Obama Schools Clinton on the Threshold Model
This election cycle has been colorful and exhausting, to say the least. The vast majority of pollsters picked Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, arguing her superior credentials and political experience would be enough to carry her past Trump’s populist oratory and outsider bravado. Whether the pollster leaned democratic, conservative, or purely statistical (see ESPN’s analytics arm, Five-Thirty-Eight), Clinton seemed to have an advantage. Armed with the threshold model of information cascades, I suggest Hillary’s strategy was flawed, while agreeing with an unlikely– and unintentional– detractor.
A week after the election, a man who’s constantly on TV got up to say a few choice words about Hillary Clinton—but for once, he didn’t have a yellow comb-over. It was President Obama, speaking at a White House news conference, who contrasted his strategy to Clinton’s, in a way many people, including the author of the Washington Post article cited below, took as a veiled criticism:
“And one of the issues the Democrats have to be clear on is the given population distribution across the country. We have to compete everywhere. We have to show up everywhere. We have to work at a grass-roots level, something that’s been a running thread in my career.
I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa. It was because I spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and VFW Hall, and there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points. There’s some counties maybe I won, that people didn’t expect, because people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for and who you were fighting for…[and] that increasingly is difficult to do just through a national press strategy. “
While President Obama didn’t intend to attack his political ally here, his words hold a surprising amount of truth, through a network lens. Clinton’s campaign was criticized as detached and out of touch. Frequently, stories surfaced of her hosting lavish VIP only events for her wealthiest donors (see the NYT article below titled: “Where has Hillary Clinton Been? Ask the Ultrarich.”) She focused on fundraising to support a “national press strategy” to appeal to the masses who using various entertainment media. But could this have worked against her?
I think that dense clusters—in this case, people who know each other well but have few connections outside of their cluster—prevented her from starting a cascade of support in traditionally conservative and borderline areas. Ms. Clinton had very strong support in liberal, urban areas, such as Eastern Massachusetts, Silicon Valley, and New York City. But these reserves of positive support could not spread to areas that were less well interconnected to the rest of the nation, by both the media and by the sheer density of people intrinsic to the urban environment. Examples of areas that are most likely this type of dense cluster include farming communities in Wisconsin and Texas, and poorer rural towns in Michigan and Ohio. These particular communities have still have a strong sense of locality, like the aforementioned urban areas, but most likely have a lower of engagement in Facebook, broadcast television, and other “national press” outlets that Clinton preferred to utilize and that were effective for the urban dense clusters. Thus, these more rural areas tended towards Trump, who enjoyed touring and throwing massive rallies.
So how did Obama beat the threshold of these clusters? In his own words he “spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and VFW Hall”. In context of networks analysis, he spent extra effort converting early adopters in these dense clusters. In many swing states, this started enough of a cascade to win him the state’s votes. He knew that if “people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for” in one of these dense clusters, they would probably help sway other people in that cluster, influencing their strong ties as the election cycle wore on. Hillary should have tried to connect more with these areas in an attempt to help her “opinion cascade.” Although she had a huge monetary advantage, she wasn’t able to utilize it as well as Barack Obama, leading to a surprise on November 8th.
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/15/did-president-obama-just-dis-hillary-clintons-campaign/
NY Times Article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/us/politics/hillary-clinton-fundraising.html?_r=0