Hillary Clinton spread around the blame in a candid interview with Recode last Wednesday. She called her private email server a “nothingburger” and the Times endorsement of her candidacy a hypocritical reversal—they reduced up the scandal to “a matter for the help desk,” after having “covered it like it was Pearl Harbor.” She even noted her hosts’ hypocrisy, pointing out that Recode’s annual Code Conference takes cash from Goldman too.
“I take responsibility for every decision I made,” she said, “but that’s not why I lost.”
The subject of the conference, and the Clinton interview within it, however, was not Hillary Clinton’s knowing the difference between the things she can and cannot change. It was media and technology. And here, Clinton also apportioned the blame outside herself. She didn’t just rail against Russian interference in the election, but unloaded on the Democratic National Committee’s “bankrupt” and “non-existent” data operations.
Comparing the data at her disposal to what the RNC was working with, Clinton told Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg: “Let me just do a comparison for you. I set up my campaign and we have our own data operation. I get the nomination. So I’m now the nominee of the Democratic Party. I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party.”
“What do you mean nothing?” Mossberg said.
“I mean it was bankrupt, it was on the verge of insolvency, its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it.”
Clinton then went on to praise the RNC data operation (which during the campaign was considered to be in a rush to catch up with Clinton) and explain that Trump was further bolstered by help from the data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica, which is partly owned by hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer, and was recruited for the Trump team by its digital director Brad Parscale. Cambridge, known for its “psychographic” voter analysis, worked the Leave campaign in the United Kingdom, and then for Trump (through his son-in-law and current White House adviser Jared Kushner).
As Clinton put it to Recode: “Trump becomes the nominee and he is basically handed this tried and true, effective foundation. Then you’ve got Cambridge Analytica and you know, you can believe the hype on how great they were or the hype on how they weren’t, but the fact is, they added something.”
It’s worth noting first off that Clinton’s criticism, on its face, runs directly counter to the perception of the two campaigns. For a year, the press wrote about how technocratically up-to-the-minute the Clinton operation was, as opposed to the Trump team, which flew by the seat of its pants, skimped on resources, and carried their ground game in their hearts.
But just because Clinton’s claim runs against the contemporaneous perception doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
A DNC aide told THE WEEKLY STANDARD via email: “The DNC [had been] outspent on data and analytics since 2012″—adding that the new DNC Chairman “Tom [Perez] has said before that we could have invested more in grassroots organizing and our technology infrastructure.” (He’s not the only one.) “Now, the DNC is undergoing an organizational restructuring—and it’s no secret that technology was one area that needed an influx of resources and attention.”
While the qualitative details of Clinton’s complaint—the DNC’s mediocrity—are less than concrete, the Democratic party did struggle to build up and maintain its grassroots reach and technological mastery after Obama’s reelection in 2012. And they say so themselves.
Clinton’s “nonexistent inheritance” from the party claim doesn’t hold up though, according to Tom Bonier, the CEO of Democratic voter-targeting firm TargetSmart, who worked with the DNC from the outside. He wrote on Twitter: “the Clinton team was using DNC data throughout the primary. If it was that bad, they knew that for 2 yrs but did nothing.”
Andrew Therriault, the Democrats’ data czar until mid 2016, was incensed with Clinton’s claim and tweeted a saltily worded reassurance to his former team. In later tweets Therriault asserted: “All that said, irony of her bashing DNC data: *our* models never had mi/wi/pa looking even close to safe. Her team thought they knew better.”
Therriault deleted those tweets soon after posting them. (He told TWS via email that he wasn’t interested in talking further about his viral rebuttal to Clinton’s complaints.) Clinton’s fate alone does not condemn the DNC data: John Hagner of Clarity Campaign Labs told the Daily Beast he used the same data to win a governor’s race in 2016, casting doubt on its culpable mediocrity.
These data gurus who took to Twitter, Democratic political operatives, have a vested interested in defending their work.
Clinton’s other strike against the DNC—that they stagnated while Republicans improved their data operations—is harder to dispute. Cambridge Analytica may well have tipped the RNC over the edge data-wise, as Clinton pointed out in Wednesday’s interview (also noting the firm’s alleged ties to the global Bannonite conspiracy).
Clinton’s compliments about how sharp the Trump campaign was didn’t convince Trump campaign alum/data nerd Matt Oczkowski, though: “Data alone doesn’t win elections, good candidates with good messages do,” Oczkowski told TWS.
“I can tell you as an empirical fact, was her data operation wrong in a lot of ways this year? Absolutely. But was it the reason why the result ended up the way it did? It might have played a part, but it was not the main factor in her loss,” he said.
Instead, Oczkowski argues, her campaign struggled to read the new political landscape. They depended on an outmoded political understanding of urban and rural voters from cycles past, and used the Obama campaign’s maps and methods—the same data Bonier’s tweet defends as Clinton’s robust inheritance—to market an entirely different candidate.
The Trump campaign had less of a misleading backlog of assumptions: “All the legwork that Clinton’s talking about we had to build in five months,” Oczkowski said, referring to Cambridge’s work with the Trump campaign.
Cambridge wasn’t at it alone either. Paul Westcott at the Seattle-area data firm L2, who also worked with team Trump and the RNC, told TWS that in contrast to Democrats, “Republicans tapped multiple sources for their data, including L2, up and down the ballot.” And in this respect, the DNC lagged behind, he said, “I know they use an antiquated single provider who has had the contract forever and has not had a reason to improve their data for at least a decade.”
