Reviewing Election 2016 & Finding The Democratic Path Forward
A Post-Mortem Requested by the DNC / Nov-Dec 2016
This was a maddeningly close race. A combined 77,188 votes (out of 137 million nationwide) in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was the difference between Hillary Clinton winning the electoral college to match her popular vote victory. Many factors might have shifted the election to Clinton because the result was so tight. The focus here is on things that the Clinton campaign and Democrats could have impacted. Accordingly, this memo does not address external factors like the FBI announcements in the final month or the legitimate concerns about Russian hacking and fake news.
The review covers some of the statistical results, focusing especially on shifts in key voter groups; it sheds light on a divided country where neither Democrats nor Republicans can address the desires of the voters who keep throwing them out of office and then inviting them back in; it offers a critique of the national Clinton campaign’s culture that emphasized control at the top over collaboration with those who were in battleground states closest to the voters; it questions the singular reliance on data analytics and the simultaneous diminution of personal politics and organizing; and it looks ahead for a path where a crippled Democratic Party can rebuild from a slow electoral and institutional decline.
Importantly, this is not the only say or the final word. Comments, arguments, additions, and anything else on readers’ and audiences’ minds have already informed what you see here. So jump in.
An Electorate That Does Not Trust Either Party. The 2016 election stood out as more of the same. Voters again sought the change that comes with throwing the bums out. Yet this year also brought something unprecedented in recent decades. The typical liberal-conservative, Democratic-Republican fault lines became muddled. Populism sprouted from Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right, highlighting common feelings of disenfranchisement diverging dramatically on solutions.
The public debate, especially as Donald Trump rose from a novelty to a punch line to an Electoral College victory, exposed a new kind of divide in America. In short, one side sees the change and dynamism of a shrinking and diverse world as something to embrace. Another side sees the same change and dynamism as unnerving at best and worthy of full-throated rejection at worst.
The first group - call them “Cosmopolitans” - includes highly educated city dwellers who like living near many different kinds of people, who embrace the disruptive and innovative technologies of the last twenty years, and who look outside their communities with interest and possibility. They generally congregate in cities, on the coasts, and in university towns.
The second group — call them “Apprehensives” — includes workers displaced by trade and tech automation and those who might be uncomfortable, though not necessarily bigoted, about new people coming to their towns. They certainly have fewer professional options in this changing world, certainly brought on by automation and perhaps by older age or by a lack of the skills that are most rewarded as the US moves from an industrial economy to a fast-moving information economy.
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have figured out how to lead the country in this new paradigm because neither can (nor will?) provide complete solutions — largely because their existing ideologies and constituencies constrain adaptation.
Top Down, Not Bottom Up: Voters Don’t Live in a Voter Model or in DC and Brooklyn. One key reason that Clinton did not find the same success in 2016 that Obama found in 2008 and 2012 was a different philosophical and strategic approach. The Clinton campaign had a top-down, command-and-control, don’t-move-unless-we-give-you-permission culture. It was the polar opposite of the Obama and Silicon Valley model of top-down leadership and empowerment that is combined with bottom-up collaboration.
After 2008, one of the senior Obama staff, national field director Jon Carson, described their efforts this way: “There’s a difference between organizing a campaign & marketing a campaign. We trained & empowered organizers, not volunteers. Carpenters, not tools.” This seemed largely lost on the Brooklyn team in 2016.
Instead of combining the human art and hard science of politics, HFA purportedly relied almost exclusively on “objective” polls, voter modeling, and the views of those whose lives and careers are in Brooklyn and Washington, DC.
HFA might have gotten good results in the data lab, but the fact that they didn’t show up in the real world means something about the model was flawed. The real question for a post-mortem is not the voter scoring RESULT but (a) whether the INPUTS were correct and (b) whether the reliance on the science of data analytics overly excluded the art of human politics in 2016. No one knows or wants to share (a) and the answer for (b) is apparently “yes, absolutely.”
Maintaining Management Decisions at National HQ Does Not Mean Excluding Intel from Battleground States. On the non-data side of the campaign, reports came out of key battleground states that staff were poorly trained and that leadership teams were “going rogue” to try to win in spite of the national HQ’s recalcitrance. Doing what might work best in a state was made even harder because there was no budgetary authority for in-state leaders to run state-specific programs. Most state teams appeared to have zero latitude to engage Brooklyn in a two-way discussion, but instead merely waited at the other end of the line to be told what to think and what to do.
In other words, HFA’s campaign model did not appear to listen to the customer (the voter, the activist, the grasstops leader) or even their own people on the ground, all of whom were closest to what was actually happening.
Perhaps there was too much chasing voters with impersonal phone calls, too many impersonal text messages and paid media ads. Perhaps there was not enough of the Barack Obama / Marshall Ganz human touch that emphasized personal storytelling and persuasion, local organizing, canvassing, and empowerment of state teams to inform state strategies.
Voters don’t vote for “Hillary Clinton — MoveOn” or “Hillary Clinton — Priorities USA.” They vote for “Hillary Clinton — Democrat.”
Whither the Democratic Party? Clinton’s loss and Obama’s eminent departure has exposed a collapse of political power for the Democratic Party. Why? The answer is a failure to value and build the institution of the Democratic Party from top to bottom over the last eight years (e.g., the “50 state strategy” as coined by former DNC Chairman Howard Dean after the 2004 Kerry loss). Instead, the Party was treated as nothing more than a bank account for moving money for their own campaigns.
Elections Cannot Be Won by Proxies. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy for Democratic Party donors and powerbrokers who say, “I don’t trust the party and don’t believe it is the way to go.” Well, when they don’t engage in it with their time and support it with their dollars, it is no wonder the country’s progressive electoral politics is such an organizational disaster.
Independent groups have a role — a vital, necessary, and indispensable one. When it comes to preparing for and winning elections, they should play a secondary role. Take a seat at the table, fund the Party, and build the Party. Don’t give up on your core missions and core issues, but don’t forget that conservatives are always planning for the next election, not taking years-long breaks in between.
Campaign finance laws have contributed to this proxy problem. In the name of fighting corruption, congressional reformers over the past century have tried to restrict the amount of money that can flow to candidates directly. It sounds good, but it has not stopped the corrosive effects of political cash. First, smart lawyers have always found loopholes. Second, money has simply not disappeared from politics. In fact, political money has increased while simultaneously becoming less accountable and more secretive as it has moved to independent, sometimes secretive, groups.
Think about campaign money like the balloons that clowns use to make dogs and giraffes and other animals -- long and skinny. When one squeezes the air in the middle of the balloon, away from elected officials and the political parties, it does not go away. It just moves to the sides.
This movement of money and power away from the “center” has weakened the vehicles (the political parties) that have historically brought together diverse groups into majority electoral coalitions.
The Simple Explanations That Follow a Big Election Loss Are Not Enough. On most days, Democrats and Republicans soothe themselves with absolutist, simplistic, and hyperbolic stereotypes of the other side. Some Democrats and other liberals are now doing it post-election by dismissing Trump supporters as nothing but racist, misogynistic hicks. That’s a lot easier than looking in the mirror and really examining how the Democrats have lost the argument, for now, that they actually stand on the side of middle and working class people.
The Path Forward. Overcoming America’s simplistic and divisive political environment is much harder than defining it. Americans, divided perhaps between Cosmopolitans and Apprehensives rather than liberal or conservative, correctly conclude that neither political party can address the present and the future. Our civic discourse, meanwhile, faces intractable hurdles — partisan media, one-issue interest groups, campaign consultants, and the biological fact that people want certainty. Gray thinking takes time and energy, and it often takes a willingness to look at oneself and discover < misogyny, racial attitudes, condescension, anti-faith, intolerant > views looking back.
For the Democrats, overcoming a devastating loss and a party back near the starting line, the debate cannot be whether Democrats should be liberal or very liberal, whether Bernie Sanders would have actually beaten Trump, or even whether Jill Stein and Gary Johnson cost Clinton the election. The functional approach for renewal requires:
• 50 State Strategy, Engage All Voting Groups
• Strong New DNC Chair & Rebuilt, Permanent Democratic Party Infrastructure
• Laser Like Focus on 2020 Redistricting in States
• Turning Away From Independent Groups & Super PACs as Primary Way to Win Elections
• Refusal to Lazily Dismiss Trump Voters as Merely a Bunch of Racist, Misogynistic Hicks
• What Did the Russians Really Do?
• Hold Trump Accountable. Push His Buttons.
There is a lot to be done and a lot more to be learned. Let’s keep working.
EXTRA SLIDES BELOW*EXTRA SLIDES BELOW *EXTRA SLIDES BELOW
ABOUT DONNIE FOWLER
In 1987, Donnie was Donna Brazile’s intern on the presidential campaign of Congressman Dick Gephardt of Missouri. In 2016, he was an advisor (just a fancy word for “intern”) for Donna after she became interim Democratic National Chairwoman. Beforehand, he led the political operations on the floor of the contentious Sanders-Clinton Democratic National Convention in July in Philadelphia.
Donnie has worked as staff on eight presidential campaigns, including those of Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Wes Clark, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. He is not a political consultant, but an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco and has spent sixteen years in and around Silicon Valley.
