… So what went wrong with Clinton’s vaunted ground game? There are certainly some things to criticize. There’s been good reporting on how Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn ignored warning signs on the ground and rejected the advice of local operatives in states such as Michigan. And as I wrote in a previous installment of this series, Clinton did not allocate her time and resources between states in the way we would have recommended. In particular, she should have spent more time playing defense in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Colorado and less time trying to turn North Carolina into a blue state or salvage Iowa from turning red.
Here’s the thing, though: The evidence suggests those decisions didn’t matter very much. In fact, Clinton’s ground game advantage over Trump may have been as large as the one Obama had over Mitt Romney in 2012. It just wasn’t enough to save the Electoral College for her. CONT.
Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight