MY LEARNING CURVE

After spending years working with pro-democracy movements abroad, the Obama 2008 campaign was the dream come true for a pro-democracy advocate and a possible model for future use in my work. I was impressed by the bottom-up communications that allowed the campaign to tweak the message for some particular locale or group or to know who was dropping the ball on Get Out The Vote efforts.

Before Citizens United, I thought the better organization with a decent candidate wins. Money flooding into the system broke the back of the Republican Party. You can even see it now that the Koch side of the party is funding the local efforts and is disdainful of the Trump side. 

I also felt that negative advertising suppressed the other side's turnout. This year negative advertising has created the largest turnout in our history.

So I come at this as knowing what the Bush campaign did to Kerry in Ohio and what Obama did both to McCain and Romney. This was before I read the great Sam Wang and got into the peculiar world of aggregators. I followed Nate Silver under his pseudonym at Daily Kos after he ended his term as the Bill James of baseball statisticians. 

What amazed me was Obama targeting non-voters and actually making it work. This is beside registering new voters. 

In this campaign, Hillary has double the money of the rump campaign,has a ground game using some of the personnel from the Obama teams and the techniques. Their data infrastructure mirrors Obama's last campaign of lacking polls but depending on data sets. They have spent over a year building up organizational capacity in the country and also throughout the swing states. It may not have looked good but Hillary thoroughly dispatched Bernie Sanders fair and square. 

Now she is running against a man who disdains almost all American institutions , ethnic groups and the whole array of things that go along with a political campaign. He stuffs his pollster, he neglects data,lacks any grassroots organization and any positive message. 

Besides his loathsome politics, how does a Trump win? I understand how Hillary wins and with whom and how to get there. But what does Trump do?

The mysterious white men emerging from the shadows appear to be unaffiliated dark-skinned people rooted out by the same techniques Obama used on non-voters. Even new registrations don't show these white males, except for millennial new voters.

I understand Silver's qualms about the polls, especially with 4 candidates. This adds volatility to a polling situation as we learned on Jason Linkins' last podcast for Huffingtonpost before the election. But when Trump has not led a legitimate opoll the whole campaign where does this final burst come from?

It is mystifying and would refute anything I have learned about political campaigns and their mechanics thus far.