The Real ‘Riggers’

With denialist Democrats blaming anyone and everyone else for Hillary Clinton’s stunning defeat, we feel compelled to point out that the real fault lay close to home: She ran a terrible campaign — fat, dumb and arrogant.

It wasn’t just the Clinton Camp’s failure to ever settle on a message. Beyond the insipid “I’m with her” and “Stronger together” is the candidate’s failure to push any actual issues. Even her much-vaunted “ground game” was a disaster.

Just consider how she lost Michigan: In a detailed analysis, Politico reports that Clinton’s top aides — wedded to their computer data — angrily rebuffed local supporters who warned she was falling behind. “They believed they were smarter, which they weren’t,” noted one Democratic veteran.

As late as Election Day morning, Team Clinton was convinced she had a commanding 5-point lead in the state — which she lost by 10,000 votes.

Ignoring human intelligence in favor of “data” far from the scene: Sound familiar? It was Clinton’s approach to the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack. (It’s also a sign of how a President Hillary would’ve governed.)

In fact, Team Clinton did everything wrong in Michigan. It refused to give volunteers lawn signs or literature, saying neither was a “scientifically” significant way of increasing the vote.

And what little data did exist from those few canvassers who’d actually spoken with voters — and who reported yuge support for Trump among white male union members — got tossed in the garbage.

And get this: Clinton’s people worried that she’d win the electoral vote but lose the popular count, so they spent millions late in the game to drive up her vote in cities like Chicago and New Orleans — which were irrelevant to carrying any states.

So she wound up carrying the popular vote but getting slammed in the Electoral College. As one Michigan union leader said, they executed their plan well — but it was the wrong plan.

The desperate efforts to blame fake news or Russian hacking for Donald Trump’s victory ignore the simple truth: The real “rigger” of Hillary Clinton’s defeat was her own campaign team.