Hillary Clinton slammed the DNC's 2016 campaign data operation Wednesday, saying she had "nothing" to work from once she won the nomination. She lamented that Donald Trump was able to walk into a well-funded and thoroughly-tested data operation, while she was forced to build hers largely from scratch.
"Its data was mediocre to poor, non-existent, wrong. I had to inject money into it ... to keep it going."
Why it matters: Axios conducted over two dozen interviews with experts associated with the Trump and Clinton data and advertising operations earlier this year, and while many sources agreed with this sentiment off the record, no campaign or DNC staffers used language as strong as Clinton did Wednesday to publicly to condemn the DNC's data enterprise.
Between the lines: It's true that Clinton walked into a less organized data infrastructure, but the DNC and the RNC's operations are tough to compare. For one, the GOP's data operation was developed over years through a symbiotic relationship with a third-party data vendor called Data Trust, and the RNC. The DNC operated largely on its own, and, as Clinton noted, largely without historical data from previous campaigns (like Barack Obama's), which housed most of their data internally.
