There are several major problems with the idea that Clinton’s Electoral College tactics cost her the election. For one thing, winning Wisconsin and Michigan — states that Clinton is rightly accused of ignoring — would not have sufficed to win her the Electoral College. She’d also have needed Pennsylvania, Florida or another state where she campaigned extensively. For another, Clinton spent almost twice as much money as Trump on her campaign in total. So even if she devoted a smaller share of her budget to a particular state or a particular activity, it may nonetheless have amounted to more resources overall (5 percent of a $969 million budget is more than 8 percent of a $531 million one).
But most importantly, the changes in the vote from 2012 to 2016 are much better explained by demographics than by where the campaigns spent their time and money. Let me start with a couple of simple comparisons that I think pretty convincingly demonstrate this, and then we’ll attempt a more rigorous approach.
Comparison No. 1: Clinton spent literally no time in Wisconsin, whereas Trump repeatedly campaigned in the state. Wisconsin turned red. But so did Pennsylvania, where both candidates campaigned extensively. Trump’s margin of victory in each state was almost identical, in fact — 0.8 percentage points in Wisconsin and 0.7 percentage points in Pennsylvania. That strongly implies that the demographic commonalities between Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — both of them have lots of white voters without college degrees — mattered a lot more than the difference in campaign tactics.
Comparison No. 2: As I mentioned, Trump campaigned a lot more than Clinton in Wisconsin, and it turned red. But Trump also campaigned a lot more than Clinton in Colorado — it actually had the largest gap of any state in where the candidates spent their time. Colorado remained blue, however, with Clinton winning it by about the same margin that Obama won it by in 2012. The difference is that Colorado has relatively few white voters without college degrees, while Wisconsin has lots of them. Again, that strongly implies that demographics rather than campaign tactics drove the shift in the results.
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In Pennsylvania, for instance, the share of white voters without college degrees is well above average so the model expects an above-average shift toward Trump. And that’s exactly what happened, of course: Trump won Pennsylvania by about 1 percentage point, right in line with the model’s expectations. Wisconsin? Clinton’s roughly 1-point loss there is actually a tick better than the 3-point loss the regression model projects. The model also projects Michigan, Minnesota and Florida to be photo finishes, as they were. It has Trump favored in New Hampshire, which has a lot of white voters without college degrees, so that may have been a state where Clinton’s ground game did save her.
On the flip side, the regression correctly projects Clinton to roughly replicate Obama’s numbers in Colorado and Virginia, as she did — even though Trump spent much more time than she did in those states. With one or two exceptions, such as Hawaii, it also does a good job with red states and blue states — for instance, in capturing the big shift toward Trump in Maine and the one toward Clinton in Texas.
To be clear, these are after-the-fact projections done with knowledge of how the actual vote turned out, as opposed to pre-election predictions. But the regression is able to figure all of this out without giving any consideration to how Clinton and Trump spent their time and money. Instead, it can explain the Electoral College drop-off Clinton experienced relative to Obama based on some simple demographic variables and the 2012 vote alone.
That suggests that either the ground game didn’t matter much — or that Clinton’s ground game advantage was as large as Obama’s was after all.
