2016 Postmortem
Showing Original Post only (View all)An Explanation of What Bernie Sanders Staffers Actually Did and Why It Matters [View all]
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The brouhaha over this little fiasco has been intense, and made worse by the fact that only a few thousand people in the United States understand anything about the voter tools involved. Few journaliststo say nothing of armchair activistshave enough campaign and field management experience to truly understand what happened. That ignorance has led to wild accusations and silly reporting from all sides, whether from conspiratorially-minded Sanders supporters or schadenfreude-filled Republicans.
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Even without being to export, however, merely seeing the topline numbers of, say, how many voters the Clinton campaign had managed to bank as strong yes votes would be a valuable piece of oppo. While its not the dramatic problem that a data export would have been, its undeniable that the Sanders campaign gleaned valuable information from the toplines alone. Its also quite clear that most of the statements the Sanders campaign made as the story progressedfrom the claim that the staffers only did it to prove the security breach, or that only one staffer had accesswere simply not true. Its just not clear at this point whether the campaigns comms people knew the truth and lied, or whether they were not being told the whole truth by the people on the data team who were still making up stories and excuses to cover their tracks. I suspect the latter.
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This doesnt mean that Wasserman-Schultz hasnt, in David Axelrods words, been putting her thumb on the scale on behalf of the Clinton campaign. She clearly has been, judging from the intentionally obfuscated debate schedule and from her demeanor and reaction to this recent controversy. The Democratic Party would have been wiser to bring the campaigns together privately and resolve the matter internally. Instead, Wasserman-Schultz chose to take it public to attempt to embarrass the Sanders campaign, and merely managed to embarrass herself and the Partys data security vulnerabilities in the process.
Still, the Sanders camps reactions have been laughable. It was their team that unethically breached Clintons data. It was their comms people who spoke falsely about what happened. The Sanders campaign wasnt honeypotted into doing ittheir people did it of their own accord. NGPVAN isnt set up to benefit Clinton at Sanders expenseand if the violation by the campaigns had been reversed, Sanders supporters would have been claiming a conspiracy from sunrise to sundown. Whats very clear is that the Clinton camp did nothing wrong in any of this. Sanders campaign operatives did, and then Wasserman-Schultz compounded it by overreacting. And in the end, the right thing ended up happening: the lead staffer in question was fired, and the campaign got its data access back.
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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_12/an_explanation_of_what_bernie059035.php
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Pretty decent analysis, worth reading in it's entirety before passing judgement.