Tree of Knowledge

As the Democratic Primary Contest draws to a close, pundits’ attention has inevitably moved from soothsaying to post mortem. It’s in this period that the media re-writes the narrative of the campaign and lays down the conventional wisdom for the success or otherwise of political campaigns.

Needless to say, the spin doesn’t stop on Election Day; it just switches focus from positioning to revisionism.

It is in this context that HRC’s campaign is coming in for a lot of criticism about how poorly run her campaign was. Viewed through the prism of her campaign’s absurdly long death throes, it’s easy to caricature her as having run a farcical campaign that was so bad that it relinquished her status as the presumptive nominee to a rank outsider.

No doubt, HRC’s campaign made mistakes. Running as the candidate of experience in an election that quickly became about change was an early mistake. Failing to hone in on the economy as the major issue in the campaign early enough was another mistake to my mind.

However, in situations like this when spin and personal prejudices are so prevalent, it’s always worth focusing on the data.

On this basis, I have to agree with Jack Shafer’s take on the issue, at Slate today that:

Clinton ran a fairly OK campaign, while Obama ran one that simply got better and better.

In other words, it was Obama’s brilliance that turned the campaign, not Hillary’s incompetence. This state of affairs is vividly illustrated in a time series of the candidates’ support during the campaign:

It’s remarkable, that other than a brief period after the Iowa result, HRC never fell below 40% support. Her share of the vote was remarkably resilient; and hardly suggestive of a campaign that blundered away its support.

Instead, the data above show that Obama’s campaign built momentum at an exponential rate as the campaign progressed through the smaller, mostly caucus states. As I’ve written here and here, it was Obama’s revolutionary, decentralised, ‘Open Source’ campaign that enabled him to win ten straight contests between Super Tuesday and the Ohio and Texas primaries by an average of more than 30 points. It’s not difficult to identify this period on the graph above.

I don’t think you can really blame HRC’s campaign for failing to see something this revolutionary coming.

Campaigning, Online Campaigning, Open Source Government, US Politics | RSS 2.0 | Comment it , or trackback this post.