Democrats are still trying to process their crushing defeat last month. Truthfully, it isn’t that hard to figure out. They nominated the worst candidate in modern American history, and the last eight years under Barack Obama have been below average, with Hillary promising more of the same. Obviously a recipe for defeat, as I predicted on this site last fall.
Unwilling to face that cold reality, Democrats are obsessing on James Comey, Vladimir Putin, etc. (No Diebold this time.) But New York Magazine has come up with the ultimate excuse for failure: the Clinton campaign was too smart! “Clinton Campaign May Have Been Too Smart to Win.”
The article isn’t as bad as the headline, but it’s dumb enough:
Hillary Clinton’s defeat came down to 100,000 votes in three states out of nearly 130 million cast nationally.
You can always fantasize about flipping votes. If you switch 100,000 votes the other way, Trump wins in a landslide.
The New York Magazine article focuses on the Clinton campaign’s vote model, which confidently predicted that she would win, no matter what those who were in contact with actual voters might say:
Clinton had lots of field offices, to be sure. She had more money for get-out-the-vote operations. Team Clinton did much, much more targeted outreach to key voters in key states than did Team Trump. But in the end “Brooklyn’s” decisions were based on assumptions that had very little to do with actual developments on the “ground;” its hypersophisticated sensitivity to granular data about many millions of people made it fail to see and hear what was actually happening in the lead-up to the election.
A casual observer might say that this means Clinton lost because her campaign was stupid. But, hey, Democrats: don’t listen to me. Just keep doing what you’re doing, fellas! You are really, really, smart, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Do it again in 2020!
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