Salon published a year-end summary Why Donald Trump won - and how Hillary Clinton lost: 13 theories explain the stunning election, yet despite offering a whopping 13 explanations (many of which I'd agree were factors), they seem to miss one of the big ones: the failure to listen to ground-level feedback and the presumption of expertise.
Consider The real ‘election rigger’ was the bungling Clinton campaign:
Just consider how she lost Michigan: In a detailed analysis, Politico reports that Clinton’s top aides — wedded to their computer data — angrily rebuffed local supporters who warned she was falling behind. “They believed they were smarter, which they weren’t,” noted one Democratic veteran.
... In fact, Team Clinton did everything wrong in Michigan. It refused to give volunteers lawn signs or literature, saying neither was a “scientifically” significant way of increasing the vote.
And what little data did exist from those few canvassers who’d actually spoken with voters — and who reported yuge support for Donald Trump among white male union members — got tossed in the garbage.
And get this: Clinton’s people worried that she’d win the electoral vote but lose the popular count, so they spent millions late in the game to drive up her vote in cities like Chicago and New Orleans — which were irrelevant to carrying any states.
They tried to drive up the popular vote in states the Democrats were pretty much guaranteed to win while spending only 1/10 as much as John Kerry had spent on canvassers in Michigan. It seems difficult to be more out of touch.
This is one thing that worries me about a lot of current "liberalism" (for lack of a better term). They've by and large disconnected the feedback mechanisms that I think are essential for developing effective strategies. Different candidates for basically the same sort of critique would seem to be both academia and the current mainstream media. Probably fodder for a couple of followup posts I guess.
