Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

by Jonathan Allen

Four days later, in an interview with ABC’s David Muir, Hillary gave her team, the Democratic Party, and the press what they desperately wanted—full contrition for the decision she’d made in the first place. That having done so at the beginning might have saved her five months of political free fall didn’t seem to register. “I should’ve used two accounts,” she told Muir. “That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility.

He was annoyed that the media focused so much attention on Hillary and her second bid for the presidency when he was sitting in plain sight in the White House. He was also being overlooked by the president whom he had faithfully served for eight years, a painful if silent rebuke.

“And so I said, ‘It’s really important to me that we don’t hurt women and children, so I will support it even though there are other things I don’t like in it,’ ” Clinton continued. “And it was Vice President Biden, who was the senator from Delaware, and the Republican co-sponsor that I was talking with, so I said I’d support it even though I’d opposed it before.” The comment enraged Biden almost more than

anything else Clinton had said during the time he was mulling whether or not to oppose her, according to one Biden source familiar with his thinking. “She’s playing ugly,” Biden told confidants. “If she thinks she’s going to force me out of the race like this, she has another thing coming to her.

He felt, with good reason, that he had earned the space to make a decision without being shit on by Clinton.

Running like an incumbent from the outset, Hillary had geared her whole campaign toward depriving any other Democrat of the institutional support necessary to mount a challenge, from donors to superdelegates. She wanted other Democrats to be afraid to run against her, or to support any would-be rivals.

And that the American public perceived her as too robotic and aloof.

That Hillary, they claimed, was relatable to nearly anyone, downright funny, and didn’t take herself too seriously. More than anything, they said, she was authentic.

where Clinton would dance the Nae Nae, reveal that she kept up with the Kardashians and Homeland, and ask hosts to playfully tug on her hair. Buell was displeased. By announcing a strategy to make Hillary seem more real, her team had actually achieved the opposite effect. Clinton supporters across the country read it the same way. It was a pure what-the-fuck moment—a major unforced error that buttressed qualms about Hillary’s honesty and trustworthiness at a terrible time. Buell, channeling the collective outrage of the pro-Clinton forces, scolded Mook.

The campaign’s inability to reveal Hillary’s authenticity—and its ham-fisted effort to manufacture a false version of it—was infuriating.

The Hillary Buell knew, foulmouthed and fun, didn’t need a bunch of political operatives inventing a more genuine persona for her. She needed them to help her drop the armor built up over decades that shielded her most human traits.

long to appreciate just how much the e-mail scandal—and the candidate’s refusal to simply apologize up front—was poaching her

But her late “evolution” to supporting gay marriage was a sticking point with younger members of the rank and file.

The Human Rights Campaign had wanted her to be the featured speaker at its annual dinner that night, but she’d declined so that she could appear on SNL. Her stand-in at the dinner? None other than Joe Biden, who had stepped out in front of Obama during the 2012 campaign cycle to announce on Meet the Press that he favored same-sex marriage.

And he was the Senate sponsor of the Clinton White House anticrime law that had led to the mass incarceration of young black men.

As a lawmaker and as an Obama administration negotiator in the Senate, he never seemed terribly uncomfortable giving up items on the liberal wish list to get deals done.

And back-to-back Bernie wins in the first two states on the calendar had the potential to give Bernie unstoppable momentum. Bill Clinton was the only candidate in either party in the previous four decades to lose both states and come back to win a nomination.

Hillary would never stray from the African American base that provided her sustenance in key primary states and numbers in November battlegrounds. But there was a trade-off. “Our failure to reach out to white voters, like literally from the New Hampshire primary on, it never changed,” said one campaign official.

It was

an issue that wouldn’t ever go away: Hillary was being advised by people who thought they knew her—

“We know we’ve got work to do. But that work, that work is not to make America great again,” she said, ridiculing Donald Trump’s slogan. “America never stopped being great. We have to make America whole. We have to fill in what’s been hollowed out.”

and she’d focused too heavily on black and brown voters at the expense of competing for the whites who had formed her base in 2008.

The one person with whom she didn’t seem particularly upset: herself. No one who drew a salary

from the campaign would tell her that. It was a self-signed death warrant to raise a question about Hillary’s competence—to her or anyone else—in loyalty-obsessed Clintonworld.

Concern about being cast out to the perimeter of Hillary’s overlapping circles of influence far outweighed the itch to tell Hillary what she was doing wrong.

Amazingly, after having been the candidate of the white working class in a 2008 race against a black opponent, she was becoming anathema to them.

As Sanders and Trump hammered away with clear antitrade messages, both built support among working- and middle-class white voters. They were playing to fears about globalization destroying Michigan’s economy, and they were doing it unambiguously.

And she told Hillary that the campaign didn’t have enough of a presence on the ground. “Debbie Dingell will fucking call her twelve times a day and say, ‘This is fucked up. This is wrong,’ ” one admiring Hillary aide said, exaggerating to emphasize that the candidate was hearing the message even if she wasn’t taking all of Dingell’s warnings to heart.

“Bernie Sanders really captured the zeitgeist,” said one longtime Michigan politician. And, like Trump, he did it without Hillary’s taking notice.

“He voted against the money that ended up saving the auto industry. I think that is a pretty big difference.” No one was more stunned to hear this than Sanders, who had supported federal money for Detroit’s carmakers during the 2008 financial meltdown.

Fact-checkers called Clinton out, and for Sanders’s supporters the charge was emblematic of three things: Clinton’s willingness to say anything to win, her negativity, and her desperation in Michigan.

It’s hard to know how many votes moved in one direction or another based on that single moment on stage, but it’s safe to say she didn’t boost her position much. For the long term, she may have helped cement her negatives in the minds of impressionable Michigan voters.

As Donald Trump took control of the Republican race, one of Hillary’s longtime advisers circulated a memo. The very top read “FACT: Donald Trump can defeat Hillary Clinton and become the 45th President of the United States.”

There was good reason for Trump to have some hope. He had several important tailwinds: only twice since 1828 had a Democrat won a third consecutive term for the party; populist movements on the right and the left had arisen from the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis and gathered steam throughout the intervening years; and the states he needed to flip had all elected Republican governors.

RNC officials had been surprised when

polling in 2015 had shown that voters didn’t care nearly as much that Hillary would be the first female president as they had in 2008 that Barack Obama would be the first black president. Whether that was because voters were misogynistic or just didn’t care for Hillary was irrelevant; it only mattered that Hillary’s gender wasn’t going to sweep her into the presidency.

While Democrats were convinced they had the math and a strong enough candidate to win the presidency, Republicans saw that the mood of the country created a landscape that should have suited them well: Hillary was deeply unpopular and well defined, she was running for the Democratic Party’s third consecutive term, and there was little reason to think her gender would be an asset. But they knew Trump was his own worst enemy, and they had little faith that he could be contained. “If Trump went on vacation for the next six months,” one Republican official observed, “he would be the next president of the United States.”

On June 7—while California voters were still at the polls—Obama walked down the majestic colonnade near the Rose Garden and into the White House residence to put

the finishing touches on an unspoken pact he’d made with Hillary the day he’d asked her to serve as his secretary of state. They had become close enough personally not to think of his endorsement of her in the transactional terms of a final payment on the deal.

He couldn’t understand what possessed Hillary to set up the private e-mail server, and her handling of the scandal—obfuscate, deny, and evade—amounted to political malpractice. He wanted his friend to win, and yet she was exhibiting, again, some of the very qualities that had helped him defeat her in 2008. It was a classic unforced Clinton error, and he couldn’t believe that she and the people around her had let it happen. When would they learn?

She’d waited until the last possible minute to tap her running mate.

He believed the party’s nominee should determine the fate of the sitting DNC chair—a position that conveniently absolved him of responsibility for making a decision. The problem was that Hillary didn’t want to make that call either.

but Hillary, who needed Bernie’s voters, and Bernie, who didn’t want to get blamed for electing Donald Trump, found common ground.

But Hillary and her friends were also frustrated that Sanders wasn’t able to snap his followers into line. In Brooklyn, Clinton aides joked about Bernie being the last Japanese World War II soldier tromping through the Philippines in the belief that the war was still being fought decades after it had ended.

Moreover, even as Bernie and his top aides softened, his supporters didn’t always follow suit.

As she went through a version of her stump speech tailored for the veterans, Hillary looked out at a sea of blank stares. Of course, the VFW members applauded politely when she paid homage to the sacrifices of men and women in uniform, but she could tell they didn’t care much for her or what she was saying.

There was an invisible barrier between Hillary and her audience, and she thought it ran along the gender line. Having spent time with flag officers, soldiers, and veterans as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee

and as secretary of state, she knew that some of them had a hard time accepting the idea of a female commander in chief. That’s the elephant in the room,...

If he was seen as failing to unify a party that he had helped divide during the primary, his reputation would be permanently damaged. That didn’t matter to his diehards.

More than a year into the campaign, her staff didn’t know her well enough to turn her candidacy into a compelling narrative for her.