The Clinton campaign outsmarted itself and helped promote a Republican nominee during the primary they thought Hillary Clinton could beat in the general election.
One month ago, WikiLeaks posted an April 7, 2015 email communication that was reportedly hacked from Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account showing a discussion among Clinton’s inner circle regarding the strategy of “elevating” Republican primary candidates who appeared beatable — like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson — to undermine other more mainstream Republican candidates.
The email from Podesta was a strategy memo with bullet points saying:
“Force all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election.”
“Undermine any credibility/trust Republican presidential candidates have to make inroads to our coalition or independents.”
“We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to[sic] them seriously.”
Podesta went on to explain:
“Most of the more-established candidates will want to focus on building a winning general election coalition. The ‘Pied Pipers’ of the field will mitigate this to a degree, but more will need to be done on certain candidates to undermine their credibility among our coalition (communities of color, millennials, women) and independent voters. In this regard, the goal here would be to show that they are just the same as every other GOP candidate: extremely conservative on these issues,” the Podesta e-mail notes.
On Wednesday morning, the day after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, WikiLeaks tweeted:
Clinton’s Pied Piper Strategy (use media contacts to promote Trump) has backfired spectacularly. PDF of our leak: https://t.co/DAmWNq9K0f pic.twitter.com/R49V3TfMXC
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 9, 2016
Trump performed better with blacks, women, and millennials than any pollster predicted, USA Today reported.
According to exit poll data, despite falling behind Clinton by 12 percent when it came to women, Trump still had a similar number of women voting for him that closely mirrored the female support for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012.
With voters in the 18 to 29 age group, Clinton led Trump 55 to 37 percent. However, the gap is much a much closer margin than in the 2012 election, when Obama beat Romney 60 to 37 percent with 18 to 29 year olds.
Although black voters overwhelmingly voted for Clinton, Trump garnered 2 percent more support from black voters than Romney did in 2012, with Trump winning 8 percent of the black vote.
Finally, Clinton only won union households with 51 percent compared to Obama in 2012 who received 58 percent.
