Yes, Blame the Campaign

In light of Hillary Clinton's stunning defeat, I expected the normal circular firing squad to line-up and hammer the defeated campaign. For about a month, that didn't happen. Now, it's started. In fact, it's gone brutal quickly:

In results that narrow, Clinton’s loss could be attributed to any number of factors — FBI Director Jim Comey’s letter shifting late deciders, the lack of a compelling economic message, the apparent Russian hacking. But heartbroken and frustrated in-state battleground operatives worry that a lesson being missed is a simple one: Get the basics of campaigning right.

Clinton never even stopped by a United Auto Workers union hall in Michigan, though a person involved with the campaign noted bitterly that the UAW flaked on GOTV commitments in the final days, and that AFSCME never even made any, despite months of appeals.

The anecdotes are different but the narrative is the same across battlegrounds, where Democratic operatives lament a one-size-fits-all approach drawn entirely from pre-selected data — operatives spit out “the model, the model,” as they complain about it — guiding Mook’s decisions on field, television, everything else. That’s the same data operation, of course, that predicted Clinton would win the Iowa caucuses by 6 percentage points (she scraped by with two-tenths of a point), and that predicted she’d beat Bernie Sanders in Michigan (he won by 1.5 points).

I'd read the rest of the article, if I were you (and assuming this interests you). The fact of the matter is that the "one-size-fits-all" blame game of Comey and Russia is not wrong, but it's inadequate in explaining this election. Here's the facts- Donald Trump was close enough to win. That tells us a lot about the campaign. You can't "model" an entire campaign, you still have to have a message broad enough to win an election. You still have to test that model, all the time. You still have to run an actual field campaign. You still have to visit places besides the big cities. You have to do a lot of things that the Clinton campaign didn't. It is true that the Comey letter probably pushed Trump across the line in about six states (WI, PA, MI, NC, FL, and AZ). It's also true, and needs to be stated repeatedly, that the reason this worked was because of the way the entirety of the race was run. That includes the campaign.