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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

> But in 2016 it wasn't

Well, you aren't technically wrong here, but I disagree with the sentiment. The RNC leveraged a the same kind of data used by the Obama team in '12 to squeak out an Electoral College win in `16.

I think it's easy to get overly ambitious with civic tech and deliver expensive garbage. However, when people stay focused and deliver then I think the results speak for themselves. While the '12 and '16 elections didn't turn on candidates tech strategies alone, it's clear that they contributed.

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Absolutely not. There remains 0 evidence that the microtargeting strategies employed by both the Obama and Trump campaigns did anything. It gets lots of press, but literally no one has presented anything to demonstrate that any of it moved the needle at all.

I personally worked on digital marketing campaigns for years as a data scientist in a previous job, and have become entirely disillusioned with the entire notion (and I am not alone[0]). Its largely snake oil, and its effectiveness is incredibly overblown. But literally billions of dollars, large marketing teams embedded in every company, and some of the largest tech giants on the planet all have an incentive to drink the Kool-Aid.

[0] https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

"advertising doesn't work" didn't work for RC Cola... There is more to it than clickthrough. It's saturation. You don't have to believe in the system for the system to believe in you.

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/04/im_not_the_one_you_s...

> to squeak out an Electoral College win in `16.

304 to 227 wasn’t a “squeak”

I think its a general reference to losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college and otherwise having nothing to do with the electoral college margins.

It is actually to my thinking.

There is some analysis that boils down to the below:

“He concluded, with help from The Cook Political Report, that the election hinged not on Clinton's large 2.8 million overall vote margin over Trump, but rather on about 78,000 votes from only three counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (by the same logic, Obama won in 2012 due to three counties in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania)

That’s definitely a squeak.

That's one way of looking at it. Another way, is to break out how many of those electoral college points were won at razor thin margins. The reality is that the election was VERY close. 107,000 votes in three states decided the whole darn thing. WI, MI, PA, and FL were won by Trump with less than 2% margins each.

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