Normally, the question of who won an election that happened six months ago and why would not be a live issue, were it not for the fact that one person keeps bringing it up, and that person is the guy who won. Now the runner-up has joined in, returning to the public stage after the customary post-defeat hibernation period, to offer her assessment of what went wrong. “I take absolute personal responsibility,” she said. Also, it was James Comey’s and Russia’s fault.

Granted, in an election that was decided by a handful of votes in a handful of states, any factor could have made the difference. As Clinton said, if the election had been held in October, we would be having an entirely different conversation. So too if the electoral college did not exist. Or if Anthony Weiner wasn’t such a pervert. Or if the Democratic party nominee had been someone not named Hillary Clinton.

David Axelrod’s take, “it takes a lot of work to lose to Donald Trump,” is a little cruel: there were a lot of factors that were out of Clinton’s hands: sexism, a slow economic recovery, the anti-incumbent-party handicap. But there were a lot of things that were not. So for Democrats engaging in postmortems, a better use of time would be focusing on those that might be fixable in the future.

One source of political research, the Wesleyan Media Project, points to own-goals in one area well within Clinton’s control: her campaign. Specifically, her campaign ads. The 2016 campaign broke the mold in a lot of ways, including the unprecedented degree to which Clinton’s campaign relied on personal as opposed to policy messaging. Remember two of Clinton’s most famous ads, Role Models and Mirrors, both featuring clips of Donald Trump insulting entire nationalities and genders. At the time they aired, they were called “devastating”. They also didn’t work, at least not as hoped.

“When I play those ads to focus groups, they say: ‘Those are really moving,’” says the political scientist Erika Franklin Fowler, who directs the project at Wesleyan University. “But timing also matters. They’re more effective early in the campaign. And once you hear it enough, it stops having an effect.”

The Clinton campaign went all in on the “This guy, really?” strategy, up through November, when it’s inconceivable that anyone had any illusions about what kind of guy Donald Trump was. There’s a common misperception that in US politics, most ads are mudslingers. But in most elections, they’re mostly about policy.

In 2016, more than 60% of Clinton’s ads were solely about Trump’s personal character, and only 25% about policy. This contrasts with Trump’s ads, 70% of which were about policy. Those policy arguments may have been less grounded in reality, but his advertising was much more in line with typical campaigns, in which personal attack ads make up less than 20% of the overall share, and single digits in the case of the last two winners, Barack Obama and George W Bush (see figure 2 here).

There’s some evidence that mudslinging ads can backfire and reduce turnout, and that these effects are more pronounced for Democrats. But Clinton’s strategy was largely predicated on a notion of a vast pool of Republican voters who would be so disgusted with the Republican nominee’s behavior that they’d switch over, a group which turned out to be limited to the types of conservatives Clinton’s people were likely to be talking to: the Beltway Republican establishment whom Trump ran against in the primary.

Most Republican voters knew exactly what they were getting, saw the ads, and voted for him anyway. Because that’s what partisan voters do. And at a time when political polarization is extremely high, that’s most voters. “In surveys and focus groups, plenty of voters said: ‘I didn’t think he was qualified, I didn’t like anything about him,’ and they still voted for Donald Trump,” says the Michigan State University political scientist Matt Grossmann. Travis Ridout of Washington State University, who co-directs the Wesleyan Media Project, notes: “The idea that she could disqualify Trump on the basis of his personality was wishful thinking.”

More recent internal research by a Democratic Super Pac suggests that in Michigan and Wisconsin, the party’s messaging on economics fell flat. But one reason why Clinton’s economic policy message didn’t resonate might be that she didn’t articulate one.

Clinton didn’t campaign in Wisconsin at all, and Michigan only at the last minute. When she did, Grossmann notes, her campaign didn’t put out a Michigan-specific ad, and instead used the same ads they were running nationally. This was a departure from the strategy used by Obama, who deployed ads in the state touting his rescue of the automotive industry, and slamming Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch rich guy who would let Detroit go under.

In a highly polarized environment, and an election between two of the most widely detested candidates in history, it’s debatable how many votes Clinton might have swung with a policy emphasis. But given the margins, it’s likely enough the strategy could have been effective.

Research shows overwhelming evidence that the Trump vote was more highly correlated with racial attitudes than economic issues, to a degree not seen in recent elections. That may be because the electorate itself has become more racially polarized, or it could be the race-baiting campaign Trump ran.



But it could also be that in past elections, this racial polarization was counteracted by economics. Democrats once gave white working class voters, who may be otherwise receptive to “build the wall” rhetoric, other reasons to vote Democratic: support for unions, support for strong social safety nets, suspicion of big business.

Maybe Clinton, being a rich person who gave paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, wasn’t a plausible messenger for this. But as Axelrod would say, it’s hard to look less plausible than a man who lives in a gold plated Manhattan penthouse. Clinton managed to do so, by giving voters numerous reasons not to vote for him, but few reasons to vote for her.

