An explosive allegation from prominent Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg last week is sparking a new wave of criticism and recriminations about Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The charge — that the campaign went the final three weeks of last year’s presidential election without polling the battleground states — amounts to an accusation of campaign negligence that resulted in Donald Trump’s election.
It’s laid bare the emotions still gripping many Democrats nearly 11 months after Clinton’s defeat. And it has exposed a simmering — and often generational — debate over the extent to which Democratic campaigns should rely on advanced, Obama-style analytics at the expense of more traditional methods. The Clinton campaign itself divided along these lines.
“Astonishingly, the 2016 Clinton campaign conducted no state polls in the final three weeks of the general election and relied primarily on data analytics to project turnout and the state vote,” Greenberg wrote in The American Prospect, published online late last week. “They paid little attention to qualitative focus groups or feedback from the field, and their brief daily poll didn’t measure which candidate was defining the election or getting people engaged.”
Read more at Politico.
