Clinton: 'That was my last race'

[thesquanderer]

49. Did you miss the emoticon after that statement?

It was tongue in cheek. I didn't literally mean her analytical data would have no value, I thought the emoticon would help make that clear.

Anyway, as for who had better analytics (to whatever extent that contributed to the final outcomes, which we don't really know), I might consider different benchmarks. You're saying that by metrics of success, Clinton's analytics were better than Sanders' because, even though she lost, he didn't even get to the general. But OTOH, she lost something that all polls indicated she should have won, whereas Bernie came awfully close in a contest where almost no one thought he had a chance to get even as close as he did. So in examining the efficacy of various aspects of their campaigns, rather than look strictly at who won or lost their contests, one could also look at how they did relative to expectations. Looked at that way, they were starting from different baselines. One went up from the base expectation, the other went down. So then the question of who did "better" is not as clear.

Of course, ultimately, there were many factors that contributed to things going the way they did. Again, the analytics thing was tongue in cheek... She could well have had some outstanding analysis there, but there were still a bunch of other things in her campaign that weighed it down, some within the campaign's control, but some not.