Stupidity and Arrogance Fueled Hillary’s Historic Loss In Michigan

As time goes on, there will be more stories about the Clinton campaign, and how they botched an election, they should have won, easily. This is why Clinton campaign people are going on television saying to anybody within earshot that Russia is to blame for the loss, or James Comey is to blame for the loss or “fake news” is to blame for the loss. It’s much easier to do that, then to do some self-reflection and admit they screwed up.

In this Politico piece, it is revealed that is precisely what they did:

SEIU — which had wanted to go to Michigan from the beginning, but been ordered not to — dialed Clinton’s top campaign aides to tell them about the new plan. According to several people familiar with the call, Brooklyn was furious.

Turn that bus around, the Clinton team ordered SEIU. Those volunteers needed to stay in Iowa to fool Donald Trump into competing there, not drive to Michigan, where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.

Michigan organizers were shocked. It was the latest case of Brooklyn ignoring on-the-ground intel and pleas for help in a race that they felt slipping away at the end.

“They believed they were more experienced, which they were. They believed they were smarter, which they weren’t,” said Donnie Fowler, who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee during the final months of the campaign. “They believed they had better information, which they didn’t.”

Donald Trump received fewer votes in Michigan than George W. Bush did in 2004 and he still beat Hillary Clinton. This wasn’t because of a failed strategy as much as it was the idea that Hillary wasn’t going to be elected President, she was going to ascend to the presidency because it’s “historic” and because it was “her time.” Clearly, that was not the case. Hillary and her team believed she was a female version of Barack Obama.

One of the mistakes they made stuck out:

The Brooklyn command believed that television and limited direct mail and digital efforts were the only way to win over voters, people familiar with the thinking at headquarters said. Guided by polls that showed the Midwestern states safer, the campaign spent, according to one internal estimate, about 3 percent as much in Michigan and Wisconsin as it spent in Florida, Ohio and North Carolina. Most voters in Michigan didn’t see a television ad until the final week.

If this sounds familiar it’s the strategy carried out by Marco Rubio’s team in the GOP primary race. They didn’t have the necessary ground operation they needed, believing television and other media appearances would make up for knocking on doors.

Just to show how screwed up the Clinton campaign operated, they ignored the midwest thinking they were going to win easily, but money was spent in heavily Democratic areas to pump up the vote because they believed the possibility of Trump winning the popular vote existed:

But there also were millions approved for transfer from Clinton’s campaign for use by the DNC — which, under a plan devised by Brazile to drum up urban turnout out of fear that Trump would win the popular vote while losing the electoral vote, got dumped into Chicago and New Orleans, far from anywhere that would have made a difference in the election.

Despite all of the evidence of their own mistakes, the campaign continues to blame James Comey:

“Now of course, in hindsight, there are any number of steps that we could have taken that may have made the difference in a state as closely decided as Michigan, but the consistent theme across all the battleground states was that we saw our numbers drop in the final week after Jim Comey sent his shocking letter to Congress,” said former Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon.

Forest for the trees, Brian.

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