The Hillary Clinton campaign “get out the vote” (GOTV) effort may have worked too well to the advantage of Donald Trump.
According to The Huffington Post, while many criticized Trump’s lack of a ground game to bring out voters, there was a failure to scrutinize Clinton’s GOTV operation and Clinton campaign volunteers in key states appeared to attest to the problems in the field.
Clinton volunteers who worked out of Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina said that when they went to remind people to go vote, a large number of the individuals were, in fact, Trump supporters. “Anecdotal evidence points to anywhere from five to 25 percent of contacts were inadvertently targeted to Trump supporters,” The Huffington Post noted.
Additionally, 30 percent of the replies from the campaign’s text messaging GOTV effort, according to volunteers, were actually Trump voters that the campaign was urging to go out and vote.
The Huffington Post blames the campaign strategy of “small organizing” that uses a “big data” approach to trim down the number of people that need to be engaged. This strategy includes depending on consultants who will use predictive modeling, micro targeting, and message testing and segmentation to create a GOTV initiative for campaign personnel and volunteers to follow.