BEGUN, THE DNC-CLINTON WAR HAS: Data Gurus to Hillary: The Numbers Didn’t Lose, You Did.

“Forgive the analogy,” John Hagner, currently a partner at Clarity Campaign Labs told The Daily Beast. “The DNC is farming and what the campaign does is cooking. It’s hard to blame the farmer if the souffle folds.”

Hagner, who previously worked as the National Field Director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said that his company was primarily focused on governor’s races in the 2016 cycle. And he pointed to one particular victory as proof that the DNC data itself was not the problem: the narrow election of Governor Roy Cooper in North Carolina, a state that Clinton lost.

“We worked out of the same pool the Clinton folks did,” Hagner continued. “The Clinton folks did the targeting themselves. The Clinton campaign did a lot right. The world ended up working out differently than they hoped.”

And:

In many of the post-mortems on the failed Democratic bid, Clinton’s campaign was accused of missing or simply not believing warning signs in the so-called Blue Wall, midwestern states like Wisconsin and Michigan that were reliably Democratic strongholds but went to Trump last year. This, in the minds of data gurus is an error in judgment from the campaign, not an error in the actual data that was available to them.

“There was absolutely a failure by the campaign,” Tom Bonier, the CEO of TargetSmart, told The Daily Beast. “That had nothing to do with the data they got. It was about the way they used that data.”
Bonier said that he was “honestly shocked” when he heard the comments from Clinton and said they were “frankly wrongheaded.”

“The reason why it was so surprising from a perspective of veracity was that it was so contrary to the truth,” he said.

That’s never been much of a hurdle for Clinton.