Data breach damage

Clinton campaign sweats out data breach damage

Hillary Clinton's team is unsettled by what Bernie Sanders' staffers might have seen in their sneak peek.

By Glenn Thrush and Annie Karni

Accusing your opponent of committing evil and unpardonable crimes is basic presidential campaign jujitsu. But Hillary’s Clinton’s team is genuinely jittery about the sneak peek taken by Bernie Sanders staffers into their secret voter file.

The unauthorized fishing expedition into the database housing the names and demographic information of voters Clinton plans to target – which led to the sacking of a top Sanders staffer and the suspension of two more — has embittered the campaigns against one another, even if the two principals made nice on the debate stage Saturday night.

And it’s a source of real and deepening concern for Clinton’s data and voter targeting teams in Iowa – where Clinton leads by single digits — and New Hampshire, where she trails neighboring-state Sen. Sanders by a similar spread.

“We’re down in New Hampshire and we all know Iowa is going to tighten,” said one Clinton staffer on the ground in a battleground state. “[The Sanders team] is full of s--t when they say they didn’t get any intel … It’s like the opposing general getting your battle plans.”

Clinton’s top strategist and pollster-in-chief Joel Benenson, who oversaw two successful Obama campaign operations that set records for maximizing core-voter turnout, says his staff is eagerly awaiting the results of a third-party audit into the hack of the Democratic National Committee-housed lists. The DNC said it is just beginning the process of securing an independent audit by a data security firm.

The Clinton campaign also wants to learn basic details of the narrative — like why, for instance, Sanders’ campaign manager didn’t tell his candidate when he learned of the breach last Wednesday; Sanders was only looped in a day later, after DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz called him personally with the news. Weaver told POLITICO on Saturday he withheld the information from Sanders because he at first believed the breach was a staff-level concern that could be dealt with in-house. “My field director informed me,” he recalled. “I said, ‘let everyone know that no one is to do anything with the Clinton data.' It was not clear immediately there was any problem on our side.”

On Saturday, it was still not clear to the Clinton campaign how much damage had been done. "I don't think any of us will know until this audit is completed how serious this all is,” Benenson said after the debate at St. Anselm’s College — adding that the value of the information is less about the specific voters being targeted than hints about how Clinton’s campaign plans to deploy its resources.

“All of [the data] is extremely valuable, it is work produced by tens of thousands of volunteers. … it is part of a roadmap to how we are running and strategizing in our campaign and how we get to the totals we need to win in Iowa and New Hampshire, especially,” he said, his voice rising with exasperation.

“We’re talking about precinct-level data, individual-level data, persuadability scores on individuals; we don't know how much they got their hands on when they were downloading. They shouldn't know what numbers we're trying to hit – we're in a three way primary, there are a lot of ways to win these things. They shouldn't know which precincts we're targeting.”

Sanders campaign officials maintained they had gained no useful information about Clinton's plans —and that if they had, there were no plans to use it. But one thing both campaigns agreed on was the value of the voter file.

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told one staffer in the hours before the debate that the breach, was “worse than if they stole $5 to $10 million out of our bank account.”

Weaver claimed that the DNC had inflicted incalculable damage on the Sanders campaign itself by shutting down its access to the voter file during the 48-hours of key canvassing before the debate. “You cannot calculate a dollar figure,” he said. “What is the cost of not being able to contact thousands and thousands of voters over a two-day period? There is not a dollar amount.”

He claimed the voter file was even more important to Sanders than it was to Clinton. “She relies on TV much more than I do,” he said. “This is a grassroots, people-to-people campaign. When I can’t talk to people, the campaign is frozen.”

The voter file flap has shed a spotlight on the complex, hidden demographic machinery underlying modern presidential campaigning; how data is collected, analyzed and deployed is among the most carefully guarded secrets of any campaign – although much more public attention is paid to the far easier-to-comprehend battle for messaging and winning the daily news cycle.

Individual voter profiles score a voter’s likelihood to vote for an individual candidate – determining how much time and money should be spent by a campaign in wooing a potential supporter. Taken in bulk, it can reveal hidden patterns and issues a canny campaign can use to leverage votes. It can also reveal weaknesses – like a lack of on-the-ground voter enthusiasm among a specific demographic or geographically-clustered group.

The Sanders breach occurred when the DNC’s database vendor accidentally dropped a protective firewall meant to shield competitors’ data. Josh Uretsky, Sanders' national data director – eventually fired from the campaign – told CNN he downloaded only phone numbers as a way of showing the DNC the system was vulnerable.

But by taking responsibility at the debate, Sanders essentially conceded that wasn’t true — and one aide to the Vermont senator suggested Uretsky’s actions were less a concerted hacking scheme than a chance to sneak a look at “some data porn.”

Clinton’s staffers and volunteers in Iowa are especially nervous about the long-term impact of the breach — winning the caucus is entirely dependent on voter mobilization, and a few thousand votes either way can swing the benchmark contest in unpredictable ways.

Pat Rynard, a longtime Democratic organizer in the state who worked on Clinton’s third-place effort in 2008, said the Sanders team didn’t need to download a lot of data — or perform a detailed analysis — to derive a benefit.

“Just because they didn’t export the file doesn’t mean they didn’t get anything out of it, knowing how many people are in the turnout world could be important, for example,” he said. “That could change a little bit of how you approach your final caucus strategy. In particular it gives [the Sanders campaign] a sense of how their organization stacks up against the Clinton operation, which could let them adjust expectations."

National Democrats cut off access to Sanders’ staff for just under 48 hours at a time when his grassroots organizers hoped to make a big statewide push ahead of the debate. Sanders operative and volunteers were forced to use old, paper voter lists — and email each other contact information in an effort to make up the difference.

Team Sanders – especially its combative campaign manager, swinging a rhetorical Louisville Slugger compared to Sanders’ Wiffle Ball bat — remained defiant, accusing the DNC of tacitly backing the Clinton campaign.

“What my guy did was wrong,” Weaver conceded. “But the worst thing that was done was that you had the chairwoman of the DNC trying to paralyze and destroy one of the campaigns. ... It was absolutely worse.”

While the operational impact of the data breach remains a question mark, most operatives expect the dust-up will be a political footnote by January. A POLITICO caucus survey of Democratic and Republican insiders found that two-thirds believe the Sanders mea culpa largely diffused any damage that could have been done to his outsider-reformer brand. “Average Americans don’t give two s—ts about voter files,” said one South Carolina Democrat.

And while Mook was on the warpath Friday during a conference call with reporters, top campaign officials appeared ready to move on after the debate.

"I don't think this is a long story,” said media adviser and ad maker Jim Margolis. “He apologized, she accepted the apology. It is a serious thing, and I do think they've got to follow through, doing the investigation. That has to occur."

Even so, Clinton insiders said they thought Sanders got off easy — and couldn't imagine the scandal if the tables were turned. "If this had been something that the Clinton campaign had done,” Margolis said, “I think there would have been a very different reaction."