Tag: campaign
NBC News Vs. The Donald

NBC News Vs. The Donald

You can’t read every email that drops into your inbox. There are just too many. So publicists have learned how to attract attention.

On Monday morning, the following press release appeared in my inbox with a ping. It was not made up. It was not spam. It was from MSNBC, and it announced the results of a major investigation by NBC News.

It was headlined “NBC News Report: ‘Donald Trump Does Not Have a Campaign.'”

Which was kind of a surprise. Trump has a campaign plane and campaign rallies and a campaign press corps, so why doesn’t he have a campaign?

It’s like owning a Rolls-Royce and never driving it.

The press release began, “According to a new Decision 2016 NBC News report headlined ‘Donald Trump does not have a campaign,’ Donald Trump is a candidate without a campaign — and it’s becoming a serious problem.”

(The press release could just as easily have begun by stating that “NBC News does not have a person who knows how to write press releases,” but I don’t want to be snarky.)

The report says:

“Republicans working to elect Trump describe a bare-bones effort debilitated by infighting, a lack of staff to carry out basic functions, minimal coordination with allies and a message that’s prisoner to Trump’s momentary whims.

“‘Bottom line, you can hire all the top people in the world, but to what end? Trump does what he wants,’ a source close to the campaign said.”

I know it is shocking to have a candidate who “does what he wants,” but the alternative is to have dimwit staff members doing what they want.

True, Trump presents serious problems as a candidate. He’s a bigot. He does not understand world affairs. And he does not understand domestic affairs.

But that is not the problem, according to his staff. The problem is that Trump has “a message that’s prisoner to Trump’s momentary whims” instead of being prisoner to his staff’s momentary whims.

That raises a question: If Trump is such a bad campaigner and “does not have a campaign,” how has he done so well?

Trump locked up the Republican nomination in late May, while Hillary Clinton — who has a staff the size of Sacramento — was still struggling to lock up her nomination.

The NBC News report also severely criticizes Trump’s handling of the Trump University scandal.

The report says:

“Aides appeared unprepared for the Trump University story last week, despite knowing in advance that unsealed court documents would reveal explosive allegations of fraud. Beyond a short video of former students praising the program that was posted online, the campaign offered scant pushback.

“The absence of a response to the Trump U story left the candidate to fill the vacuum with a torrent of demagoguery against the federal judge overseeing the case, Gonzalo Curiel, who Trump said was biased by his ‘Mexican heritage’ despite his Indiana birthplace.”

But if Trump had a huge staff, could that staff have prevented him from unleashing “a torrent of demagoguery”? Yes — if it wrapped him in a torrent of duct tape.

The report does throw Trump a few bones: “Despite the campaign’s sluggish start, Trump supporters stressed that his unique gifts, especially his ability to command media attention via Twitter and cable news, give him some leeway to bypass ordinary campaign methods. They also are encouraged by polls that show Trump competitive with likely Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and Republican voters largely united despite the bruising primary.”

That is another way of saying, “Hey, this guy is a complete tool, but he’s awfully good at it.”

And in fact, Trump sent out a tweet that shows how deft he is at social media (despite the usual typos): “I am getting bad marks from certain pundits because I have a small campaign staff. But small is good, flexible, save money and number one!”

NBC News thinks Trump should seek other sources of wisdom, including aides from other past campaigns. Remember that terrific Mitt Romney campaign of 2012, for instance?

The report says, “The Romney campaign, for example, helped push coverage of Obama’s ‘You didn’t build that’ quote by organizing events with supporters in the business community in swing states around the country.”

I see one problem with that analysis, however. The “You didn’t build that” attack was exceptionally stupid and ineffective, even by Romney campaign standards.

But do not despair. “The good news for Trump is that it can only get better from here,” NBC News concludes.

That’s true. All the Trump campaign needs to do is hire a top adviser to answer criticism with erudite, eloquent, articulate and persuasive responses.

Anybody know what Sarah Palin is doing these days?

Roger Simon is Politico’s chief political columnist. His new e-book, “Reckoning: Campaign 2012 and the Fight for the Soul of America,” can be found on Amazon.com, BN.com and iTunes.

Photo: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Lynden, Washington, U.S., May 7, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart 

A New Data-Mining Technique To Uncover New Hampshire Influencers

A New Data-Mining Technique To Uncover New Hampshire Influencers

By Sasha Issenberg, Bloomberg News (TNS)

In recent weeks, as Ben Carson began to slip in national polls of the Republican presidential primary field, volunteers at New Day for America, the super PAC backing Ohio Gov. John Kasich, began calling Carson backers in New Hampshire who might be open to Kasich as a second or third choice. But these weren’t just shots in the dark. They were equipped with a target list of voters identified as social anchors — people who are particularly influential within their personal networks, based on information culled from yearbooks, church lists, sports rosters, and other sources nationwide.

The list was prepared by Applecart, a New York-based data company that specializes in taking social-network analysis offline. Rather than merely looking for relationships validated on sites like Facebook and Twitter, Applecart is using a variety of sources to build its own map of the analog links between Americans. The idea is to help campaigns identify the voters who are likeliest to shape the attitudes and opinions of others around them, and then work to engage them as supporters. Applecart’s approach upends the logic of volunteer campaigns, in which campaigns look outward from the supporters they already have; instead, Applecart’s system starts with the targets they want to reach and then moves back to find people who are connected with them. “What we’re talking about is not finding that Rihanna is probably influential to my 19-year-old female cousin, but that the one person in her community whose name no one knows yet is influential (to her) because they went to high school together,” says Sacha Samotin, 24, one of Applecart’s founders.

Samotin and two classmates began the company three years ago as undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, meeting as research assistants to John DiIulio, a prominent political scientist who once served as adviser to George W. Bush. Under DiIulio’s guidance, the trio embarked on a project to take the sort of social-media targeting that was then in vogue — that year the Obama campaign developed a pioneering app called “Targeted Sharing” — and apply it to those who had not agreed to open up access to their online friend lists, or were not even active on Facebook at all. (A recent Pew analysis showed the generational cohort most likely to be Republicans was aged 69 to 86.)

Applecart executives are coy about its methods for retrieving the underlying data, although they hint that it stretches from labor-intensive work like library visits nationwide to scraping of websites, such as law-firm directories that inventory co-workers. Samotin says Applecart has developed processes around this work that it is currently seeking to patent.

On Applecart’s “social graph” of New Hampshire, each voter is treated as a node in a network with each of their known contacts webbed around them. (Around a dozen voters in the state were found to be “hermits,” with no meaningful interpersonal links.) Nuclear family, extended family, friends, professional acquaintances, and non-professional acquaintances are each assigned different statistical weights, then mixed with other values such as geographical proximity to calibrate a “connection score” between the voters in question. “A coworker who lives on the same block as a Manchester voter would be in a different category than a coworker who lives in Nashua,” says Samotin.

One application of such mapping was validated last year, when Applecart mimicked a classic 2006 experiment in which political scientists at Yale sent Michigan residents copies of their own voting records, along with those of their neighbors, with a threat to send out an updated notice after that year’s primary marking who had cast a ballot. Turnout among those who got the mailer increased 8 percentage points, the largest effect ever produced by a single piece of direct mail. When Applecart analysts replicated the experiment, they replaced neighbors’ vote histories with those whose names were likely to be personally familiar to the recipient. In one southern state that had competitive statewide elections last year, the “socially inspired” approach increased turnout among recipients by 14.6 percentage points.

An intimate approach to grass-roots politics is essential to Kasich, who has increasingly banked his campaign on a strong showing in a state where the difference between finishing in eighth place and third could be as few as 20,000 votes. Applecart was sought out by the pro-Kasich super PAC in part because — unlike outside groups backing Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz — it wanted to develop the type of volunteer-based field activities that others have left to the candidates’ own organizations. “So many companies use data to overcomplicate politics,” says New Day chief strategist Matt David. “We’re trying to use data to leverage existing relationships to find Kasich supporters, and then turn them out.”

When volunteers arrive at New Day phone banks either in New Hampshire or Kasich’s political base of Columbus, Ohio, they are given call sheets prioritized by who the voters know. The targets are prospective “anchors,” those whom statistical models have identified as open to Kasich (even as a second or third choice) and also whose connection scores showed them as likely to be interacting with others. The idea is to convert these anchors into de facto campaign surrogates. “It doesn’t take too many people who are connected to a persuadable target to say nice things to them about John Kasich,” to start to close the deal, says Matt Kalmans, a 22-year-old co-founder of Applecart.

Outreach to party and elected officials, who are usually approached on a candidate’s behalf by other elites, follows a similar logic. “One of the strategies we’re using is instead of going directly to the (person from whom they’d like an endorsement) we go to the people around them and try to push them,” says New Day political director Dave Luketic. “That’s incredibly important because one of the metrics they use is: can this guy run a good campaign?” This is one area where the super- PAC is at a particular disadvantage, given that it is legally forbidden to directly communicate with the organization that secures endorsements. “We just set ’em up and the campaign knocks ’em down,” Luketic says.

©2015 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Governor John Kasich speaks at the debate held by Fox Business Network for the top 2016 U.S. Republican presidential candidates debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 10, 2015. REUTERS/Darren Hauck 

 

Clinton And Sanders Enter New Phase In Battle For New Hampshire

Clinton And Sanders Enter New Phase In Battle For New Hampshire

By Jennifer Epstein, Bloomberg News (TNS)

NEW YORK — By the numbers, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are in more or less the same position in New Hampshire. They’ve been within a few points of each other in most recent polls, and both have more than 50 paid staffers and about 10 offices in the Granite State.

Behind those numbers, though, are two dramatically different campaigns.

Clinton’s team started early, with senior staff in place as she launched her candidacy in April and a staff of a few dozen paid organizers working on her behalf by the summer. Her first ad buy of $1 million came in August and her campaign has since spent millions of dollars more. She’s made a dozen trips to New Hampshire, including three in October.

Sanders’s campaign, meanwhile, didn’t have a state director on the job until August and had about 30 staffers by the end of that month. Its first ad buy (along with a complementary one in Iowa, totaling $2 million) was announced on Sunday, the day after Sanders wrapped up his ninth trip to the state.

Without the same robust structure until the past several weeks, the Sanders operation had been kept afloat by its volunteers. By the time Julia Barnes, the state director, started work, there were already hundreds of volunteers campaigning on behalf of Sanders, posting signs at their grocery stores, talking to neighbors at waste-transfer stations, selling home-embroidered hats featuring the candidate’s name and donating the profits to the campaign.

“One of the reasons why we’re seeing such success, even having a delay” in launching formal organization efforts well after Clinton, “is we did not — and this is a professional anomaly for me — have to work to manufacture enthusiasm,” Barnes said. “It was already there.”

Enthusiasm can only go so far (and, to be sure, there’s plenty for Clinton, too), argue veterans of President Barack Obama’s New Hampshire primary and general election campaigns, who just happen to be Clinton supporters this time around. Early and sophisticated organization gives her an edge, they say.

“There’s a key difference between the Clinton campaign and the Sanders campaign in that Clinton made an early investment in recruiting top volunteer organizers, top paid field organizers, political supporters like state senators who make a massive difference,” said Sean Downey, a Democratic consultant who was Obama 2012’s New Hampshire political director. “At the end of the day, those things count for something and it’s one of the many things that’s going to make a difference for Clinton at the end.”

Clinton’s effort on the ground in New Hampshire “looks and feels a lot like the Obama 2008 ground game,” said Jim Demers, who was a co-chair for that campaign. “Volunteers are in the offices on a regular basis, they’re targeting, canvassing. It really does rival that really aggressive campaign of 2008.”

As of Sunday, 5,500 people had volunteered for the Clinton campaign in New Hampshire, and she’d secured the endorsement of nine of 10 Democratic state senators, according to a memo from state director Mike Vlacich marking 100 days until the primary. “We started this campaign in April with a plan and stuck to it,” he wrote. “The result is a strong, durable organization built upon lasting relationships.”

The Sanders team is still working to build that kind of operation, Democrats in the state say. The campaign has been looking for a data director since July and several key staffers, including communications director Karthik Ganapathy and digital director Melissa Byrne, have joined in the past few weeks. The Clinton campaign’s data director started work July 1.

Despite Clinton’s early edge and Sanders’ surge through the summer months, the race in New Hampshire is now just where smart observers expected it to be: close, and likely to remain that way right up until the Feb. 9 primary.

The latest round of polls, conducted after the first Democratic debate and before Clinton’s Benghazi testimony, showed mixed results, with Sanders and Clinton each leading in some. In the Bloomberg Politics/St. Anselm New Hampshire Poll conducted Oct. 15-18, Sanders led Clinton by five points, 41 percent to 36 percent.

“It’s going to continue to be a competitive environment in New Hampshire. That’s the way New Hampshire is. Every race is competitive,” said Vlacich, who joined Clinton’s team in April after managing Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s 2014 re-election campaign. “Voters make their decision on Feb. 9 — not tonight.”

Barnes also acknowledged the tightness of the race and raised the stakes. “I think New Hampshire is for us a must-win and it’s a must-win for them too, quite frankly,” she said. (Delegate math suggests that Sanders would likely need the momentum of a strong showing in New Hampshire to stay competitive in the nomination fight, while Clinton would be injured by a loss, but not fatally so.)

Sanders himself is just as definitive. “I think we have an excellent chance to win here in New Hampshire,” the Vermont senator told a few dozen supporters who gathered on Friday afternoon to mark the opening of a campaign office on Main Street in Nashua. “I think we can win in Iowa. Then if we win in Iowa and New Hampshire, it opens us for us a path toward victory.”

Clinton and Sanders both visited New Hampshire last week and showed off their relative strengths.

While in New Hampshire last Wednesday and Thursday, Clinton spoke to a crowd of about 400, the largest-ever for Politics and Eggs, St. Anselm College’s speakers series for presidential candidates, and traversed her way across the sparsely populated northern part of the state.

A Thursday afternoon town hall on rural issues drew 500 to a school cafeteria in Littleton, where the crowd booed a man who asked her how she’d be capable of “ending corruption” given Whitewater, Benghazi and scrutiny of her email server. “I wish you’d go back and read the history of the 1990s,” she told him. “I advise you to go back and read my 11 hours of testimony. I hope you enjoy it.”

Sanders arrived in the state midday Friday, making a last-minute stop at a senior citizens center in Manchester where a few dozen residents sat in the audience of a multipurpose room while a group of women kept up their card game. That night, he spoke to an audience of 450 at a town hall in Derry, delivering a 68-minute stump speech before taking half an hour of questions on democratic socialism, Syria and his opposition to the death penalty.

His visit during the last two days of October was his first to New Hampshire in five weeks, but was scheduled just as tightly as a standard Clinton campaign swing. It included three town halls, a meeting with the New Hampshire Union Leader’s editorial board, an office opening, trips to a senior center and a union hall, plus an unusually personal vignette of retail politicking, as he spent about 20 minutes trick-or-treating with his grandkids.

Both candidates were, in their own ways, making their case to undecided voters and trying to inspire those already committed to them to do more.

They also both have legitimate claims to being the favorite candidate in the state, though it’s usually the opposing campaign making the claims.

Sanders supporters cite Clinton’s campaigning in the state not just in 2008 but during her husband’s first campaign in 1992. Clinton supporters point out that Sanders campaigned in the state ahead of 2012, 2013 and 2014 elections.

“This state has a long history of looking very favorably at neighboring candidates,” said Demers. “People forget that Tsongas beat Bill Clinton here. Kerry, Dean, Dukakis all did very well.”

“I don’t think anyone can overestimate the impact of having a next door neighbor in the race,” he added.

“There’s a clearly a good connection and familiarity” for Sanders in New Hampshire, Barnes, his state director, acknowledged. “But I don’t think that that’s necessarily a unique advantage. I mean, Secretary Clinton has been campaigning here for decades…she’s spent a lot of time here.”

Both sides agree, though, that Clinton had a big head start in building her campaign infrastructure.

Entering the race as the clear front-runner and knowing she’d raise tens of millions of dollars in just her first quarter as a candidate, Clinton created a machine that would pay dividends down the stretch, hiring top talent including Vlacich and several others who worked on Shaheen’s 2014 campaign.

Clinton plans to formally file paperwork to get on the ballot on Nov. 9 and, in the days leading up to then, show off some of her big-name supporters. Among others, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean will attend house parties on Clinton’s behalf and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will attend a Women for Hillary Event.

But Sanders is making gains, though he sometimes seems surprised by voters’ support for him.

While knocking on doors Saturday evening with his grandson and two granddaughters, a woman ran into her house to grab something and returned with the Bernie Bear, a stuffed critter with unruly white hair and a Bernie 2016 button on his suit jacket.

“This is the real thing,” Sanders said. “I’m so honored…. Oh my God, this is an experience of a lifetime. That is clearly something that is not going to happen every day.”

(c)2015 Bloomberg News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks at the “Carroll County Democratic Committee’s Annual Grover Cleveland Dinner” at the Attitash Mountain Resort in Bartlett, New Hampshire October 28, 2015. REUTERS/Katherine Taylor 

Walker Tells Republican Lawmakers His Lack Of College Diploma Could Be Political Asset

Walker Tells Republican Lawmakers His Lack Of College Diploma Could Be Political Asset

By John McCormick and Billy House, Bloomberg News (TNS)

In modern American politics, you don’t hear many stories about college dropouts moving into the White House.

Scott Walker wants to change that. The Wisconsin governor never finished his degree at Marquette University, dropping out of the Milwaukee school during the spring of his senior year.

His lack of a degree was one of the questions that arose Tuesday during his meeting in Washington with dozens of Republican U.S. House members, according to lawmakers at the session.

Walker, who in recent days has become increasingly more affirmative about the likelihood of a Republican presidential bid, is also meeting privately with social conservatives in Washington. He’s said he will make an announcement about his decision after the Wisconsin legislature completes a two-year budget plan, likely in late June.

Representatives Tom Cole of Oklahoma and Dave Brat of Virginia, who attended the meeting that Wisconsin’s Republican congressional delegation held for lawmakers to meet the governor, both recounted Walker’s answer to a question about his lack of college degree. They said Walker told the group he was offered a job during his senior year and took it.

The Washington Post reported in February that friends remember Walker getting a job at an American Red Cross office near the campus. Some also remember hearing that one of his parents had a health problem or about financial stress on the family, the newspaper said.

Walker argued the lack of that bullet point on his resume is a potential political advantage, telling the lawmakers — as Cole recalled it — that 68 percent of American adults don’t have college degrees. It “plays in my favor,” Cole quoted Walker as telling the group.

In Wisconsin, 46.7 percent of the population reports having some college education or an associate’s degree, according to the most recently available American Community Survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Nationwide, 45.5 percent report some college or an associate’s degree.

“It is an elitist question,” Cole said.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr