I think most of us know by now that Hillary’s campaign manager is John Podesta, while The Donald’s campaign manager is Kellyanne Conway (although he infamously fired Paul Manafort and Corey Lewandowski before her). I was thinking these two have been in the news more than previous campaign managers - for example, from 2012 I remember David Axelrod was on the Obama team, but Jim Messina was actually the campaign manager, and I don’t remember anything at all about Matt Rhoades, who managed the Romney campaign.
I wonder how these managers are doing, in a “wins above replacement” kind of way. Obviously, with the dumpster fire that is The Donald’s candidacy, Conway has her work cut out for her - but is she a good campaign manager regardless? Is Podesta doing a good job, or would Hillary be up 20 points if she had Messina instead? If you could wave a magic wand after the primaries and switch the managers, would the race have been tighter or wider?
I suppose I’m really wondering how critical the manager is to the campaign. Clearly the candidates think they need one (and they probably do need someone to handle the day-to-day while they give speeches and decide policy), but I wonder if they really change the campaign or if they’re just a middle management type that’s generally replaceable (that would surprise me actually).
If possible, I’d like to keep the politics out of this and focus on the campaign qua campaign, so if your opinion is “Conway is supporting a Republican, so she clearly eats babies” or “Podesta is helping Hillary so he probably belongs in jail too”, a pit thread is probably more appropriate
Clinton’s team is doing fine, IMO. Conway is probably doing as well as she possibly could (which isn’t much, since Trump is uncoachable and unmanageable), but she’s doing potentially permanent damage to her future career, IMO. She’ll forever be remembered as the woman who kept defending Trump long after it was clear he was a misogynist (and it was clear he would lose).
It seems that getting a reputation for dumping a candidate when it looks like they’re losing is not going to do much for having the next political campaign hire her (“What, are you going to quit as soon as I’m down in the polls too?”).
That said, Conway specifically runs PACs more than campaigns, and she’s probably golden to continue doing that.
I don’t think so. Her line to the party folk will be: “The party nominated him. We had an obligation to try to make the campaign as professional as possible, if only to mitigate the potential down-ballot damage. I was there to the bitter end, doing what I could with an unmanageable candidate, for the good of the party.”
Politicians value party loyalty as a major factor. They want someone who will have their back, especially when things look bleak.
I don’t like Conway but both her and (previously) Manafort seemed to have the best luck with a terrible candidate. If Trump shut up and listened to them, running a scripted campaign, he’d probably be doing much better. It’s his listening to Lewandowski (still) and Bannon and the whole “He’s a crazy political outsider savant who doesn’t play by the rules – and wins!” mindset that’s been sinking him.
As it turns out, he’s not some amazing savant turning the political world on its head and the traditional, well operated campaign is winning. But that’s not really Conway’s fault; Trump isn’t running the campaign she’d want to run and it’s out of her control.
Y’know, I’d agree with you but Trump does have a history of being pretty loyal to his (presumably ungroped) female execs (Ivana, Barbara Res, Omarosa).
I agree that Conway is very unlikely to be the scapegoat, let alone “guaranteed”. First, Trump values loyalty and she’s displayed that in spades. Second, if he scapegoats his campaign manager then he’s saying his campaign was the problem rather than the “rigged system”.
I suppose the question becomes “Is there any campaign manager that could have done better with Trump?” which the answer seems to be no. Is Conway doing a good job anyway, and what about Hillary’s team? Are they doing well, or is it a matter of an NFL team facing a peewee team?
Hillary seems to be doing better in every conceivable metric: money raised, organization/boots on the ground, high profile endorsements and owning the news cycles. Part of that is doing well but things like the news cycle can definitely be attributed to Trump’s peewee league antics.
Conway is doing a better job than the two idiots that came before her. Corey Lewandowski was just as crazy as Trump and Manafort just seemed to be coasting to the inevitable loss.
A big part of the reason Podesta has been in the news is because his email was hacked and released by wikileaks. At the very least I think someone that didn’t get hacked could be said to be doing a better job. Reportedly the way he was hacked was by falling for a phishing email that looked like it was from Google.
I don’t know whether David Axelrod or Kellyanne Conway would have fallen for the same attack. At the very least I think you can imagine a hypothetical campaign manager that would have been more careful with cyber security, especially after what had happened with Clinton’s emails.
For what it’s worth, I think Clinton would probably be doing even better with Axelrod or Conway. I don’t have any cites, it’s just a gut feeling that I have.