From the new York Times:
As much as Mr. Trump won the election in Wisconsin, Hillary Clinton lost it. Her campaign, which prided itself on employing all the data wizards and ground game gurus money can buy, did not do nearly enough to lock down the upper Midwest, particularly Wisconsin and Michigan, and instead treated those states as a given.
Paul Soglin is the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin’s capital city, in cerulean Dane County. He supported Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, and said he talked at least once a week with a field organizer from the Sanders campaign during the primary. But once Mrs. Clinton locked up the nomination, it was radio silence from the Clinton campaign.
Not one call.
I have started to come to a conclusion based on conversations since the election.
I do not think the Clnton people ever believed losing was a possibility. As a result the campaign was kind of a massive CYA job. They did things to check off boxes, not because they were necessary to win.
It really shouldn’t come as a surprise WI would be close.
This is the cheat sheet based on Obama’s ’12 margin. It’s really not a shock the state would be competitive – the margin was close to NV for example which was fought over tooth and nail.
They did other things. But the choices they made make me think they never really thought they had to defend their path to 270. OK – so they had polls. But during the summer surely some organization would be built in the state. If for no other reason than as evidence as their support for “downballot” given the Senate race..
But no. And I think that is because the Clinton people didn’t think they could lose.
Curious how many of those Rust Belt losses were members of the Hillary Victory Fund MAD arrangement? Did the state party have funds for down ballot? I read that Russ was asking at the end.
Saw that Minnesota is hanging on by a fingernail. Both lege houses are now Republican.
Not seeing any MN changes/adjustments in the past week to the reported votes of Hillary, Trump, and 3rd parties. Hillary has a 45,000 vote lead and that’s way outside what a recount could make disappear (assuming there was no Democratic rigging in the cities).
Not talking about this go-round, but down the road…”Add in some targeted vote suppression in a heavily white state and voila, the impregnable firewall is breached and your face has been melted off….” Wonder if their current popular Dem gov is term limited?
Well, if one is going to run a standard issue, mush-moutheed Democrat and depend on historical voting patterns, she/he will lose in “rust belt” states for a while. Maybe only a short while if Trump crashes the economy or merely ends up on the hot seat of an inevitable crash. However, a good, solid Democrat with an authentic personality and no taint of scandal can shift the voters in his/her favor by the needed 3 to 5 points. It’s crap shoot with a crap candidate against a crap candidate.
In every competition underestimating one’s opponent can easily be catastrophic. HRC thought Trumper was the perfect joke candidate, and never understood the unprecedented circumstance that she and Bill were themselves presenting to voters. In a battle of the High Negatives, it turns out either one can triumph, haha. Especially with a failed constitution.
I’ve been scratching my head over treating WI as a solid Blue state for some time. Same for MI. The evidence was getting pretty shaky, given the horrible creatures that WI (and MI) has given its state government over to. Yes, WI hadn’t voted Repub for prez in quite some time, but man, you could sure see that it wanted to! Add in some targeted vote suppression in a heavily white state and voila, the impregnable firewall is breached and your face has been melted off….
In fairness, it was difficult not to underestimate Trump. He was a guy with a big megaphone that said dreadful things. And there was no there there in his campaign operation. Whether he figured it out or just got lucky, he quasi-replicated GWB’s two elections. The hunger for a win after eight years out of the WH is always strong for either party. It brings out voters that lean in the direction of the party but don’t fit within an identifiable faction of the party’s base and don’t pass the LV screen. Oddly, GWB’s slick 2000 campaign didn’t find them. They went for the usual suspects: the religious/anti-abortion contingency, the standard issue ordinary LV Republican, and the GOP country club set. The “missing” turned out for GWB in ’04 because sometimes it’s nice to vote for a winner.
Trump could shed a lot of the country club and DC Republicans because they only exist in small numbers in the potential swing states and there were a lot more of those unlikely voters in those states. A key of course was that he had to hold the religion vote; did he know mental compartmentalization is a feature of these voters? Are they the TV viewers for his beauty pageants? Difficult to imagine that he was that systematic in any of his analysis.
More plausible to me is that he tapped into the pool of GOP leaning Perot voters. In both ’92 and ’96 they voted for Perot because on trade they recognized that there was no difference between Clinton and Bush. Neither Gore nor Bush would have been anymore attractive for them.
From this perspective, once those more rural voters in WI decided to vote, a Trump-Feingold ticket split isn’t as weird as a partisan analysis would suggest.
…did he know mental compartmentalization is a feature of these voters?
Red states are the highest consumers of on-line porn and Utah is #1. So, yeah. The evidence is out there.
Have you looked at any numbers for a Trump-Feingold split? I’m curious as to where Feingold lost support seeing he lagged behind Clinton. Perhaps in the Milwaukee suburbs where Trump didn’t do quite as well as Romney.
I’m not particular surprised that both HRC and Russ lost here although I didn’t expect the state-wide swing in Presidential years to occur for another cycle.
Only from THiS.
You could collect the data yourself and verify the report.
Not necessary. This makes perfect sense to me since Bernie did very well here in these areas.
The combined Johnson+Stein vote hurt Trump more than Clinton in WI. I saw that in some NH precincts as well.
Buzzfeed — Why Trump Really Won Wisconsin And Pennsylvania. (More “how” than “why” IMO.) Some in-depth number crunching and a good write-up. And some counter-intuitive observations. In WI rural areas that were Trump-Feingold ticket splitters. And in suburban areas there were Clinton-Johnson ticket splitters.
Why is Stein carrying the “Hillary was cheated” ball and raising money for recounts? Stein raised a total of $3.5 million for her campaign and Jill Stein hits $2.5m donation target for recount in US election battleground states, ABC News Why is this setting off a little alarm bell in my head?
LOL Do you think that is fooling anyone?
Please explain because it’s not obvious to me. wrt the money, easy enough to assume that it’s not from Stein supporters, but even there I have a bit of a problem because vote and electronic vote theft obsession is high on the the far left and there’s enough money available from them to put together $2.5 million. OTOH, Hillary diehards are grasping for any possible straw. But is the money coming from individuals or from the large donor Hillary base? Or even being facilitated by Hillary operatives?
The next question is why would Stein take this on? To satisfy her vote fraud obsessives? Does she expect to find a treasure trove of Stein votes that didn’t get counted? Has she sold out? Or has she been a DP stalking horse all along?
Jill Stein’s credibility for serious scientific thinking took a big hit in this election cycle. She’s not going to get that back by mounting a national effort operating from top-line/statewide data and weak analysis and her “gut” once any recount confirms the current results.
I suspect it is largely funded by pro-HC Dems who do not want to leave fingerprints. The corner they painted themselves into before the election–about our elections being safe from hackers? A big obstacle.
As for Stein, what a dupe.
they still can’t believe they lost. pitiful
According to their donation page the purpose is to raise standards (presumably by exposing fraud).
Even without any collaboration behind the scene, there is plenty of motives: exposure for the party aimed at disgruntled dem voters and a chance to promote their policies regarding voting. And since it’s crowd funded they won’t lose anything on it.
I have a vague memory of the Greens (possibly together with the libertarians) doing something similar in 2004.
The easiest answer is that this is just another platform that Stein can use to draw some attention. It likely has very little to do with Hillary Clinton.
I’d say conspiracy thinking with regards to election security is a perfect issue for her and there’s enough partisans on the left, Hillary supporters and others, who agree that it makes a compelling story.
As someone who just donated $100 to the vote-recount fund, let me say that I did it because there seem to me to be credible arguments for suspecting the integrity of the vote where voting machines were in use. I’m a registered Green but voted for Hillary Clinton. Do I deny that one hell of a lot of people did in fact vote for Trump? Of course not.
May I just remind folks here that back in late spring, Steven D posted a couple of lengthy pieces alleging that the Hillary Clinton campaign and its institutional supporters had conspired to commit egregious vote fraud in a large number of states. I was a severe critic of what Steven D had to say then; my reasons were laid out in comments I made on his diaries.
I think we need to look to the organizers in Arizona and Nevada. First Nevera held strong despite Trump’s surge in rural areas. Not just for president but up and down the ballot. With respect to Arizona, the margin was close at the presidential level, but they took out that fucker Joe Arpiao. To me that shows they did the work rather than Clinton’s campaign to keep the margin down on Trump. The states been steadily organized to get rid of that nasty Sherrif. What did they do that other states have not?
What did [NV/AZ] do that other states have not?
Have lots of Mexican Latinos? I suspect the boat anchor on the other side may have had more to do with this than any actions by D organizers.
Also, CA – another state with Mexicans – became one of the nation’s bluest states this election, while it was just average among blue states in the last few cycles (and pink before Pete Wilson).
both of those are part of it I think.
CA exports volunteers to both NV and AZ since we’re so reliably Dem.
I’ve read that in NV the Mexican-American anti-Trump vote was huge, and more important was organized and turned out by the (heavily Mexican) Las Vegas based unions. (lots of discussion of this point at dkos)
A strong union base is what carried Democrats for decades. Then the national party chose to go a different way — as I discussed in the thread in my diary about this issue.
Also note the strong casino unions in Las Vegas and Trump was not only anti-Latino but anti-union. Nevada is where this caught on with him.
That’s a large part of it, yes, but the other part is that they were organized. Moreover, Trump won Sheriff Joe’s Maricopa by 50k. How’s that compare to 2012? Romney won it by 150k. Should see how the demographics changed.
Well, it’s not as if Trump was a dynamo that smashed Mitt’s record everywhere. The latest count has him 1.3 million ahead of Romney, but that varied widely.
AZ: Mitt plus 12 thousand
FL: Mitt plus 455 thousand
CA: Mitt minus 700 thousand
I don’t understand NV and AZ.
In NV the margin was down from ’12. In AZ the Dems did much better.
I don’t really know why, but haven’t studied it either.
The short answer is to look at who gained in raw votes from ’12. In AZ it was Clinton and “other” and in NV it was Trump and “other.”
AZ: 2012 other = 1.7% and 2016 other 5.5%
NV: 2012 other = 6.6% and 2016 other 6.6%
NV had a “none of the above” ballot line for POTUS and the GRN party wasn’t on the ballot. That line went from zero (or too small to consider) in 2012 to 2.6%.
Increase in voters: AZ 11.1% and NV 10.8%. Not a surprise that Johnson did better in both states compared to 2012. Or that Trump would gain in NV (mentioned that to you some time ago as NV can be wacky). Appears that the DP Las Vegas organization held, but otherwise in both NV and AZ Trump was the factor that drove the changes.
You write:
As is…and has been for at least several decades almost…the entire surviving Democratic Party at its highest levels…Schumer and Feinstein particularly covering more ass than should legally be allowable. This is the Democratic Party the center of which you still apparently support. Why? As with the HRC debacle, “It’s the lesser of two evils,” I suppose.
Sigh…
More CYO?
Sure.
As is…and has been at least since the Judith Miller fiasco and probably since the assassination years…the NY Times that so blithely (well after the fact) reports on the total incompetence of the HRC campaign on all levels except blocking Bernie Sanders.
As is the massively stalled bureaucracy that we laughingly call “The Federal Government” in general. Soup to nuts, janitorial services in the Congressional buildings right on up to the highest levels of the military, the intelligence esablishment and the State Department.
All the state-by-state post mortems in the world are not going to even touch why HRC lost and Trump won. HRC lost because she represented the totally locked-down Cover Your Ass system that is in place throughout the corporate world and its most valuable possession, the U.S. government, and Trump won because he sold the American public a bill of goods that looked, smelled and tasted like a revolt against that system. He sold them a single, heroic father figure trashing all the bureaucratic bullshit for which HRC stands, and enough people bought it to get him elected.
End of election story, beginning of post-election story.
Can he continue to sell this fiction while simultaneously trying to at least somewhat tame and streamline the bloat? Or will he “public and private” himself out of favor from those who hoped he wasn’t full of shit?
We shall see, soon enough.
Meanwhile, the bloat floats on.
Up close and personal.
AG
P.S. To paraphrase the great basketball character Micheal Ray Richardson regarding a woeful ’80s N.J Nets basketball team:
And stinkin’, too.
Bet on it.
AG
In Democratic circles, the “Blue Wall” of MI-WI-PA as Dem states is orthodox religion. I have gotten into a number of debates from WI progressives, in which I mocked their ludicrous notions of WI as a Dem state. It is a red state. It could be blue in the future, and was in the past, briefly.
It is the state of “Tail Gunner Joe” McCarthy. At least 50% of the govs since WWII have been R. At this time, the state has House, Senate, SCOSWI, Gov, all elected offices R. Yet they state “Oh, WI always goes D in the President and for Senate”.
Unless you can get the suburbs, you lose the state. And if you do not TRY to get the state, as this diary so correctly states, you will not get it.
While I am on the subject of CYO Syndrome and its connection to the faceless bureaucracy that is mediocratizing this country into almost total stalemate and crippling stasis by its obsession with covering its own ass at the risk of not really doing much else, I would like to draw a parallel to the blizzard of negative ratings that has descended upon this (until recently) fairly open and accepting blog.
Downrating is CYO. It is the faceless, cowardly, craven way that bureaucratic workers cover their own asses by backstabbing other workers with whom they either disagree or are engaged some sort of competition. Little or no discussion…open discussion is risky because you may find yourself out-argued…but lots of back room pissing.
So it goes, this blog.
Down like a motherfucker if it continues. Several of the most intelligent, painstaking bloggers here on this site are being constantly downrated by people who themselves make very few, very sparse comments themselves.
Bureaucracy.
The triumph of the mediocre.
The unavoidable way of the world?
I hope not.
Let us pray.
And then let us either fight back or be preyed upon.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
But they’re even-handed. For every downrate of a comment by someone they dislike (may not even read the comment), there is an uprate of any POS comment by someone they believe is on his/her team.
I do not downrate much…almost never until recently…but as a prophylactic measure I have been uprating a great deal since I came back from voluntary semi-exile a couple of weeks before Election Day.
Why did I leave?
Tired of the downraters, basically.
Why did I come back?
Really?
Because I knew that Trump was going to win and I wanted to see the downraters chew on their own tongues. Maybe help them out a bit with some nice, juicy chew bones.
Like dat.
AG
I think I down rated once here.
What is the point? To my knowledge nothing happens if you get good ratings or bad ones.
The down rates mostly are comical.
Yeah – I don’t pay attention to the ratings since the ratings do not tell me at a glance WHO did the rating.
You can just click on the rating and see who rated – which is more than you can do at other sites with ratings.
Arthur, might as well make this comment here. T did not win for the reasons you stated constantly, “the fix is in”. you shouldn’t be so full of yourself.
I always thought that Hillary is unelectable. I used to have respect for her, so I was surprised when she decided to run in 2008 – I thought she was too smart to think that she had a chance.
Virtually all Republicans hate the Clintons. It is the height of hubris to think you can win when members of the opposition party are uniformly strongly opposed to you. A Hillary victory would mean that Hillary was being shoved down Republicans’ throats. The Dem party choosing such a divisive candidate was a major fail. Add to that that her husband was one of only two presidents to be impeached. Why dredge all that ugliness again? And let’s not even bring up that the Clintons wanted to found a new dynasty, like the Bushes had. But Americans said no to dynasties when they had their revolution.
So why did most liberals think that Hillary could win? I think it is their millenarian ideology that led them to that delusion. Progressives believe that history marches forward, to ever greater inclusion. Given that we had the first black president, that Americans would choose a woman as president when given the chance apparently seemed to be a historical inevitability.
Smarts had nothing to do with it. It was an aspiration and the first tangible pieces were being put in place early as 1992. She pushed herself to the front of the line as the designated woman to carry all women to some sort of promised place.
The fact that the big-name feminists were on board with that agenda (excluding Molly Ivins and Barbara Erhrenreich) betrayed their feminist principles. Specifically that woman are to succeed on their own merits and not because daddy, mommy, or spouse bought them the center seat. Twenty-four freaking years of effort and money put into one woman who has required more makeovers than Michael Jackson.
If not for Obama, she would likely have succeeded in ’08 because practically any Democratic nominee would have won after the horrid eight years of Bush.
I agree that Hillary would have become POTUS in 2008 had Obama not edged her out, although that is something that had not occurred to me before.
woman are to succeed on their own merits and not because daddy, mommy, or spouse bought them the center seat.
That is what has always puzzled me about feminists’ support of Hillary more than anything else. I was never able to understand how a woman getting made POTUS because of who she married was supposed to be a victory for all women.
This is off topic, but since you brought up Clinton’s first term, I cannot resist sharing this:
American Pravda: The Destruction of TWA Flight 800
Until I ran across that piece, I had not realized that there was a “conspiracy theory” regarding TWA 800. But if you read the books and watch the films mentioned in that article, you will find that there is much more conclusive evidence for the official story about TWA 800 being a cover up than there is in the case of other prominent conspiracy theories, namely those having to do with the JFK assassination and 9/11. The NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) should have carried out the investigation, as per protocol, but the FBI took over, and then the CIA finally ran the show. The documentaries mentioned have retired employees of the NTSB explaining how the investigation was rigged (to use a Trumpian term).
What appears to have happened is that the US Navy shot down TWA 800 by mistake, and then Bill Clinton had that covered up, because he was worried about this debacle damaging his chances for reelection. Why this is relevant to the thread is that Hillary was undoubtedly involved in the decision to launch the cover up.
I was surprised that this story was not picked up by prominent right-wing news outlets, such as Drudge or Breitbart. Evidently, that whole event is too scary even for them.
tried to write about this in the spring on this blog. on one, no one! was going to vote for HRC in the areas where I talked with ppl. checked the counties, over 80% T, high % libertarian. don’t know what they were thinking to edge out Sanders, who would have won, and run a highly hated candidate who made zero effort to reach out to cultures which, evidently, they disdain
This stuff about a Clinton dynasty strikes me as ridiculous, especially now with that brand of Democratic politics having been trounced. When I hear Clinton-dynasty comments, about all I can think is, there goes someone else whose dislike of Bill & Hillary blinds them to what’s really out there.
If Chelsea Clinton decides some day to run for office, she’ll have to do it on her own merits.
very much appreciate your reasoned analysis. still can’t write about this. how could they throw away Russ? the disdain for my ppl? yeh, still can’t write about it.
Hope someone takes a much closer look at the POTUS-Senate vote outcome in WI. Not surprising that there would be a high number of Johnson-Johnson voters. But the first closer look has revealed that there was Trump-Feingold voters and Clinton-Johnson voters, both of which are odd. The former in more rural areas and the latter in suburban areas.