Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign
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Read between July 6 - August 13, 2017
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Throughout the campaign, Mook would give short shrift to persuasion efforts—a bias that either reflected a savvy understanding of the electorate or a costly miscalculation of Hillary’s capacity for building a broader coalition.
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Hillary’s communications shop wanted to more aggressively attack Sanders to drive his numbers down—an instinct in line with the Clinton way of handling foes—while senior strategists knowingly advised that she would hurt herself by going after a popular figure who hadn’t been negative enough to warrant return volleys.
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“The seeds of what we see across the campaign were present there,” said one person familiar with the campaign’s strategy and tactics. “It was a warning sign that they just barely scraped by, and I don’t think they took that seriously.”
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On one of the flights, Hillary unburdened herself to Moore. “I don’t understand what’s happening with the country. I can’t get my arms around it,” Hillary confided. Moore just listened. “How do I get answers to this?” Hillary asked. It was a quandary that would plague her throughout the campaign. After nearly a year on the campaign trail, and hundreds of stops at diners, coffee shops, and high school gymnasiums and just as many roundtables with young professionals and millworkers, Hillary still couldn’t figure out why Americans were so angry or how she could bring the country together.
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“He is incredibly awesome at figuring out how much money we need to spend,” one Clinton adviser said of Mook. “But when you’re close to the margins, there’s not a lot of room to spare.” Mook bet on Kriegel as the professional political class griped. The decision to hold back on spending and trust his plan was a striking demonstration of discipline. He’d made his name as an organizer and yet essentially determined that organizing was a fool’s errand on the short timeline before the March 1 showdown with Sanders.
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The real answer: she’d become the candidate of minority voters on social justice issues while Bernie was hitting her as a corrupt, Wall Street–loving champion of the “rigged” financial system that took advantage of working-class voters. Whether she was perceived as hostile to working- and middle-class whites or just indifferent, it wasn’t a big leap from “she doesn’t care about my job” to “she’d rather give my job to a minority or a foreigner than fight for me to keep it.” She and her aides were focused on the wrong issue set for working-class white Michigan voters, and, even when she talked ...more
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By then, Mook was in all but open warfare with Podesta. For starters, their vastly different styles clashed time and again. Mook, with his field-organizing roots and millennial viewpoints, was part manager, part dreamer, part salesman, and part cheerleader. Podesta was more grounded, direct, and pessimistic. He was also furious at Mook for cutting him out of the information loop on major parts of the campaign, including budgets, analytics data, and staffing in the states.
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At the same time, Trump was taking the opposite tack. Instead of trying to increase the number of competitive states, he concentrated intently on a handful that carried large numbers of electoral votes.
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For Mook and the Brooklyn number crunchers, it held little value. Hillary, the policy wonk, leaned heavily toward hard evidence too. And, because she didn’t want to expose herself to unscripted interactions with voters, she wasn’t getting much retail political information. From the very beginning of the campaign, Hillary had met with preselected groups but tried to avoid chance encounters with voters who might heckle her. She took the same approach to members of the media, who sometimes relayed the concerns of voters to candidates. She was running a variation on a “Rose Garden” strategy—the ...more