The risk of avoiding risk: Hillary Clinton’s careful defeat

A friend once relayed to me one of the most valuable lessons an old sensei had taught him. He explained that there are two most effective ways to sneak up on an adversary in an adjoining room. The most preferential option is to approach as quietly as possible towards your intended target before making an attack. The second, when the first option isn’t viable due to physical or other constraints, is to enter as loudly as you can.

Throughout the presidential election, Donald Trump, unable to execute the former strategy, effectively employed the latter. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, got stuck in the murky middle, which ultimately led to her defeat.

Clinton won the popular vote, but failed to execute a campaign with a compelling enough strategy to win. Trump, McCain and Romney all earned roughly 60 million votes against President Obama. The differences between the current race and the previous two were mostly due to fewer votes cast for the Democrat.

There are two basic theories as to why this happened. The first is that the race’s outcome was precipitated by an outcry from disaffected, mostly exurban and rural white voters. The second points to what is, at best, a lack of enthusiasm for Clinton, and at worst, outright disdain and distrust. Both assertions have merit, and the answers are much more complex than what we can cleanly outline in newspapers, but there were several other contributing factors to her defeat as well.

First, we can look to the Clinton campaign’s almost religious fixation on data and field operations. There is no question that Obama’s campaigns benefitted greatly from outreach efforts on the ground, but they were always directly fueled by rhetoric that resonated strongly with targeted voters. In a race as enormous as a presidential, the effectiveness of a field operation is always contingent upon the effectiveness of the campaign’s message, not vice versa.

In a November 10 Politico article, Annie Karni writes, “Bill Clinton’s viewpoint of fighting for the working class white voters was often dismissed with a hand wave by senior members of the (Clinton) team as a personal vendetta to win back the voters who elected him, from a talented but aging politician who simply refused to accept the new Democratic map.” What the old pro understood was that the map hadn’t changed as much as Clinton’s staff may have wished, and that people are living beings, not data or color splotches on maps, and they need to be spoken to in a way that inspires them.

There is an inverse relationship between the size of a race and the effectiveness of its ground game. In smaller races, where name recognition and the awareness of candidates’ respective records and positions on issues are often low, below-the-radar field operations are invaluable, often the most significant determinant of their outcomes. But in a race where the major contenders share a veritable 100 percent name recognition, and most voters are aware of their perceived differences, the importance of technical outreach diminishes.

While the Clinton campaign shrugged off Trump’s strategy of holding multiple large rallies a day to maximize free media, they paid insufficient attention to their own propensity to speak in vagaries, as well as their overly risk-averse strategy designed to make their opponent less palatable rather than making their own candidate more so. In essence, they never stayed above the fray, nor got down in the muck; they were in limbo.

A consistent strain that could be observed in Clinton’s contests against Obama, Bernie Sanders and Trump was her tendency to retreat and play it safe whenever she appeared to be winning. Adversely, whenever her campaign’s popularity appeared to wane, she would enter back into the fray. This ebb and flow has defined an overly cautious, overly reactive mentality that consistently permeates Clinton’s campaigns.

It is baffling that, through these three contests, her advisors never comprehended what most campaign professionals understand instinctively: There is a direct correlation between how hard and often you campaign and whether you win an election. Trumps rallies may have seemed nonsurgical, and they certainly caused sociological misgivings among many voters, but they undoubtedly reached masses of people who had every intention of getting to the polls with a clear (if imperfect) message.

Instead of toying around in purple states unnecessary for her success, Clinton’s campaign should have taken Trump’s approach and fought hard in blue, Midwestern strongholds like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where she lost by razor-thin margins. There’s no use pulling out voters who haven’t been given a reason, or even been asked, to pull the lever for you.

It was the subtle shift by these suburban, swing state, often Catholic voters – typically the determining population in every recent presidential election – that did more to contribute to Trump’s victory than the apparition of a massive new poor and working class electorate. In reality, the median income among Trump’s white supporters was roughly $75,000 a year.

That’s why it’s a mistake to view the race’s outcome through an ideological lens. Whether Trump was really conservative or liberal meant little to his supporters, just as it didn’t among some of Sanders’s supporters, which is why we witnessed the strange phenomenon of the Sanders/Trump voter. On a macro level, this election was about foreign versus domestic control of our autonomy, and on a micro level about exurbs and suburbs versus cities. Trump’s strategy was predicated on the notion that foreigners and undocumented immigrants were to blame for the problems of citizens who were losing control of their own cultural definitions and economic destinies. Tax cuts resonated not because people in rural areas didn’t want or need services, but because they didn’t believe they were getting enough in return from the system they were paying into, one they perceive as controlled by urban elites who chose to serve the needs of other demographics over their own.

This contest was never about liberal versus conservative. The debates lacked questions about religion, and hardly touched on social issues. It was about who spoke clearest, whether with a whisper or a roar.

In this non-ideological climate Clinton was free to pay little attention to her opponent, and instead speak clearly on jobs and trade. Adversely, she could have directly engaged him often and vigorously on his lack of experience, temperament and the grave danger of his collusion with foreign governments to meddle in our election process. Instead, she fluctuated between both approaches. 

While Trump growled at her with all his might, Clinton fired back with enough volume to throw him at times off balance, but never enough to defeat him. 

Michael Oliva is a political and media strategist. Follow him on Twitter @olivamichael.