Robby Mook, the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, has reemerged as a top adviser to a super PAC involved in House Democrats’ midterm social media strategies.
Breitbart News obtained images of PowerPoint slides from a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) donor event over the weekend, showing that Democrats hope to raise tens of millions of dollars to fund hundreds of content creators on social media. A piece of the effort includes a “Social Media Boot Camp,” as suggested by one slide, which features the logo of the super PAC ZINC Collective, indicating involvement in the boot camp.
A quick review of ZINC Collective’s leadership page shows that Mook is one of its four key advisers.
The group’s mission is to “Recruit, develop, support, and retain diverse, high potential talent and address gaps in a technologically-enabled Democratic ecosystem,” its website notes.
Mook is also listed as an adviser for DigiDems, which is one of ZINC Collective’s organizations.
“Our mission is to recruit, develop, support, and retain diverse, high-potential tech talent and address technology gaps in the Democratic campaign sphere,” DigiDems’ website states.
Breitbart News reached out to Mook via text and email, asking what involvement he has in the boot camp and for further information as to what the boot camp would entail, including if it would be digital or in-person. Breitbart News also inquired if he stands to gain money from potential participation in the initiative. He did not immediately respond to the comment requests.
According to the slide, the boot camp will key in on “Customized social media evaluation,” “Platform-specific optimization strategies,” “Realtime insights on trending content and engagement Strategies,” and “Daily + rapid response content.”
Mook faced intense criticism following Clinton’s election loss, according to a New York Times write-up of the 2017 book Shattered by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes:
As described in “Shattered,” Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook — who centered the Clinton operation on data analytics (information about voters, given to him by number crunchers) as opposed to more old-fashioned methods of polling, knocking on doors and trying to persuade undecideds — made one strategic mistake after another, but was kept on by Clinton, despite her own misgivings.
“Mook had made the near-fatal mistakes of underestimating Sanders and investing almost nothing early in the back end of the primary calendar,” Parnes and Allen write, and the campaign seemed to learn little from Clinton’s early struggles. For instance, her loss in the Michigan primary in March highlighted the problems that would pursue her in the general election — populism was on the rise in the Rust Belt, and she was not connecting with working-class white voters — and yet it resulted in few palpable adjustments. Michigan, the authors add, also pointed up Mook’s failure to put enough organizers on the ground, and revealed that his data was a little too rosy, “meaning the campaign didn’t know Bernie was ahead.”
These problems were not corrected in the race against Trump. Allen and Parnes report that Donna Brazile, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, was worried in early October about the lack of ground forces in major swing states, and that Mook had “declined to use pollsters to track voter preferences in the final three weeks of the campaign,” despite pleas from advisers in crucial states.
For a time beginning in 2019, he served as the president of the House Democrat Super PAC, “The House Majority PAC.”
