama’s 2012 support in 23 counties, and a 10% or greater drop-off on Obama’s 2008 support in 45 counties.
The Clintons got the news first that something was desperately wrong from an operative in Florida.
Around 7:45 on election night, when Hillary Clinton and her aides still thought they were headed to the White House, troubling news emerged from Florida. Steve Schale, the best vote-counter the Democrats had in the state, told campaign officials they were going to lose the biggest battleground in the country. Yes, Clinton was doing well in some places, but Donald Trump’s numbers in Republican areas were inconceivably big.
“You’re going to come up short,” Schale said, stunning aides in Brooklyn who were, until that moment, comfortably cradled in the security of their own faulty analytics.
People talk a lot about “the faulty analytics,” but it’s important to realize that Clinton met reasonable targets in her areas of strength. Compared to Obama’s 2012 performance, she netted about 400 more votes out of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia combined, and in the Philly suburbs, she netted 5,796 more votes out of Delaware County, 26,097 more votes out of Chester County, and 34,376 more votes out of Montgomery County than Obama had in 2012. This more compensated for a modest 1,243 net underperformance for her in the more working class Bucks County suburb.
Compared with Obama’s landslide 2008 election, she impressed by netting 6,331 more votes than he had out of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County which more than offset the 3,482 fewer votes she netted out of Philadelphia County.
When we talk about “faulty analytics,” therefore, it’s important that we understand regardless of turnout, Clinton was netting votes at a clip that should have assured victory. I don’t know that they thought they were going to do much better than they did in blue areas and I don’t think that’s where there was a failure of modeling or analysis.
The failure seems to have been in not realizing that Trump was going to win red areas by “inconceivably big” margins.
I keep coming back to this because it doesn’t seem to be truly appreciated.
This is exactly the kind of story that makes me suspicious. Did these “Inconceivably Big Losses” occur in areas which used electronic voting machines?
It still fucking hurts.
I posted here I thought we had won Florida.
Because:
The Broward numbers looked great, and the Hillsborough numbers looked great.
Steve noted:
And you just don’t lose with those numbers.
But Clinton collapsed in the ring counties around I-4.
Schale again:
The stories of FL and PA are almost identical.
http://steveschale.com/
Polling and a back of the envelope calculation was enough for me to put both FL and NC in Trump’s column weeks before election day. That meant that Trump had four ways to win. One of those ways was NH AND NV (or NH and CO, but Trump threw in the towel on CO early enough that it could be ignored) which team Clinton did work hard to retain, but barely succeeded in NH (which still pisses off Trump). The other three ways were PA, MI, OR WI.
So, what the hell was Clinton doing expending time, resources, and money in FL, NC, OH, and AZ and completely ignoring WI, paying scant attention to MI, and not getting west of the Philly suburbs in PA?
If you predicted Florida honestly you got lucky: there was no way to predict a 1 point win given the complexity in the state.
I was screaming about all of this in September. I couldn’t understand why they pulled out of Co (which was whopping 3 point win). If you go back and look at that chart I was posting any campaign with a brain would make sure THEY KNEW they were going to win any state where the 2012 margin was smaller than Colorado’s.
Anyway I read the book Shattered. In Robby Mook’s defense he was applying lessons he learned from David Plouffe.
The campaign did not poll during the last 3 weeks of the campaign.
It is just amazing. They thought they knew better.
This another case in which a general statement without reference to geography misleads. What “Republican areas” in Florida were those “inconceiveably big numbers” flipping the state?
Trump’s margin in Florida was 112,000 votes in a turnout of over 9 million votes.
David Leip’s Atlas: Florida, County Graphs
Where are those inconceiveably big numbers?
I don’t see them, even in aggregate.
What I see is a lot of small margins in a lot of counties adding up to a squeaker that is “huge numbers” only by comparison to the 2000 election.
It was the geographical distribution of voting and not the numbers that allowed Trump to lose bigly in the popular vote and still win the electoral vote.
Could any analytics have caught that event in advace?
I doubt it.
Psephology is its own entire thing. Sometimes “inconceivable” (which really means unprecedented) is not numerically much larger than “conceivable”.
To <strike>steal</strike> borrow a term I saw earlier today on another site, this is dirtographics the science of assigning political affiliation to geographic regions rather than humans.
True enough. But that is exactly what geographically delimited legislative and Congressional district do. And exactly what the difference is between the popular vote and the electoral college vote.
Those maps of the US full of red are dirtographic maps of an election in which Trump lost the popular vote.
50% + 1 vote is what flips the color on those maps. There is a lot of that in the Florida data I linked to, unlike some other states generally referred to as “red states”. No 80% “inconceiveable” numbers in Florida.
I’m wondering what the seasoned operative was finding inconceiveable.
I posted about Florida here:
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2016/11/17/164624/70
To take one example:
And I think it is fair to say few on our side saw the failure in the ring counties of Tampa and Orlando coming. Now they were not really deep Republican areas (Obama won Pinellas) before 2016.
But the shift in margins in the counties around Tampa were 10-15 points – not small.
Having said all of this and having read the book I am surprised the Clinton people were confident.
I don’t think Florida was ever more than a 60-40 proposition at best.
The Early vote, as I noted here, was insanely close. I don’t know how ANYONE could say with any degree of certainty who was going to win.
As I have noted before:
Total Change in Margin from the 5 counties surrounding Tampa: -122K
Total Florida margin: -112K
Having political rallies in big cities is lots of fun. Democrats are generally well-received there, the crowds are big, and they’re enthusiastic. That translates into winning the vote in urban areas.
But nationally, Democrats are giving away states they should win by neglecting suburban and rural areas. The crowds aren’t as big or enthusiastic, and it seems like a heavy investment of time for little return. But it doesn’t require sweeping these areas, just a 3% or 5% bump could make the difference. In addition to generating local excitement, it becomes a shot in the arm for folks persevering in these areas, who often feel neglected by the national party.
There’s also the advantage of talking to the local newspaper and radio reporters and presenting the Democratic platform without the Fox filter that distorts everything. Residents in these areas still read the paper and get local news from the radio. Why not take advantage of local media’s need for content by supplying some of our own?
This election really highlighted the need to place resources everywhere. Clinton didn’t even make an effort in many counties where she was blown out, just assuming that because she was white she would at least match Obama’s numbers. This was the key mistake of her campaign.
I saw it out here in Washington state. It’s the other side of the issue because it was clear she was going to win our fair state. But Obama committed resources here in 2008 and 2012. Those resources generated some real enthusiasm on the ground and pushed Governor Inslee over the top.
Clinton spent zero in Washington. This showed up in a complete lack of enthusiasm on the ground. At least that was part of it. Having a candidate so closely tied to “centrism” and big-moneyed interests didn’t help either. I talked myself blue in the face trying to convince Bernie voters that we needed them on board. Even here in Washington, a ton of Democrats didn’t turn out. Fear of the other guy isn’t enough.
PS: Though I actively campaigned for Clinton, aspects of her candidacy nauseated me. Her Israel-can-do-not-wrong perspectives were disgusting. She personally deserved to lose, she’s such an opportunist. It’s just that the American people didn’t deserve the Don. Or maybe we did. Maybe we’re getting exactly what we deserve.
She made no effort in Colorado outside the Front Range urban areas. Obama did, and he won my rural county.
I’m guessing it’s you who made this post at Balloon Juice during various election post-mortems:
As I said in a previous topic, Dems aren’t necessarily going to win rural counties like ours but they have to campaign here regardless. The idea is to cut the margin of loss to an acceptable level.
Obama has been very public about this. He’s stated on more than one occasion that the reason he won Iowa in the 08 Primary was that he campaigned everywhere.
Here in Misery, our Dem Senator, Feckless Claire, understands this. She just finished a series of town halls and every one was in a county that overwhelmingly voted for the Popular Vote Loser.
The Clinton campaign fucked up…again. I was an enthusiastic supporter but her and her campaign still didn’t get it. And now we’re stuck with the results.
Obama learned this as a state senator in IL, he routinely traveled downstate and heard people out
I don’t read and have never posted on Balloon Juice.
I did post that on Booman Tribune, however.
Ah, duh. I see that now. Since there are a fair number of us on both sites, I often confuse some of the quotes I save.
No problem
Wonderfully interesting postmortems.
So Der Trumper seemingly alienated the educated classes to an unprecedented degree, causing even the rock solid Repub suburbs to quaver and either reject him (in Blue states) or barely support him (in Red ones). While the areas outside the major metropolitan areas gave Der Trumper “inconceivably big” margins, propelling him to his popular-vote-losing “victory”.
Setting aside the (continuing) failure of our constitution and the FBI director’s throwing of a (too close) election to the Repub, we are still in the midst of attempting to figure out the motivation(s) of the WWC Obama deserters and what it portends for the future. As several here have observed, the suburbanites did not reject their braindead Repub Congressional candidates at the level they rejected Trumper, so he is simply an aberration–a Repub many of them couldn’t go along with, maybe because they could not stomach voting for an obviously unfit and unqualified fool with an obvious personality disorder to be holding the nuclear buttons. Whatever. They have not renounced “conservatism”, they just couldn’t endorse Der Trumper.
The lower education/working class white masses had no such reluctance. The “increased racism” explanation has several weaknesses, as Booman and all the commenters laid out. It’s somewhat incoherent and difficult to make the evidence fit. The “economic” explanation has similar problems, most notably the fact that the environment isn’t substantially different than 2012 and is clearly better than 2008. The decline is marginal at best.
And, of course, how/why exactly do Congressional Repubs keep holding onto these deep red rural districts in such massive numbers if the denizens are so frustrated with their economies and prospects? They are simply too stupid to understand anything about macroeconomics and what it means to have a corporately owned Congress?
Perhaps the events of the past 4 year provide more clues than have been imagined. The past four years had some major culture war victories for the left–most notably the declaration of a federal constitutional right to same sex marriage. There has also been a national movement calling attention to the harassment and unjustified killing of (urban) minorities by (urban) police, with the usual law n’ order response of the media, running many stories on our Heroic Thin Blue Line and the uppitiness of those ungrateful black people who are objecting to being killed for no good reason. We also had some (home grown) Islamic terrorists strike (urban) cities on several occasions, which were breathlessly covered for maximum fear. Finally, Obama also took the very first actions in support of addressing climate change in the past 4 years, and protecting the environment and attempting to save the climate have been made anathema to the ignorant low education voter.
These are types of things that outrage extreme “conservative” sensibilities, and they are all things that Trumper ran against. Add in the stealing of the Supreme Court seat by McConnell and its (advertised) effect on Roe et. al. and one can perhaps throw out the theory that 2016 was a culture war backlash against the left, as the left was beginning its (premature?) celebration of national victory.
At a minimum, it might be well to examine some of the things that actually happened in the past 4 years when seeking explanations of substantial alterations in WWC voting patterns. This might fit the data better than Obama-voting racists or economic “desperation” in parts of the world that actually have very few people even in aggregate (such as small rural towns).
The huge problem, of course, is that the suburbanites will happily return to their all-Repub voting pattern whenever Trumper exits the scene (and will never stop voting for “conservatives” for Congress), but the WWC dissenters from the culture wars are likely lost to Dems forever.
They’ve been lost since at least the 1994 mid-terms. That’s when Clinton put ‘gays in the military’ in play. All those Sam Nunn-David Boren-Howell Heflin voters left and never came back.
And, of course, how/why exactly do Congressional Repubs keep holding onto these deep red rural districts in such massive numbers if the denizens are so frustrated with their economies and prospects?
Because Democrats don’t run anyone there, and when they do it’s some lame Blue Dog instead of a Sanders-type populist.
Inconceivable is the right word, alright.
Inconceivable that “loyal Dems” allowed the DNC big-timers to bump Sanders out of contention.
Inconceivable that the DNC big-timers were so stupid as to get caught red-handed in he act.
Inconceivable that a serious presidential candidate would use the word “deplorables” in public referring to a societal group that quite possibly has traditionally made up 1/2-3/4s of the traditional Dem voters…working class and rural white people.
Inconceivable that a serious presidential candidate would use the phrase “public and private positions” in public referring to what is basically the tendency for politicians to lie to their constituencies in order to get over.
Inconceivable that y’all are still trying to blame anybody but the DNC and the candidate for Trump’s win.
Inconceivable that those selfsame DNC controllers have been allowed to remain in power, ready to fuck up the next election just like they fucked up this one.
Inconceivable that with all of those “inconceivables,” you are still trying to blame the statisticians for the loss.
Inconceivable.
Inconceivable but true.
BIGLY true.
WTFU.
AG
Even granting all your points for the sake of argument, AG, what is inconceivable is that the white electorate could be so incompetent as to think Der Trumper was actually the lesser of two evils, circa 2016.
One cannot “wake up” the braindead. And it is the white electorate which has failed, bigly!
That’s exactly why you lost us. What have you “highly educated” “non-deplorables” ever done for the melanin-deficient? You insult us in racist terms. You insist that soon “demographics is destiny” and you won’t need those dumb icky working stiffs and hillbillies anymore. And you are surprised that we aren’t as dumb as fish, continuing to pull the lever for you. Trump was not a good choice but he promised jobs and Hillary promised more out-sourcing and upper class scorn.
I voted for Stein, but she wasn’t a real choice. I would have walked the neighborhood for Sanders. I wouldn’t walk out of a burning building for Clinton. She is GARBAGE. Human trash, like she calls us.
Now Trump is claiming t9o rein in the H1-B program. If he does (which I doubt), I will vote for him in 2020, because for two decades NO Democrat has done that, instead courting the immigrant vote to the detriment of the native-born, trusting that we are too dumb to notice.
I personally haven’t done anything for anyone, VW, haha. But surely things like SS, Medicare, Medicaid and the great environmental laws aided the “melanin-deficient”.
I guess Trumper’s “promises” were good enough, although it didn’t take much to see that voting for Trump was a fool’s errand, even if one took into account the dubious promises. I remain adamant that Der Trumper was not the lesser evil, which will be made clear in due course.
As for H1-B, that the Dems have allowed someone to get to the left of them on this issue is appalling, and exactly the sort of thing to point to as to why they have been destroyed. But don’t get your hopes up too high, since this is a federal law as far as I know, and Repubs aren’t about to change it, as it is plutocrat-demanded—although only Dems seem to get blamed for this stuff. Whether Trumper is willing to fail to enforce this law on his own (ala the doomed environment) will be the proof of his intended “reining in”…so that will be your test of his determination on this issue!
Well, plenty of people and a few politicians get to the left of the Dems on many issues, but they don’t count.
Your gripe is that a Republican got to the left of Dems. Have we forgotten the campaign so soon? Trump got to the left of Dems (Obama and/or Clinton) on TPP and FP wrt to Russia, Syria, and NATO. Whether his position was authentic or not, for the moment he’s killed TPP and being the weak half-wit that he is, bowed at least somewhat (and possibly fully) to the Beltway consensus on FP.
Democratic voters support marijuana legalization 49% to 28% — what’s the split on that question for elected Democratic officeholders?
Am I mistaken? Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and environmental laws only apply to white people? Not all Americans?
It didn’t take much to see that voting for Hillary Clinton was a fool’s errand. She obviously was in Goldman-Sachs’ hip pocket. Her promises reversed during the course of the election and doubtlessly would have reversed again after the election.
are entitled to extra . . . special . . . beneficial treatment available only to us solely on the basis of our melanin-deficiency!
Only that would suffice for you. (But then why would you have gone door-to-door for Bernie? He wasn’t offering any such thing.)
There’s a word for that, you know. (Can’t require spelling out, can it? Yet you rant and rail against its application to yourself, even as you demonstrate here its completely accurate applicability to you!)
I’m betting this comment of yours was more self-revealing than you really intended!
I’ll retract if/when you document the truth of this:
I.e., documentation of Clinton “calling” you “human trash”.
Have at it.
Prediction: you won’t because you can’t (because she didn’t). Demonstrating (again) why your credibility here is zero.
But go ahead, prove me wrong. Would be a welcome change from your usual.
He self-defines as a deplorable.
one (at least) of several specific categories of bigot, all of them . . . well . . . deplorable!
Wonder which he’s declaring himself to be. Racist? Islamophobic? Xenophobic? Homophobic? All the above?
I doubt he’d take those options, but he just knows that he’s in the basket somewhere.
Having dived in head-first.
“deplorable[s]”.
To claim she called him that is to declare he’s one (or more) of those kinds of bigot, aka “deplorable[s]” (I see I left out “sexist”).
It’s that simple.
And, of course, his actual, original lie was that she called him “human trash”.
They wanted something new.
What Obama represented…neoliberalism in all its rancid glory, globalism, international corporatism, government from way, way above…wasn’t working for them. Jobs were headed out of the country: banks/credit card companies etc. were eating their lunch…as was inflation…black communities were in turmoil and madmen with guns were making headlines daily both domestically and internationally.
They chose a new path. HRC was just Obama II…minus the glib charm, saddled with enmities from the 1990s right on through her Senate and Secretary of State years and a very bad politician/gladhander who thought she was going to win on sheer “competence.”
What’d you expect from these people?
Refined intelligence on a conceptual level? These products of a broken media culture and lousy educational system? They do their work and they are…mostly…pretty damned good at it. Work intelligence. An admirable thing if your nose isn’t so deep in the ass of the .01% that you think people who do real work…as opposed to office/bureaucratic/hustle bullshit…are “deplorables.”
Because that”s what she thought.
HRC and the DNC both.
That’s why they didn’t organize in the whiteland/heartland. Too busy in gentrified Brooklyn and DC eating $50 lunches to bother with the plebes.
And they got their asses kicked.
I call bullshit.
AG
Ok, SUPERGENIUS. You’ve discovered the problem, in fact you’re really good at finding the problem. Now how do we solve the problem? That’s a bit harder, innit? How does the party appeal to the WWC in such a way as to not alienate the rest of the party, you know, Blacks, Hispanics, women, LBGTQ and other minorities that make up the base?
What do I expect? Minimum electoral competence. The ability to identify a completely unqualified candidate. The ability to see that someone obviously has a couple of screws loose.
Something new, eh? The Hitler movement brought something new. Try as one might to defend or justify our incompetent white electorate, Trumper cannot rationally be considered the lesser evil. Or is rationality also expecting too much? They wanted to believe willfully ignorant nonsense, that’s what they wanted.
We shall see whether they get what they deserve.
Words cannot express how tired I am of Gilroy’s schtick…
At least I am reaching you…
AG
Twenty-five years of constant lying, slander and conspiracy-mongering, all aimed at two people named Clinton, paid off.
Do not underestimate this. There are a lot more crazy people than anyone wants to admit. And not a few of them are Democrats.
Did anybody catch this yesterday?
ps://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/books/shattered-charts-hillary-clintons-course-into-the-iceberg.html
?_r=0
I missed this book review. Thanks for the heads up. It is very good and offers plenty of food for thought.
Of course, blame me!
[All links added are mine – Oui]
But, but … not Comey but Putin is to blame!
Democrats out-of-touch with plight of millennials and the reason Brits voted FOR Brexit …
○ John Kerry: Brexit could be ‘walked back’
○ Fed ‘Mystified’ Why Millennials Still Live at Home
○ In the 1960s and 1970s, the culture shifted decisively leftward, but American voters shifted
to the right and answered a cultural revolution with a political Thermidor By BooMan on Sept. 21, 2016
Hillary knew well before 745 PM that she was in for a tough day. I live in NYC and it was announced in early afternoon that her fireworks were canceled. At that time it was obvious to me that she was not cruising to victory, though with a slight chance that it was a security reason.
The Clinton campaign lived and died by big data.
You write:
Yup.
Precisely.
Above it all.
Just like neoliberalism/globalism/international corporatism in general.
The .01% have gotten so far away from the rest of us that they cannot see the forest for the trees.
If they were foresters they wouldn’t know if a plague hit their land until a massive tree die-off started. And by then it would be too late to do anything about it.
Except of course burn the forest down and replace it with a “gentrified” forest. You know…one that wouldn’t get sick?
Or maybe …
Robotrees?
Could happen…
AG
P.S. So could this.
No more messy deplorables, don’tcha know…just the controllers and the controlled.
The ultimate neoliberal dream.