All day today, the contributing editors will be offering different takes on why Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic primary despite having started as the prohibitive favorite. These essays approach the question from differing angles and are not for the most part mutually exclusive, but attempt to address specific pieces of the complexity of this massive, drawn-out primary process.
At the end of December, if you read comments at Daily Kos, you'd have noticed a lot of people talking about their plans to go to Iowa or New Hampshire to volunteer for their candidates. I wanted to give those people the credit they were due, so I started putting together a post giving a hat-tip to volunteer kossacks. It didn't take long to run into a problem. These volunteer trips were a constant topic of conversations among Edwards and Obama supporters, but not among Clinton supporters. Wanting to be fair, I combed through hundreds of comments in Clinton supporter diaries, and finally eked out a few names to post.
At that time, as at any other time, Hillary Clinton's supporters were a minority on this site, but there were still a significant number of them, and they were dedicated to their candidate. They were giving money, forming a community amongst themselves -- they cared. But the campaign of the candidate they cared about did not seem to be asking for their active participation, and their online community's activity was not oriented to extracting hours of volunteer work from its members. By contrast, the Obama and Edwards campaigns had clearly worked to create a culture of activism among their supporters. Among them, going to Iowa or New Hampshire was not just a point of pride but of excitement, community, responding to a call from a candidate they believed in.
This continued. In the weeks before the Pennsylvania primary, the Philadelphia City Paper had reporters go undercover as volunteers for Clinton and Obama. Though Clinton won the state, there too Obama had many more volunteers, with a greater sense of their own efficacy. As Tom Namako, the author of the Clinton article, wrote:
This was the opposite of the grassroots, Howard Deaniac-style race, where fervent just-out-of-college staffers and volunteers helped the candidate set the campaign's message and tone. In that same book, Halperin and Harris spent 80 pages vetting Hillary Clinton's chances in the political and media arenas should she run for president. "She would have no difficulty attracting first-rate policy staffers, Iowa [the first election-year caucus] field operatives, or advance men and women. ... She would never have a shortage of volunteers," they wrote. In six chapters, it's the only mention of what role Hillary's field operations would play in the future race. This was no mistake on the author's part: It's just not Hillary's style.
This became evident before I finished my first week at the headquarters. We volunteers were on our own as the staffers struggled to learn the city, get the computers online, and essentially wait for more staffers to show up. No one paid us much mind.
Obviously this was not decisive. If it had been, Edwards would have finished ahead of Clinton overall and Obama would have won Pennsylvania. But in the case of the Obama campaign, it tied into the extremely successful strategy of racking up delegates in the February 5 caucus states, where volunteer organization could very directly win delegates -- something the Obama campaign did right much more than the Clinton campaign did it wrong. Thousands of words could be -- have been -- written about the Obama campaign's use of online networking, its incorporation of existing supporter groups into its state-by-state primary infrastructure, and of course, that realization that there were delegates to be had in the small states and caucus states, too. Less has been said about the failure of the Clinton campaign to make anything but the most routine use of volunteers. Because, as Namako wrote, nobody ever expected her to do otherwise. It's just not Hillary's style.
But in a campaign that ran short of money and dragged on for months longer than expected, even without the Obama campaign's innovative channeling of the passion of its supporters, the Clinton campaign's business-as-usual approach to rank-and-file supporters represents a resource squandered. This was crucially about campaign organization and strategy. But watching Clinton's supporters, online and off, it seems to me something deeper happened. As long as Clinton was inevitable, and the establishment candidate, and getting her money from big donors, she didn't ask for her supporters to do much, and they, as passionately as many of them felt about Hillary Clinton as a candidate, did not fully buy into her campaign, did not feel responsibility for it. That only seemed to happen when it was too late. When it came out that the campaign was in financial trouble, that the pool of big donors had been all but exhausted and small donors were necessary to its survival, small donors seemed to step it up, and were an essential part of Clinton fundraising through the ensuing months. Clinton seemed to find her voice, to be more comfortable and successful on the campaign trail, and to have a greater connection with her supporters. And her supporters clearly gained a sense that her survival in the race depended on them. But pivoting a giant campaign around to make the best possible use of volunteers may not have been possible in such a short time, if indeed that would have been a goal of its leadership.
The importance of supporter activism in the 2008 Democratic primaries lies most of all in the efficiency and extent to which the Obama campaign made use of it. It is more a reason Obama won than a reason Clinton lost. But at the same time, it's hard not to think back to all those Daily Kos comments I read in December, looking for a sense that Clinton supporters felt that her fate was in their hands, and not finding it, despite their evident passion. What might have happened if her campaign had given them that feeling, asked for their help, and really used it?
