Clinton Camp Mastered The Science Of Politics But Forgot The Art, Staffers Say

In a private conference call with top campaign surrogates just days after the election, several high-ranking Hillary Clinton campaign officials offered an overview of how, exactly, they came up short against Donald Trump.

It fell on Navin Nayak, the campaign’s director of opinion research, to offer the statistical explanation. Nayak, whose role in the presidential campaign had gone almost entirely unnoticed until after its unravelling, noted that in the closing weeks before the election, internal models had both Trump and Clinton losing roughly the same percentage of the vote to third-party candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson. All of Stein’s support was coming from Clinton’s camp, while Johnson was taking more from Trump but a little from Clinton too, he explained. But when the final data came in, the campaign was shocked by how far off its assumptions had been.