New Study Explains Why Hillary Clinton Lost Against Donald Trump

A new study authored by several political scientists says that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ran the worst campaign in recent American politics and likely caused her own loss by poor advertising and a strategy that focused almost entirely on Republican candidate Donald Trump, Fox News reports.

The study — “Political Advertising in 2016: The Presidential Election as Outlier?” — was authored by Erika Franklin Fowler, Michael M. Franz, and Travis N. Ridout and appeared in political research journal The Forum. It concluded that Hillary may have run the worst campaign in modern history.

The study concluded that Clinton’s campaign did not address issues of policy but instead went after Trump almost exclusively on character. It pointed out that her advertising “almost ignored discussions of policy.”

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It also points out that her lack of advertising efficacy “may owe to the unusual nature of the presidential campaign with one nonconventional candidate and the other using an unconventional message strategy.”

Only 25 percent of Clinton’s ads dealt with substantive policy concerns, compared with 70 percent of Trump’s ads. Meanwhile, 65 percent of Clinton’s advertising was devoted to bashing her opponent.

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The study also notes that Clinton refused to run ads in states she figured she would win — in particular, Michigan and Wisconsin — that Trump advertised in and ended up winning. Clinton dramatically upped ads in those states in the days before the election, but it was too little, too late.

This happened even as Politico reports that the Clinton campaign dumped money into New Orleans and Chicago — cities in states that weren’t in question — because they were afraid they would win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote.

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Clinton also had a massive advantage in resources during the campaign. The New York Post reports that she spent $1.2 billion, twice what Donald Trump did.

Of course, needing to be told via a study that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was terrible is a bit like needing to be told via a study that Vanilla Ice’s career imploded because he wasn’t a very good rapper. However, it’s interesting to see just how poorly Hillary and the functionaries around her squandered $1.2 billion.

In 2020, without a marquee candidate like Clinton and her years of fundraising, Democrats can’t count on having $1.2 billion to spend, and a Trump running for re-election is going to have a lot more thanks to the fact he’s the incumbent president. In other words, it looks like Hillary Clinton and her campaign of failure may have blown their one chance to stop the Trump train.