A lot has been made lately of Clinton’s campaigning in places like Arizona, Utah, Florida, North Carolina. Since “all she needed to do” was win the midwest, why didn’t she just focus on her blue wall? I think this criticism is unfair for two reasons:
First, it would have shown a lot of hubris to assume that we knew the order of how the states would finish. North Carolina is a different state from Michigan--it’s possible that it was actually more friendly to Clinton (turned out not to be true). Arizona has a large number of Hispanics and, I believe, Mormons, so there was reason to think that it might be close as well. Same with Florida, minus the Mormons. As Nate Silver pointed out, these states were possible backups in case the firewall failed. If you notice, in another year if Clinton lost Iowa and Ohio by 10, Arizona would probably see even a bigger loss...but the margin in that state was only 4%. The polling errors weren’t correlated--and it makes sense to widen the playing field with a lot of uncorrelated states.
Second, I don’t think there was zero value in every electoral vote over 270. As soon as Virginia was too close to call, and Florida was looking dicey, I was very upset. It wasn’t that I knew Hillary was going to lose at that point. It was because the only chance we had at going back to a normal country was a thorough repudiation of Trump. Hillary needed to win Florida by 5 points. She needed to win Arizona and Georgia. Heck, I thought she had a chance in Texas, and THAT would have been a stinging rebuke to Trumpism. The GOP might have had a chance of becoming less-racist than it was before Trump. Heck, Hillary might have actually gotten something done instead of facing 4 years of gridlock.
This is what people have trouble with a lot: saying that one thing matters means that the other thing doesn’t. It is terrible that Trump won the Presidency. Given what we know now, yeah she should have camped out in PA, MI, NH, and WI. But given the uncertainty at the time, and the very strong likelihood of holding those states, it was a defensible strategy to go for the throat rip. There was more than just an administration at stake. I’ve been saying this all along: it’s as troubling to me that the election was within 5 points as it is that Trump actually won the thing.
We have a serious problem in this country, and it was reflected in the debt ceiling crisis and the inability to rebuild our infrastructure when the economy has plenty of slack and our failure to come to a national consensus on climate change and a host of other things. Trump is that problem in a bright orange package. I detested the Bernie supporters who claimed that Trump winning would “shake things up” and be good for liberals in the long run. They’re still wrong. But at the same time, we did have this problem before Trump.
