The following story fits in with information that I have come across that now seems to have actually been information, that Hillary studiously ignored her husband's political advice during the election campaign. William wanted Hillary to shore up her base of support in blue collar rust belt states, she didn't want to do any such thing, in fact, she had almost no interest in rust belt concerns, her campaign would be her's, not his. She would win on her terms, not anyone else's. That might make a certain amount of sense if someone has good political instincts, but Hillary never had any such thing. And she seems to have had even less imagination. Think back to 2008 when she didn't make any effort at all to win the caucus states; BHO, in contrast, went after each caucus state where volunteers could be mobilized and won almost all of them, which turned out to be his margin of victory. Trump, of course, did have mostly good instincts. His record in the primaries demonstrated that. So too did William Clinton, as 1992 and 1996 demonstrated. Hillary wouldn't listen. She "knew" better, she was riding the wave of identity politics and the gender feminist cause, it was a "sure thing." And Trump was such a pariah among the educated elites of the Left that "everyone" assumed he would get clobbered. Even Trump himself didn't think he would win until election day. Hillary never came to terms with her unpopularity; she was deeply disliked all over the country except for New York and California. Almost any other candidate should have easily bested Trump, who was also disliked, sometimes extremely disliked, but not everywhere. As it turned out the working class didn't dislike him, they thought he was "their man." Hence for the first time in history the rank and file of the labor unions split close to 50-50 in the election; gone were large Democratic labor majorities and with that the election was gone as far as Hillary was concerned even if she didn't "get it" until November 8. Speaking personally, if there was no other reason, I could never have voted for a cranky old woman who "scolded" me and every other male with almost everything she said as she campaigned. This didn't make me vote for Trump, that wasn't going to happen -and my ballot was cast for a third party candidate. But multiply me by several million who voted for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or Castle of the Constitution Party or McMullin of Utah, and that also explains the results. Hillary, when all is said, isn't very smart. Trump, when all is said, and this is a statement of resignation not an endorsement, is a lot smarter than the cognoscenti give him credit for. BR =============================================== Politico How Clinton lost Michigan -and blew the election Across battlegrounds, Democrats blame HQ stubborn commitment to a one-size[-fits-all strategy By: Edward-Isaac Dovere December 14, 2016 Everybody could see Hillary Clinton was cooked in Iowa. So when, a week-and-a-half out, the Service Employees International Union started hearing anxiety out of Michigan, union officials decided to reroute their volunteers, giving a desperate team on the ground around Detroit some hope. They started prepping meals and organizing hotel rooms. 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.” Flip Michigan and leave the rest of the map, and Trump is still president-elect. But to people who worked in that state and others, how Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes and lost by 100,000 in states that could have made her president has everything to do with what happened in Michigan. Trump won the state despite getting 30,000 fewer votes than George W. Bush did when he lost it in 2004. Politico spoke to a dozen officials working on or with Clinton’s Michigan campaign, and more than a dozen scattered among other battleground states, her Brooklyn headquarters and in Washington who describe an ongoing fight about campaign tactics, an inability to get top leadership to change course. Then again, according to senior people in Brooklyn, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook never heard any of those complaints directly from anyone on his state teams before Election Day. 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’ve never seen a campaign like this,” said Virgie Rollins, a Democratic National Committee member and longtime political hand in Michigan who described months of failed attempts to get attention to the collapse she was watching unfold in slow-motion among women and African-American millennials. Rollins, the chair emeritus of the Michigan Democratic Women’s Caucus, said requests into Brooklyn for surrogates to come talk to her group were never answered. When they held their events anyway, she said, they also got no response to requests for a little money to help cover costs. Rollins doesn’t need a recount to understand why Clinton lost the state. “When you don’t reach out to community folk and reach out to precinct campaigns and district organizations that know where the votes are, then you’ re going to have problems,” she said. The enthusiasm gap >From the day Clinton released her launch video, the campaign knew she’d struggle with enthusiasm. Yet they didn’t do many of the things voters are used to seeing to give a sense of momentum, insisting that votes didn’t come from campaign literature, door knocking, commitment to vote cards or the standard program of sending absentee ballot applications to likely voters rather than just appealing to the people once they’d already ordered the ballots. “It was very surgical and corporate. They had their model, this is how they ’re going to do it. Their thing was, ‘We don’t have to leave [literature] at the doors, everyone knows who Hillary Clinton is,’” said one person involved in the Michigan campaign. “But in terms of activists, it seems different, it’s maybe they don’t care about us.” Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not “scientifically” significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back. “There’s this illusion that the Clinton campaign had a ground game. The deal is that the Clinton campaign could have had a ground game,” said a former Obama operative in Michigan. “They had people in the states who were willing to do stuff. But they didn’t provide people anything to do until GOTV.” The only metric that people involved in the operations say they ever heard headquarters interested in was how many volunteer shifts had been signed up — though the volunteers were never given the now-standard handheld devices to input the responses they got in the field, and Brooklyn mandated that they not worry about data entry. Operatives watched packets of real-time voter information piled up in bins at the coordinated campaign headquarters. The sheets were updated only when they got ripped, or soaked with coffee. Existing packets with notes from the volunteers, including highlighting how much Trump inclination there was among some of the white male union members the Clinton campaign was sure would be with her, were tossed in the garbage. 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
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