Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

by Jonathan Allen

In Mook’s mind, the two forms were indistinguishable in terms of testing the horse race, and he was worried about overspending, even after the Comey letter produced a windfall of contributions from concerned Democrats. So he declined to use pollsters to track voter preferences in the final three weeks of the campaign. Some Clinton aides and advisers thought that was an unwise decision because it robbed him of another data point against which to check the analytics. “They just cut it too tight to the edge and that was because of that absolute belief of Elan. And then it was Robby not wanting to spend money, and it was no checks and balances and transparency in the system,” said one person who thought Mook could have done more to understand where Hillary stood in the stretch run. “That’s how you end up with realizing it too late.” There’s no guarantee that Hillary’s pollsters would have come up with different numbers, but many officials on the campaign and in the larger Democratic Party believed at the time that Mook relied too much on analytics.