• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to secondary sidebar

Datadoodle

  • Home
  • About Datadoodle
  • Contact Ted Cuzzillo
  • cities

Democratic pollster: Hillary campaign’s data malpractice

September 25, 2017 by Ted Cuzzillo Leave a Comment

Hillary Clinton’s data analysis failed her — even with the help of Barack Obama’s 2008 data cruncher. The problem, says a Democratic pollster, wasn’t in how they crunched the data. The problem was the data they ignored — with a result that’s rarely so clear in business.

Democratic pollster and strategist Stanley Greenberg explained in a blog post a few days ago.

… When campaign developments overtake the model’s assumptions, you get surprised by the voters — and this happened repeatedly. … 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. They paid little attention to qualitative focus groups or feedback from the field, and their brief daily analytics poll didn’t measure which candidate was defining the election or getting people engaged.

Some on the team were worried, such as campaign chair John Podesta. He wanted to fire the data guy, Robbie Mook. But Clinton refused, recalling his work for Obama.

The trouble was that Hillary lacked Obama’s star power, something she probably understood but dismissed. Listen to her post-election interviews and you’ll hear her miss the people point again and again. The difference created a soft but crucial margin that put Obama over the top and left Clinton losing to a candidate no one should have lost to.

Without the Obama zing, Mook was riding bareback. The data analysis itself had to be right on, but it wasn’t — having been selected on bad assumptions that went unmodified by what sounds like a smug disregard for all that fell outside of the model.

Posts related to "Democratic pollster: Hillary campaign's data malpractice"

  • The six genres of data stories This appeared originally on the TDWI site in September behind…
  • Free-the-data movement meets privacy Back when data was little and simple, self-service analysis advocates…
  • Qlik asks what a difference a device makes When I first heard of Qlik's research into use of…
  • Five Tips for Better Data Stories Originally published on September 22, 2015 in BI This Week,…
  • Impressions of Strata Conference Strata buzzes. Other events go to sleep for long stretches.…
  • Big Data, big hype, big danger A remarkable thing happened in Big Data last week. One…
FacebookTwitterSubscribeLinkedin

Filed Under: analysis & methods, storytelling Tagged With: assumptions, politics

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe here!

Search Datadoodle

Most Shared Posts

  • Data driven? No, you’re story driven, says German data scientist...
    Just when data seems to be approaching maturity as a touchstone in business, along comes a data scie
    8 Shares
  • Free-the-data movement meets privacy...
    Back when data was little and simple, self-service analysis advocates started the chant, “Free
    6 Shares
  • Data guided, not data driven...
    I like data same as the next guy. But I don’t like pronouncements like the one I heard at an i
    7 Shares
  • Bad stories stop good data at the water cooler...
    We agree by now that data’s a good compass. One neglected question is tougher: Which map? Everyone
    4 Shares
  • How to find a story in data: What a news reporter would do...
    Originally published on December 15, 2015 in BI This Week, a TDWI publication. A data analyst raised
    4 Shares
  • Data: it’s just notation, not reality...
    The always fascinating Donald Farmer, former Qlik exec and now Treehive Strategy principal, has news
    4 Shares
  • Scenarios for a Qlik Sense data story...
    Real data storytellers know that data framed in a story is much more effective than data standing al
    3 Shares
  • Smart cities / Cisco’s smart pipes p...
    Cisco’s plumbing will soon feed Teradata’s brains, according to last week’s announ
    3 Shares
  • What’s Tableau doing in Munich?...
    What’s Tableau doing buying HyPer, the German OLTP/OLAP hybrid? The March 10 announcement brou
    3 Shares
  • Public sector CIOs have a tough job...
    Public sector CIOs have a tough job / San Jose’s winding road toward “smart” / Bil
    3 Shares
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Secondary Sidebar

Recent posts

The new Teradata in three words

The week Smartest Systems tried out at Port of Los Angeles

Teradata’s Customer Journey in smart cities: still beta

Algorithmic city, Sicilian style

Business analysts tell about Vertica

Tableau’s first conference / What a little tool proved

Content marketing / Building trust with trust

Data driven but wabi-sabi driven, too

Who needs data literacy when you’ve got data pictures? / Tableau

Cities / Too much “smart” can make you dumb

Copyright © 2019 · eleven40 Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in