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Submitted via IRC for chromas
The Clinton presidential campaign used a complex computer algorithm called Ada to assist in many of the most important decisions during the race.
According to aides, a raft of polling numbers, public and private, were fed into the algorithm, as well as ground-level voter data meticulously collected by the campaign. Once early voting began, those numbers were factored in, too.
What Ada did, based on all that data, aides said, was run 400,000 simulations a day of what the race against Trump might look like. A report that was spit out would give campaign manager Robby Mook and others a detailed picture of which battleground states were most likely to tip the race in one direction or another — and guide decisions about where to spend time and deploy resources.
Of course, the results are only as good as the data. Since the outcome of the election was different than most poll predictions, it seems like Ada may have had a Garbage In, Garbage Out problem.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @03:45PM
were only mildly more optimistic than the consensus - they gave Trump a 30 percent chance of winning on Sunday IIRC. But Trump and some of his staffers had a gut feeling they could pull it off anyway, because of the "hidden voters". They were right.
This election shows pretty decisively the weakness of the Big Data approach for predicting elections. Trump ran basically an entrepreneurial campaign and beat the established competitor who was ahead in all the metrics. Clinton basically ran the same campaign she did in 2008 and lost the same way. She didn't learn from her mistakes.
In retrospect, she should have shown real anger about Trump University in one of the debates, raised her voice and shouted at Trump instead of playing it cool, at the expense of reviews that she didn't look very Presidential. She should've said it was 100 times worse than anything she did with the email server. Voters would've argued about that, but the argument would've been on her turf so to speak.
She should've gone into the Midwestern states and presented a 100 day plan after the debates that had some controversial, populist features, including some that might be opposed by her big backers. That's the kind of stuff Trump did his entire campaign. Now that Trump is President-elect, we can see that he's prepared to ditch half or two-thirds of his promises before he steps into office. And that's probably fine with most of his backers, other than maybe Roger Stone.
Obama's campaign brain trust was so much better than Clinton's. Obama had himself, Axelrod, and Plouffe, all very smart people with high integrity and willing to listen to different viewpoints. Hillary surrounded herself with people like Wasserman-Schulz and Donna Brazile.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Saturday November 19 2016, @04:35PM
"Hillary should have been a more competent and likable speaker/person, surrounded herself with less corruption, and run a more successful campaign. Then she would've won."
Hahahahahaha
"raised her voice and shouted at Trump instead of playing it cool, at the expense of reviews that she didn't look very Presidential. She should've said it was 100 times worse than anything she did with the email server"
It would have been a good strategy, I just hope that you don't actually hold that opinion - unless of course you think that the value of thousands of human lives is worth less than the money involved in Trump University.