Carville on Hillary’s loss

When my column about Democratic strategist James Carville was published last weekend, a lot of readers were transported back to the Clinton era. Carville was a key strategist for Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign in 1992 and an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful one in 2008.

Naturally, the prolix politico had more to say than I had room for. Here are some of his comments that didn’t make it into the column:

“When you look back at why Hillary lost,” I asked Carville at one point, “do you think it was mostly sexism, or we underestimated Trump, or they didn’t listen to Bill, or what?”

“Certainly some of it was sexism,” he replied. “I’d never deny that. Some of it. They made the wrong calculation. Their calculation was there’s more of us than there are of them, and if our people come out, that women, particularly white women, are going to find it totally unacceptable, and that will overcome any deficiencies that we have, and they didn’t go to Wisconsin.

“I could go on and on,” he said. “To be honest with you, I think she knows. Everybody knows that it was believing in an algorithm as opposed to something else. Here, it was destroyed by an algorithm,” referring to ways that the Clinton campaign (and other political campaigns) used big data to try to anticipate and shape voter behavior—as the 2012 Obama campaign did as part of its winning strategy. “That’s just not how people think.”

“I don’t dislike Robbie Mook,” Carville said, referring to Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager in 2016. “He’s a nice man, but he had a flawed view of what American politics was . . . It was just an unfortunate confluence of events.”