Pollsters largely fault Hillary Clinton’s campaign for prioritizing analytics over polling for much of the race. | Andrew Harnik/AP Did the Clinton campaign really stop polling at the end?

An explosive allegation from prominent Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg last week is sparking a new wave of criticism and recriminations about Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The charge — that the campaign went the final three weeks of last year’s presidential election without polling the battleground states — amounts to an accusation of campaign negligence that resulted in Donald Trump’s election.


It’s laid bare the emotions still gripping many Democrats nearly 11 months after Clinton’s defeat. And it has exposed a simmering — and often generational — debate over the extent to which Democratic campaigns should rely on advanced, Obama-style analytics at the expense of more traditional methods. The Clinton campaign itself divided along these lines.

“Astonishingly, the 2016 Clinton campaign conducted no state polls in the final three weeks of the general election and relied primarily on data analytics to project turnout and the state vote,” Greenberg wrote in The American Prospect, published online late last week. “They paid little attention to qualitative focus groups or feedback from the field, and their brief daily poll didn’t measure which candidate was defining the election or getting people engaged.”

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Greenberg, a veteran party pollster who helped elect Bill Clinton president in 1992, blamed the campaign’s “malpractice and arrogance” for contributing “mightily to the election of Donald Trump and its profound threat to our democracy.”

His excoriating assessment, which came two weeks after Hillary Clinton launched a book tour for her new memoir, “What Happened,” was largely greeted by public silence from former Clinton campaign officials. Still sensitive to accusations that they blew the campaign, they aren’t eager to relitigate the details of the campaign.

Privately, some Clinton staffers insist Greenberg's criticism is a distortion of the campaign’s data and polling operation. For most of the race, the campaign conducted both message polling (which consisted of regular, in-depth surveys) and analytics polling (which consisted of shorter polls that fed the campaign’s analytics and modeling operations).

Message polling is typically a straightforward affair, featuring a lengthy questionnaire that begins with a horse-race question before exploring voters’ opinions on the candidates and issues in the race. Many of these questions are designed to help campaigns fine-tune attacks against their opponents and probe their own candidates’ vulnerabilities.

Analytics polling, on the other hand, consists of shorter surveys designed to measure only the horse race and some other basic questions, like candidates’ favorability. Some campaigns use automated calls to gather these responses, but the Clinton campaign’s analytics polling involved live interviewers — sometimes using the same call centers as the message polls.

In October, about a month before Election Day, campaign officials pulled the plug on its deeper-dive state surveys — the messaging polls — over the objection of the campaign’s pollsters, who argued at the time that it was too risky to stop listening to voters beyond just the horse race, according to three sources associated with the campaign. The campaign continued, however, with its analytics polling, calling thousands of voters across battleground states every night to ask basic questions about candidate preference.

The campaign's pollsters argued against that decision at the time — analytics polling, they argued, might tell the campaign's leaders whether Clinton was ticking higher or sinking lower but it couldn't tell them why.

Those pollsters were overruled by senior Clinton campaign leaders, according to two people in the Clinton campaign orbit.

“All the pollsters on the campaign believed throughout the month of October that those polling in the individual states should have been polling — because when things change on the ground in each of those states, that’s the best tool you have in figuring out what’s happening,” said a Clinton pollster who requested anonymity to discuss the campaign’s internal dissension candidly.

The advantage of the analytics polling was scale, argues Navin Nayak, who served as director of opinion research for the Clinton campaign. Shorter surveys mean pollsters can talk to more voters, increasing the precision of the horse-race data — not just for the overall topline results, but for smaller demographic or geographic subgroups that can be analyzed more closely.

Moreover, Nayak said, both polling methods were producing the same results over much of the campaign.

“For seven months, we got two streams of data that were almost always consistent,” Nayak said. “So we didn’t double-up on that data for the last few weeks.”

The campaign continued to do more comprehensive surveying in battleground states in the final weeks but by polling across the whole body of battleground states, rather by conducting traditional state-specific polls. Nayak dismissed criticism that one big poll of swing-state voters might have missed developments in specific states that could be drowned out by trends elsewhere.

“This was a nationalized election,” Nayak said. “There is no question that the parochial stuff can matter in state-to-state combat. It was just irrelevant in this election.”

Greenberg insists that still amounts to political malpractice. He recalled his experience as the lead pollster for Bill Clinton in 1992 and Al Gore in 2000. On the Gore campaign, he said, states were assigned to specific pollsters who took ownership of those states. By winding down the more thorough message polling in October, Greenberg asserts, the Clinton camp may have missed the underlying warning signs in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“I’m distinguishing between the analytics using a couple questions on a poll and a real poll that looks deeply beyond the horse-race question,” Greenberg told POLITICO this week. “The most important thing is having a real strategy, understanding in each state. You need to get across the finish line.”

That divide between pollsters and those advocating for more campaign analytics has bubbled beneath the surface in Democratic politics for a decade. One of the fault lines is generational — often pitting experienced campaign pollsters against younger data scientists.

Barack Obama’s campaign was credited with successfully marrying those two approaches, especially in 2012.

Democratic pollster Mark Mellman — who polled for then-Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign — said that while Greenberg’s article focused on Clinton’s 2016 campaign, some of the themes transcend last year’s presidential race.

“It is the typical pointing of fingers on one hand, but there is an underlying issue that lies behind it,” said Mellman. “There has been an ongoing debate. … And that debate has been occasioned by some analytics firms that have advertised them as better than traditional pollsters without empirical evidence.”

While pollsters largely fault Clinton’s campaign for prioritizing analytics over polling for much of the race, most acutely at the end, many campaign staffers largely view the battle between pollsters and analytics as a settled issue.

“This is a generational battle that I thought was over,” said a Clinton campaign official who requested anonymity to discuss the campaign’s data operation. “[Obama’s campaigns] made spending decisions based on analytics surveys, too.”

In the public statements campaign staffers have made — and in Clinton's own book — most of the blame is placed on exogenous factors, rather than the data or its polling decisions.

Forty-eight hours after the election, Nayak sent a memo to senior campaign staff, arguing that James Comey, the then-FBI director, threw the election to Trump by re-opening — and then closing — the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server.

In an interview this week, Nayak reiterated that the late-breaking events in the race meant that any polling — whether message or analytics surveys — wouldn’t have predicted Clinton’s defeat.

“There’s empirical evidence that if the election were held on Oct. 27 — even if you have the same amount of error in everyone’s polling — that she would have won,” Nayak said. “Our sense was that despite that late movement, we were still positioned to win.”

Greenberg stands by his basic assertion: that suspending even some of its state polling in the closing weeks of the campaign was foolhardy, and that more diagnostic polling might have seen the trouble brewing.

“I don’t understand,” said Greenberg. “Real elections — in which you win or lose — you get every state that you can win, and you look as closely as you can. And I think it’s malpractice not to have real state polls right until the end.”