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Comment by imron | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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