In an interview that quickly turned into an election post-mortem, Hillary Clinton slammed the Democratic National Committee’s poor data for playing a role in her lost bid for the U.S. presidency.
Onstage at the Code Conference with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Clinton praised her campaign’s own data team before launching into a scorching criticism of the DNC’s data machine.
“I was very proud of my data and analytics team,” Clinton said, noting that her team was comprised largely of Obama campaign veterans. “We had a lot of help from some people in Silicon Valley as well.”
She claims that in their effort to build “Obama 3.0,” a nod to the former president’s lauded campaign apparatus, Democrats were at a disadvantage of their own making.
“I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party,” Clinton said, recounting her experience of winning the nomination. “I mean, it was bankrupt. It was on the verge of insolvency. Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it.”
She drew a stark contrast with what the DNC’s Republican counterpart handed to Trump, calling the RNC’s data a “tried and true, effective foundation.”
Clinton made multiple mentions of data’s huge role in the 2016 U.S. election, with a nod to the buzz surrounding Cambridge Analytica, the fairly shady social analytics group that either won the election or wasted a whole bunch of money, depending on who you ask. Clinton landed somewhere in the middle, stating that “the fact is, they added something.”
“They married content with delivery and data,” Clinton said of the Trump campaign and its faceless online armies. “It was a potent combination.”