Hillary Clinton could have withstood Donald Trump’s rural surge and won in Pennsylvania had her campaign hit the vote goals it set for Philadelphia and surrounding suburbs.
That’s according to Brian Fallon, Clinton’s campaign secretary, in tweets he posted Thursday afternoon.
“We did well in Philly ‘burbs but still underperformed our goals. Could have withstood rural surge if we hit our marks,” Fallon said in a Twitter post.
Fallon was responding to a debate about whether Trump, now the president-elect, made it impossible for Clinton to win because he simply pulled too many votes from rural and exurban counties. Trump defeated Clinton statewide by just 46,435 votes.
Michael Cohen, a Boston Globe columnist, asked Fallon if he would have predicted a Clinton victory if the Democratic nominee exceeded President Obama’s 2012 vote totals in Pennsylvania’s blue counties, which she did.
Fallon said he would have projected a Clinton win. “Degree of rural surge was not expected,” he conceded in a tweet. “But cld have withstood it if we hit our goal in ‘burbs. Comey letter cost us there.”
Fallon was referring to the letter to Congress from FBI Director James Comey sent on Oct. 28 confirming that the bureau was taking another look at Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
T.J. Rooney, a former chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, described Trump’s victory in the state, the first by a Republican presidential nominee since 1988, as a perfect storm that Clinton couldn’t have done anything about. He also dismissed criticism directed at Clinton that she lost there because of strategic mistakes made by her campaign.
“They did not screw this up,” Rooney said.
“The margins out of Philadelphia and the suburbs — nine days out of 10 that wins you Pennsylvania,” Rooney added. “I understand there’s lot of head-scratching, but the reality is, they did run a good campaign. But the undercurrent was that even the most perfectly run effort wasn’t going to be enough to win that day.”
