Here is Ed Morrissey writing at HotAir.com about some very interesting mistakes — and interesting numbers in Michigan:
Hillary’s team added a level of arrogance that can only be described as remarkable, under the circumstances. Barack Obama built perhaps the best presidential-campaign infrastructure ever in 2008 and kept it largely intact in 2012. Democrats not only had that game plan available, but saw clearly how Team Romney failed to match it. Rather than learn from those examples, and Hillary’s own failure in the 2008 primary she was widely expected to win, they doubled down on their flaws and insularity.
Door knocking? Pass. Literature? Pass. Dovere relates a story about the Clinton campaign telling a potential volunteer that lawn signs and canvassing were “unscientific,” whatever that means in terms of politics. Only in the final days of the campaign did Hillary’s team put significant effort into GOTV. Thanks to that failure, they had no way to check their assumptions on polling or turnout models, and no time to adjust to fix the problems that emerged on Election Day.
Democrats want to blame their loss on Comey, Russians, the Electoral College; perhaps the heartbreak of psoriasis will be next. Dovere’s deep dive gets much closer to the truth about the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton, especially in the “blue wall” states she took for granted. Hillary Clinton never bothered to generate that enthusiasm, and her campaign was almost deliberately designed to avoid it, at least in the states that mattered. Politics is not a science, but the art of human relations, a lesson that Romney learned the hard way, and that Hillary and her team still resist.
It’s also a lesson for Republicans. Dovere notes that Trump won Michigan while getting 30,000 fewer votes than George W. Bush did in a losing effort in 2004 (it’s closer to 35,000). Trump may not have won those “blue wall” states as much as Hillary lost them.
Read more: HotAir.com
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