Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist said a national “obsession” with campaign forecasters like Nate Silver and New York Times’ Upshot blog had deeply worried the Democratic presidential campaign in the final weeks of the election, and could have hurt voter turnout.

Speaking at a conference held at New York University’s Florence campus, La Pietra, Joel Benenson, a pollster and consultant who also worked on Barack Obama’s successful campaigns in 2008 and 2012, said a number of factors contributed to Clinton’s stunning defeat last week, including actions by FBI director James Comey.

But he singled out the relatively new phenomenon of reporting on elections not just by examining national and state polls, but by forecasting probability of a candidate winning by looking at aggregates of polls and other factors.

Clinton’s odds of winning the election on the Upshot, the New York Times forecasting model, were 85% on election day and only began to plummet as results came in late in the night.

“[There was] a lot of the coverage and obsession with Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight and the Upshot focusing on the probability of a win,” Benenson said.

“And I think when we have people talking about whether there is a 93% probability that Hillary is going to win [or not], as opposed to her being up 2% in the polls … it’s a real concern. Because you don’t want people to think an election is over.”

Benenson was one of several election officials and political pundits to speak on a panel about the US election results.

“[Forecasting] is not news,” he continued, “it is not journalism and it is not news, and yet journalism is now obsessed with it because it is cheap news. It’s like, ‘Oh, I can throw out polls.’ They don’t even discriminate [which polls they choose].

“That is a terrible thing inside a campaign, for people to think that that election was won. Hated inside a campaign.

“There is a difference between people thinking Hillary is three points ahead in the polls, and someone who they think is a god of probability forecasting, saying there is a 94% chance she is winning. Maybe they say, ‘I will have another drink at the bar and not vote.’”

Benenson also pointed to a lack of trust in American institutions, which he blamed on the fallout of the economic crisis, and said Trump’s role as a “quintessential outsider” helped the incoming Republican president.



Other factors claimed as reasons for Clinton’s defeat include an alleged failure by the campaign to ensure the support of Hispanic voters. Javier Palomarez, president and chief executive of the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC), told the Guardian on Saturday that after Trump built his campaign on hardline immigration policies, “we thought this election cycle would be different”.

“Unfortunately,” Palomarez said, “Hillary Clinton was advised once again by Beltway advisers who knew it all, had the models and the projections, but who called it wrong.”

Benenson echoed Clinton, who reportedly told donors in a private conversation that she blamed actions by Comey for her defeat, by pointing a finger at the FBI director, saying Comey’s decision to announce the discovery of new alleged evidence in the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server 11 days before the election “did have an effect”.



Benenson said voters who were on the fence about Clinton and contemplating support of third-party candidates, including Green party candidate Jill Stein, had begun coalescing around Clinton in the last weeks of the election, until the Comey letter went public.

“We always had a group that were Trump defectors and a group that were Clinton defectors,” Benenson said.

First, Trump’s defectors began to come back around to the Republican candidate, he said. “And then our defectors started to come home until that Friday, and once that Friday hit, we saw them [go back] to the third-party candidates,” Benenson said.

Comey sent a second letter two days before the election, saying no new evidence of wrongdoing had been found.

Benenson said the trend of voters switching allegiance after Comey’s first letter was “significant” in Florida and in Wisconsin, where Stein garnered strong support among liberals and where Clinton lost by one point.