President Obama will join Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail for the first time Tuesday


President Obama will campaign with Hillary Clinton for the first time this coming Tuesday, appearing with the presumptive Democratic nominee in North Carolina, a state he won in 2008 and narrowly lost in 2012. Obama originally planned to appear with Clinton in Wisconsin last month, but the scheduled event was postponed after the massacre at Orlando's Pulse nightclub.
The much-lauded campaign data team which helped Obama win the White House twice is also #WithHer, giving the Clinton camp access to an invaluable email list of 20 million likely supporters. The list handover is both practically and symbolically important, providing Clinton a powerful tool and strong backing from the sitting president.
On the other side of the aisle, Donald Trump has downplayed the importance of big data, calling it "overrated" and arguing that Obama did not win because of his data machine. With Clinton in full possession of the Obama resources, the general election will give Trump a chance to test his theory.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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