
Clinton’s data-driven campaign relied heavily on an algorithm named Ada - ryan_j_naughton
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/09/clintons-data-driven-campaign-relied-heavily-on-an-algorithm-named-ada-what-didnt-she-see/
======
imron
> the algorithm was said to play a role in virtually every strategic decision
> Clinton aides made, including where and when to deploy the candidate and her
> battalion of surrogates and where to air television ads — as well as when it
> was safe to stay dark.

Meanwhile, Trump was doing 3 rallies a day, across multiple states, and up to
5 a day (including until after midnight) in the days leading up to the
election, drawing crowds in excess of ten thousand people.

Where was Clinton during all of this? Almost nowhere to be seen. It seems to
me that Ada made some pretty terrible choices.

~~~
sosull
I don't know about that – now that she's lost every strategic decision can be
made to look wrong. But the real problem was that people just weren't drawn to
her as a candidate. The algorithm isn't to blame.

~~~
imron
That's a fair point.

And maybe having her hold more rallies would have worked against her in that
case (people not being drawn to her) because there would have been the an
increasing emphasis made on the comparative sizes of crowds (which was already
happening to some degree).

That puts them in between a rock and hard place strategically - hold more
rallies and get lambasted for having smaller crowds, don't hold the rallies
and get lambasted for not having the stamina and not being accessible to the
people.

In these cases, one wonders if a human in charge of strategy might have made
better choices. After all, it was only just recently that a computer was able
to outmatch a human in Go (heavily based on strategy) and I'm not convinced
that an election involves less strategy and that you can rely on an algorithm
to beat a talented human opponent.

And say what you will about Trump, but his strategy this entire election
campaign has paid off incredibly for him and he did what most people
considered to be the impossible.

~~~
gotofritz
I don't know if "his strategy paid off" is correct - it seems to me that at
one stage he wanted a way out and actually tried to fail, but the people just
wanted him to go on. What's that quote about him shooting someone and that not
mattering?

He could well have been elected _despite_ his strategy, not because of it.

~~~
imron
> it seems to me that at one stage he wanted a way out and actually tried to
> fail

Which stage was this? I mean sure there were plenty in the media quoting
unnamed sources stating that Trump was going to quit any day now - for almost
the entire duration of his campaign, in fact.

There were also plenty of times when he went against conventional political
wisdom and came out on top. I don't think that was him trying to throw the
campaign, I think it's just a fact that he's not a politician and so he does
things differently.

Trump was always very clear that he was serious and that he planned to become
president.

------
elevensies
1\. They created a sophisticated system to allocate effort.

2\. The system selected Pennsylvania as an important target.

3\. They expended lots of effort there -- and still lost it.

I don't see how it is the computer's fault. Even if the system predicted the
results exactly, you still need to do something about it.

~~~
mentat
Not enough effort bridging the gap with rural voters? Too much belief that
people would vote along racial and gender lines?

~~~
taurath
I think thats it entirely. I'd be very curious what their model had if
anything for rural/urban voters. It could be that even if she knew there was
very little support amongst rural voters, she as a candidate had no way at all
to pivot her strategy towards these voters without alienating doners and her
base.

Trump ran as the face of rural voters - every attack Clinton made became an
attack on people who agreed with him. Perhaps not agreeing with every single
outrage, but general statements such as "he's just a racist" were something
that the rural voter had heard over and over again as a way to dismiss them.
Trump turned the attacks into a provocation of his base.

~~~
cmdrfred
This isn't even a new strategy, the exact same thing happened with GWB.
Electoral college victory and everything. The DNC are incompetent hacks to not
have seen this coming.

------
sheraz
Garbage in. Garbage out.

I'm pretty sure the data collection was not well handled.

Why would we think that the hubris, as exposed in the Wikileaks emails, would
not also infect this "secret" project.

I also wonder if everyone involved was able to speak truth to power--Or if the
ones with dissenting opinions or countering data were simply ignored? Seems
plausible.

~~~
mattnewton
Agreed, the DNC emails seem to paint a picture of the establishment as
inflexible and self assured. I wish Bernie had been enough of a wake up call.

------
fixxer
Big MCMC model, likely written in Stan. Fancy as can be to a statistician with
a penchant for strong priors... And completely fucking useless when your
priors on likely voters are as wrong as wrong can be.

------
chaosmatic
I think it's pretty clear that when a fair portion of your data (polls) are
misleading or incorrect for whatever reason - your algorithm will have a very
hard time producing meaningful output.

~~~
tristanj
I think it did work. The Clinton camp uses internal polls which are much more
accurate than public ones. These don't have the 1-2 week lag that the public
polls do. The Trump campaign has its own internal polls too. From what I've
read, the Trump campaign's internal polls found Clinton support in the Midwest
collapsed 1.5 weeks before the election. From how they reacted it sure looks
like the Clinton camp knew this too. The Clinton camp suddenly went all out:
surprise rallies in Michigan and Pennsylvania; surprise concerts with Jay Z,
Madonna, Lady Gaga; even drafting Obama to do _daily_ rallies in November.
Obama held twice as many rallies in November than he did in all of October.

The way I view it the Clinton camp knew they were in serious trouble and
reacted accordingly.

~~~
WillPostForFood
She was also campaigning in Arizona the week before the election, a state that
would be really hard to win, and not campaigning in Wisconsin, where she had a
chance. So not sure they did have the best picture of what was going on, or at
least didn't respond to it.

~~~
fullshark
She may have figured Wisconsin wasn't the front. Michigan and Pennsylvania
were. I.e. if she lost Wisconsin she lost those two as well.

------
fullshark
This is Trump's pollster's post on the election:

[http://www.moremonmouthmusings.net/2016/11/10/trumps-
interna...](http://www.moremonmouthmusings.net/2016/11/10/trumps-internal-
polls-were-spot-on/)

------
exstudent2
Maybe it did work? The loss may have been even greater without the data driven
decision making.

There's been a ton of finger pointing today as to where the blame falls for
Clinton losing (Facebook...). The reality isn't hard to understand, Bernie was
treated unfairly by team Clinton and Trump's supporters were discounted,
vilified and talked down to. It's pretty easy to see where the real fault lies
and it's not with any form of technology.

------
wtbob
I'm reminded of Mitt Romney's fabled ORCA system[1], which was also an epic
failure. Indeed, it's something which has since caused me to re-evaluate my
opinion of Romney: if he was as great an executive as I thought, how could he
have helmed a disaster like ORCA?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_%28computer_system%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_%28computer_system%29)

------
jacques_chester
You're all going to hear a lot more about the Shy Tory Effect[1] in the coming
months and years. It was first identified in Britain. It's talked about in
Australian politics too.

In particularly heated elections, right-leaning voters begin to lie to
pollsters about their voting intentions. They are embarrassed, or afraid, or
skeptical about the pollster's intentions and honesty. So they lie. This
creates a misleading impression of the actual position of the candidates.

Typically, exit polls show a much more realistic picture of the vote. It's
just that they're too late to operate on.

The next generation of algorithms will need to introduce allowances for the
shy tories in the US, relative to the degree to which one side feels unwilling
to be honest with pollsters.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_Factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_Factor)

~~~
ghostly_s
My understanding is exit polls are actually pretty unreliable; they are
conducted primarily to correlate demographic data with the official totals for
future campaigning purposes, but need to be adjusted based on the actual
outcome as the raw data is not representative. Perhaps this particular
phenomenon is less present, though?

~~~
jacques_chester
My understanding is that they're a better predictor of the final tally than
any other poll, because they occur after the vote has been cast.

~~~
WillPostForFood
There definitely have been problems with exit poll accuracy.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/05/upshot/exit-polls-why-
they...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/05/upshot/exit-polls-why-they-so-
often-mislead.html)

~~~
jacques_chester
I think I see the disconnect. I'm Australian, we have compulsory voting. I
hadn't connected all the dots on the effects of voluntary voting on exit
polls. Only got as far as thinking about the ballot.

------
maxlybbert
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be excited about the name: "wow, their
programmers know about Ada Lovelace," or about the fact that campaigns are
high tech, which isn't new but I guess is still a surprise to some voters.

~~~
fixxer
Lady Lovelace deserves better.

------
tnzn
Trump didnt rally more people than previous republican candidates. he even
rallied LESS. It's just that Clinton was a pathetic choice.

------
eva1984
And it fails.

Garbage in, Garbage out.

------
divbit
Maybe Trump just had a better algorithm?

------
occsceo
I'm sorry Hillary, I'm afraid I can't let you do that.

------
kevin_thibedeau
It seems like the main problem is that no one took into account the true
effect of the 2011 gerrymandering and assumed the support for Obama in 2012
could still be relied upon as a predictor.

~~~
mark212
can you explain exactly how a presidential election is (or could be)
gerrymandered? Aside from two (Iowa and Maine) all the states award all of
their electoral votes to the winner of that state's popular vote. So unless
the shapes of the states change, there's no way to gerrymander.

~~~
aamar
Nebraska, not Iowa. Otherwise correct.

