Hillary Clinton’s ‘Invisible Guiding Hand’

[Geee]

Politico:

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — There are only a handful of corner offices inside Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters, and they are mostly occupied by familiar names: campaign manager Robby Mook, campaign chairman John Podesta, and Huma Abedin, her ubiquitous confidante.

 

Then there is Elan Kriegel.

 

Overlooking downtown Brooklyn in two directions, Kriegel’s skyline view is the backdrop for what is on the windows themselves: erasable marker scribblings reminiscent of A Beautiful Mind that amount to some of the earliest drafts of the computer algorithms that underlie nearly all of the Clinton campaign’s most important strategic decisions.

 

What cities Clinton campaigns in and what states she competes in, when she emails supporters and how those emails are crafted, what doors volunteers knock on and what phone numbers they dial, who gets Facebook ads and who gets printed mailers — all those and more have Kriegel’s coding fingerprints on them.

 

To understand Kriegel’s role is to understand how Clinton has run her campaign — precise and efficient, meticulous and effective, and, yes, at times more mathematical than inspirational. Top Clinton advisers say almost no major decision is made in Brooklyn without first consulting Kriegel. He was one of her first hires and is among her highest-paid, and yet he remains virtually unknown outside the cloistered community of political number-crunchers. “I can’t think of anybody who has as much impact as Elan who has as little name recognition with the national press,” said Stu Trevelyan, CEO of NGP VAN, which manages the voter file used by every major Democratic campaign, and who has worked with Kriegel for years.