LANSING – On Friday, November 4, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Preibus contacted the Michigan Republican Party and informed it that RNC data modeling showed Republican Donald Trump winning Michigan by 8,000 votes.

Michigan Republican Party Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel said it was that data that led to two visits in 24 hours from Trump, Vice President-elect Mike Pence setting up camp in the state for nearly the entire stretch leading up to the election and a surge of surrogates flooding the state.

“Our modeling showed Trump winning Michigan by 8,000 votes,” she said. “Reince Preibus got on the phone and said, ‘This is what we’re seeing in Michigan and we’re going to send Trump and Pence into your state.'”

The modeling was totally at odds with virtually every public poll of the state, which all showed Democrat Hillary Clinton leading by 3 percentage points to 7 percentage points. Republican consultant John Yob had released a survey showing Clinton and Trump tied, but otherwise all the polls favored Clinton.

For some time, data has been seen as the dominion of the Democrats. The political team of President Barack Obama took it to new heights and accuracy. And going into this election, Clinton’s operation was seen as vastly superior to Trump’s.

But even as some snickered at Trump’s repeated visits to Michigan and questioned how he could justify a late trip to Minnesota, the RNC team clearly had a savvy system. Trump nearly won Minnesota and his Michigan margin will be slightly more than 13,000 votes.

“Reince Preibus really invested in data,” McDaniel said. “That was a huge push for him in the past several years.”

She said the RNC’s data modeling was obviously far superior to what public pollsters found. She further could not believe when the Detroit Free Press called Michigan for Clinton not long after the polls closed based on its analysis of selected precincts. Later in the night, the newspaper under heavy criticism, the Free Press rescinded its call and published an apology Wednesday.

McDaniel said she knew right away the Free Press’s call “was not matching with what we were seeing.”

Yob said his surveying made a point of trying to find voters who had not voted in the last four general elections for president to assess their interest, and that is what yielded his data showing a dead heat.

“Pollsters who didn’t properly test unlikely voters probably didn’t include them in their surveys and therefore got it wrong,” he said. “Every state in the country went exactly the direction that modeled data told us it was going to go and therefore nothing about the election was surprising to us.”

He said the Republicans have made major advancements in data modeling since 2008.

This story was published by Gongwer News Service. To subscribe, click on www.gongwer.com