Well, let’s leave it to the Bernie Sanders crowd to shout “I told you so,” but two senior campaign advisers for the self-proclaimed democratic socialist suggest that perhaps the model Clinton and Obama used to find voters is flawed, and that good, old-fashioned outreach through an army of volunteers is more true, especially when it comes to gauging voter reception to campaign messages. Becky Bond and Zack Exley wrote in Huffington Post that Clinton’s get-out-the-vote operation likely turned Trump supporters away. And this era of microtargeting with large data should end because they missed out on millions of Obama supporters from 2012 who voted for Trump, along with 53 percent white women who voted Republican this year. These discrepancies could have been avoided if Team Clinton had returned to the “big organization.”
The media has made much of the noise about Trump’s lack of a real organization on the ground in the states, but it has largely failed to examine the noise about Clinton’s field operations. As the hangover from Election Day subsides, an examination of the mechanics behind Clinton’s get-out-the-vote efforts—reaching out to Clinton voters in key states at their doorsteps, by phone, or by text message—is revealing evidence of what appears to be a rather shocking truth: Clinton’s volunteers were unwittingly turning out Trump voters. Perhaps in significant numbers.
Clinton campaign volunteers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina reported encountering significant numbers of Trump voters while reminding people to vote. Anecdotal evidence suggests that between five and 25 percent of contacts were inadvertently directed at Trump supporters.
This is a large deal because when voters are engaged by a volunteer, they are much more likely to vote in elections. Worse, because Republicans have had no ground game in many areas this cycle, that sturdy reminder from a Clinton volunteer to get out and vote may have been the only personalized GOTV communication Trump voters received.
The biggest offender may be the text-messaging GOTV campaign. Volunteers reported that as many as 30% of the responses they received from voters they urged to turn out came from Trump supporters.
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For a compact organization, the campaign invests in a “big data” approach to narrow down who needs to be involved. They typically do this by hiring an pricey consulting firm that relies on predictive modeling, microtargeting, and message testing and segmentation to design a get-out-the-vote program that employees and volunteers then implement.
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Big organizing is how the Bernie Sanders campaign and other grassroots initiatives focus on results. Instead of using technology to guess who to mobilize on Election Day, Bernie mobilized hundreds of thousands of volunteers to build a voter contact machine that could call, text, or knock on voters’ doors and identify who was for Bernie, who was against him, and who was undecided. This happened months before Election Day, so that in the crucial GOTV week before the vote, volunteers would be contacting voters they had clearly identified as supporting the campaign, not voters whose pricey consulting team had guessed would be for the candidate.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the large data on the left completely missed a gigantic group of white working-class voters who were undercounted by 10 million from 2012 estimates, meaning that a pool of millions of voters from the white three-quarters majority of the electorate were not included. All it takes is a fraction of that number to change the outcome of an election. Moreover, when you have a frail candidate like Clinton who either fails to energize the typical Democratic cohorts or when the same people who supported Obama change their minds, you’re in for a tough night. And that’s exactly what happened. Trump was flawed, yes — but he could change voters’ minds and mobilize people who had never voted before. They stuck with him. He wasn’t a politician. And the white working class finally said enough, kicked the establishment off its stool, turned the table over and said let’s start over. But they are swing voters—and there will be Obama-style defections if Trump doesn’t deliver what he promised in this campaign. For now, mark this on the list of Clinton blunders: Their ground game was extensive but messy. The Republican National Committee’s ground game has certainly improved significantly since the 2012 campaign. They had people on the ground for the last two or three years in key areas of the country, canvassing neighborhoods, talking to voters, shutting down phones and landlines, and constantly updating their databases. Even the RNC was trailing Trump by 30 electoral votes, but their approach and the get-out-the-vote operation helped him secure a victory because the Trump campaign had no ground game. I also think we can thank the Clinton people for mobilizing Trump voters who might have fallen by the wayside.
