It was the job of the campaign to make these analyses and determine which locales weren't actually safe. Trump's team managed to do that.
No, actually, they did not. At least not in the manner you're making it seem. His team was all over the place in regard to strategy throughout the campaign. Here are two excellent in-depth articles showing constant disarray, disagreement and fundamental confusion over what to do at just about every turn of Trump's campaign:
Final Days, which was published on October 31st, 2016 (just before the election) and this Politico piece
Inside Trump’s Stunning Upset Victory published just three days after the election. Relevant snippets from Politico:
In August, Trump gathered a number of his top advisers in New York City for a presentation led by his chief pollster, Tony Fabrizio. The numbers showed the Republican nominee falling behind in a number of states. Trump was stunned by the numbers, but he didn’t push back.
“Jesus,” the Republican nominee told the group. “Can we come back from this?”
Trump would frequently ask his team whether he could win. But the mood was different this time around. His aides were struck by the feeling of helplessness that had overtaken a candidate whose public image was centered on his confidence. To some of them, it highlighted his political inexperience. While Trump was behind by high single digits in some battlegrounds, political history had shown that a comeback at this stage in the game, particularly with Clinton’s vulnerabilities, wasn’t out of the question. Yet Trump was acting like it was.
...
On Aug. 19, the day after the Alexandria meetings, Manafort abruptly announced his resignation.
And that’s when the campaign started to turn around for Trump.
Taking Manafort’s place were two people who would—as Lewandowski once famously said— let Trump be Trump. Bannon took over as campaign CEO and the campaign manager would be Kellyanne Conway, a pollster who’d been brought on in June and who developed a chemistry with Trump that Manafort had not, mainly by cloaking the difficult realities she delivered to the candidate in more optimistic terms.
Trump’s decision to elevate the two, especially Bannon, demonstrated that Trump wanted to end his campaign just as he’d begun it: as an unapologetic, bare-knuckled nationalist.
...
Yet, even in the final stretch, Trump’s team reminded divided about what their message should be. At one point, his pollsters complained to the candidate’s top aides on a conference call that Trump was missing a golden opportunity to run as a change agent—something that could help him build momentum.
“On Friday’s polling team call to review the state data, I think you heard all of us express frustration with DJT’s inability to “own” the “change” message,” the pollsters, Fabrizio, David Lee, and Travis Tunis, wrote in an Oct. 3 memo to senior aides Conway, Bannon, Bossie, and Brad Parscale.
The memo painted a bleak picture for Trump, noting that the campaign’s internal surveys showed him behind in swing states like North Carolina and Florida, and also in traditionally conservative Georgia – but argued that presenting Trump as a “change” figure was perhaps the only way to turn the tide. “This is why it is critical to get DJT to understand the importance of this message to his victory,” the pollsters implored.
...
And then, 11 days before the election, Trump got a break he needed—the FBI director’s stunning announcement that his bureau was reviewing new information in the Clinton email probe. A renewed sense of optimism rippled through the Trump ranks. Aides began openly discussing which jobs they might get in a Trump administration. And at the RNC, operatives said they detected a dramatic shift toward Trump among undecided and Republican voters who had been wary of the nominee.
As Trump hit the final stretch, and he searched for a narrow path to victory, his team decided on a gambit: to try to steal a blue state from Clinton. On Oct. 24, Fabrizio wrote a memo to Bossie—under the header “CONFIDENTIAL - EYES ONLY” that outlined a proposed plan for the final two weeks of the election.
“Bottom line, if we do NOT expand our targets to try and steal at least 2 of the current lean Clinton states, we are will be left with trying to draw to an inside straight flush,” he wrote.
Fabrizio argued that Trump would have to expand the map to have a realistic shot at winning, suggesting that the Republican compete in Michigan and Minnesota. Within days, Trump was heading to the Democratic-friendly states.
The odds were long. The RNC’s predictive model on the Friday afternoon before the election had Trump losing all-important Florida by 2 percentage points and finishing with 240 electoral votes—30 short of the tally needed to win the presidency.
Clearly, Republicans couldn’t see victory on the horizon. But Trump didn’t lose heart, as he did in August.
So there was chaos throughout and the final "strategy" was, apparently, a last ditch effort, not something planned all along. At least not on the surface.
Here's another excellent in-depth piece from Bloomberg from October 27, 2016:
Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go. It starts with Kushner and Parscale:
But after Trump locked down the GOP nomination by winning Indiana’s primary, Kushner tapped Parscale, a political novice who built web pages for the Trump family’s business and charities, to begin an ambitious digital operation fashioned around a database they named Project Alamo.
...
Several things jump out. Despite Trump’s claim that he doesn’t believe the polls, his San Antonio research team spends $100,000 a week on surveys (apart from polls commissioned out of Trump Tower) and has sophisticated models that run daily simulations of the election. The results mirror those of the more reliable public forecasters—in other words, Trump’s staff knows he’s losing. Badly. “Nate Silver’s results have been similar to ours,” says Parscale, referring to the polling analyst and his predictions at FiveThirtyEight, “except they lag by a week or two because he’s relying on public polls.” The campaign knows who it must reach and is still executing its strategy despite the public turmoil: It’s identified 13.5 million voters in 16 battleground states whom it considers persuadable, although the number of voters shrinks daily as they make up their minds.
Trump’s team also knows where its fate will be decided. It’s built a model, the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” to weight and rank the states that the data team believes are most critical to amassing the 270 electoral votes Trump needs to win the White House. On Oct. 18 they rank as follows: Florida (“If we don’t win, we’re cooked,” says an official), Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Neither Wisconsin nor Michigan are in their model. And rightly so, considering almost every poll going from October to the election itself (and certainly in the eleven days that they suddenly decided on a hail mary gambit in
Wisconsin and
Michigan in particular) showed Clinton the clear winner of both states by some consistent 6 points.
Go back to the Bloomberg piece:
Trump believes he possesses hidden strength that may only materialize at the ballot box. At rallies, he’s begun speculating that the election will be like “Brexit times five,” implying that he’ll upend expectations much as the Brexit vote shocked experts who didn’t believe a majority of Britons would vote to leave the European Union. Trump’s data scientists, including some from the London firm Cambridge Analytica who worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit initiative, think they’ve identified a small, fluctuating group of people who are reluctant to admit their support for Trump and may be throwing off public polls.
At the time that Fabrizio--Trump's
pollster guru, mind you--inexplicably said the campaign needed to pull a hail mary and go to Wisconsin and Michigan in the final eleven days (iow, on October 30th, 2016), the polls showed Clinton beating Trump in Wisconsin by 6.5 points; Michigan by 7 points. If you look at the aggregates for the week prior in both states, you see an even worse slam for Trump, so from a
polling analysts perspective it makes even less sense for him to have argued--let alone for Trump and others to agree--to go to those two states.
Back to the Bloomberg article:
Still, Trump’s reality is plain: He needs a miracle. Back in May, newly anointed, he told Bloomberg Businessweek he would harness “the movement” to challenge Clinton in states Republicans haven’t carried in years: New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Connecticut, California. “I’m going to do phenomenally,” he predicted. Yet neither Trump’s campaign nor the RNC has prioritized registering and mobilizing the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees who are Trump’s most obvious source of new votes, as FiveThirtyEight analyst David Wasserman noted.
To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.
To reiterate, then, their PLAN did not involve Wisconsin or Michigan. In May, in fact, it was New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Connecticut, and California, all states where he lost big. Another strategy was: go after Sanders supporters, women and blacks.
The Bloomberg article furthers notes:
Campaigns spend millions on data science to understand their own potential supporters—to whom they’re likely already credible messengers—but here Trump is speaking to his opponent’s. Furthermore, there’s no scientific basis for thinking this ploy will convince these voters to stay home. It could just as easily end up motivating them.
Plus there is this:
Locations for the candidate’s rallies, long the centerpiece of his media-centric candidacy, are guided by a Cambridge Analytica ranking of the places in a state with the largest clusters of persuadable voters.
But, again, CA evidently also missed Wisconsin and Michigan in that regard, since it was a last ditch decision eleven days before the general for Trump to go to those states.
In regard to what they did spend on digital ads in Wisconsin and Michigan, Parscale only
mentions "get out to vote" ads:
Specifically, he told The Associated Press, the campaign and Republican Party spent about $5 million in get-out-the-vote digital advertising targeted in the final few days to Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida. That proved critical; some of those states were won by razor-thin margins.
"You think, what if we hadn't spent that?" Parscale said. "We might not have won."
So, the question remains, why did Trump's
pollster (Fabrizio) and Trump and Parscale suddenly decide that Trump's physical presence was important in Wisconsin and Michigan on October 30th in spite of the fact that the digital campaign in those states was little more than GOTV spots and BOTH states showed consistently in the week leading up to October 30th that Clinton was the clear winner--in every single poll taken--by significant percentages; so significant in fact that they could not possibly be overcome by microtargeting feedback data alone.
Here are the top polls during that time frame again for Wisconsin:
Remington Research (R)*11/1 - 11/2 Clinton +8
Loras* 10/31 - 11/1 Clinton +6
Marquette* 10/26 - 10/31 Clinton +6
Emerson* 10/26 - 10/27 Clinton +6
And for Michigan. Note in particular the Fox polls :
FOX 2 Detroit/Mitchell 10/31 - 10/31 Clinton +6
FOX 2 Detroit/Mitchell 10/30 - 10/30 Clinton +9
Emerson* 10/25 - 10/26 Clinton +7
FOX 2 Detroit/Mitchell 10/25 - 10/25 Clinton +6
Detroit Free Press* 10/22 - 10/25 Clinton +7
At best a marketer like Parscale would argue that their microtargeting information shows a 1 to 2 point differences, but sure as shit NOT a 6 or 9 point difference, just to break even with the poll numbers, let alone exceed them.
So, no, again, the facts simply prove that in regard to anything on the surface at least, the Trump team did not in fact have a superior grasp of the EC ground game.
Of further note about Parscale:
Parscale, who sees himself as more than just a staffer. “Because you know what I was willing to do? I was willing to do it like family.”
Weird comment to make. Unless one factors in how Russia was the one who actually targeted Wisconsin and Michigan (and evidently had been doing so since 2015) and that it wasn't until Jared Kushner brought in Parscale that anyone even mentioned Wisconsin and Michigan and
then not until the very last minute,
in spite of every poll telling them they don't have the numbers to get anywhere near a win in either state.
The Trump team made a good call
Well,
someone was making the calls. It wasn't Trump and it wasn't Bannon. Supposedly it was Fabrizio that made the inexplicable call to go to Wisconsin and Michigan on October 30th, but the reason for that call still has not been fully revealed. At best, we have words like "last ditch" and "we needed a miracle" and the like, but, with the exception of Parscale after the fact, no one was ever strategizing on either state and the only time they did hit on them was at the last minute in the lead up to the actual election as a hail mary, so leaving out any ties to Russia in any of this, even by their own admissions it was a "miracle" against the polls, conventional wisdom and basic intellect.
Which is why it's being targeted by Mueller, evidently, with Kushner and Parscale as prime people of interest.
Iow, either they pulled something completely out of their asses in a last gasp, close your eyes and pray hope this works fashion--which destroys your argument--OR this was part of some deeper strategy that had been in the works for at least a year before the election even began and the puppeteers either pulled the strings or coordinated with the puppets on which strings to be pulled.