Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

by Jonathan Allen

During the convention, a woman approached him and said that the American flags in the arena were beautiful. That was to hide the crazy people shouting things, he thought. But it looked great.

Similarly, the campaign looked a lot better in front of the curtain than behind it.

Hillary mingled with old friends in Sag Harbor under a tent on the night of August 30: Calvin Klein, Harvey Weinstein, Jimmy Buffett, Jon Bon Jovi, and Sir Paul McCartney. Buffett and his wife, Jane, were the hosts of this extravaganza,

Now, just as she had extended her lead, it felt like Hillary was easing back. She was working the fund-raising circuit hard, but for the public—and for her own staffers in the states—she had all but vanished from view. And she had done so at precisely the moment that Trump was starting to rev his engine.

When she went back to chat with them after the Cleveland rally, she was overcome with another coughing fit. Once she recovered, she was, of course, asked whether there was anything to Republican claims that her health had faltered. “I’m not concerned about the conspiracy theories,” she said. “I pay no attention to them.” But this wasn’t a conspiracy theory. Even some of her staff members wondered what was wrong with her.

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” she said. “Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that.” She added that they were “irredeemable.” The reaction to her remarks, so starkly at odds with her “Stronger Together” slogan, was swift and severe. That night, conservatives began using #basketofdeplorables to rally critics of Hillary, and Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence said at a conference in Washington the next day that Americans “are not a ‘basket’ of anything.”

“Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea,” Hillary said in a statement. “I regret saying ‘half’—that was wrong.”

One Clinton aide later said the snappy decision making was “one of our finest moments internally.” But others thought it didn’t do enough to limit the damage Hillary had done to herself. They knew they were witnessing their first unforced error of the fall. And it was ugly. “It was like, ‘Oh my God,’ ” one campaign staffer said of his reaction to her original comment. “She didn’t have the feel, the empathy.”

Hillary had become the 2016 cycle’s Mitt Romney.

For all the messaging she’d done on inclusiveness, she now sounded like not only an elite but an elitist. If nothing else, she’d energized an already active Trump base. And still, things were about to get worse.

Earlier that day, Hillary’s doctor had diagnosed her with pneumonia, which explained her cough. But most of the leadership of her campaign was kept in the dark about it. Of the Super Six, only Abedin knew. As a result, the media wasn’t informed about a significant change in the Democratic presidential nominee’s health, an omission that would be costly.

During the service, Hillary began to feel overheated and faint. She walked away from the event and toward a waiting van with the assistance of an aide. As she moved to get into the van, her body pitched and slumped. She was dragged the last couple of feet into the vehicle, with her feet scraping across the curb. Her campaign initially said nothing and didn’t even alert her traveling press pool of reporters that she would be leaving early. The media learned of Hillary’s departure when video of her being hoisted into the van surfaced online. For the next couple of hours, in the absence of any clarifying information from the campaign, media outlets played the video over and over, and pundits both professional and amateur speculated on social media about whether she was suffering from a serious health problem. Kaine e-mailed to check on her soon after the video began playing on television and she responded that she was fine. He hadn’t been told of the pneumonia diagnosis either.

Between Trump suggesting she didn’t

have the “stamina” to be president, Karl Rove saying she might have suffered brain damage in a 2012 fall at her home, and the coughing fits, the stage had been set for full-on media and public speculation about whether there was something physically wrong with ...

More important, she’d reinforced the public perception that she was always hiding something. She was so secretive that even her own campaign team didn’t know when she was sick.

But the final words on the page—“I’m with her”—were too much. Bernie couldn’t bring himself to say them. “It’s so phony!” he griped. “I don’t want to say that.”

So he didn’t.

But still, killing an ad with Bernie endorsing Hillary, at a time when she was struggling to

energize his base, was a real head-scratcher. “It could have been really helpful to her,” said one person who saw it.

But Bernie had hammered Hillary so hard during the primary that validating her now strained his credibility ...

“Donald’s plan to round up sixteen million people with a deportation force is wrong,” she declared. “We have limited resources. We should use them on the people who are really dangerous, who threaten our safety, not on families—law-abiding people contributing to their communities…” “Like the thousand people that should be deported that you just gave citizenship to?” her rival crowed.

Trump’s arguments on issues at the heart of his candidacy—jobs, immigration, and trade—packed more punch than Hillary’s. His words were tough, and his ideas were easy to grasp. Hers were neither. That’s what truly annoyed her.

He thought Hillary should practice the traditional predebate handshake with Trump because it could be a tense moment. Trump could use his physical size to get in her space and intimidate her, maybe not even out of malice, but just out of sheer awkwardness. Trump might even try to kiss her.

“If you had seen debate prep, you would see why he was the nominee,” said one person who was in the room. “You would not have said this woman is going to kick his ass.”

When Hillary interjected with a canned line, “I call it Trumped-up, trickle-down,” a collective groan echoed through the Democratic universe. Trump was fresh and on point. Hillary was a day-old bagel.

Hillary had been in free fall before the debate and she was doing nothing to arrest it. Trump looked almost presidential. Would they look back at these early exchanges as the moment Trump won the White House?

Neither Mook nor the rest of the campaign’s top brass thought much of the video, which they hadn’t yet experienced with the all-important audio. The Russian hacking story seemed like a much bigger deal.

“At the time, nobody really appreciated

it,” another source said. “We were convinced that the statement about the Russians was going to be the big deal that day.”

The Republican nominee’s campaign was discovering one hard fact, as campaign manager Kellyanne Conway would later put it: “There’s a difference for voters between what offends you and what affects you.”

That’s why the most jarring and memorable video clip in modern campaign history—a tape that should have rattled the “family values”–minded Republican establishment to its core—couldn’t put Trump away. Early in the campaign, Trump had said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue shooting people and not lose a vote.

“We have 17—17—intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin,” she would say at one of the debates. “They are designed to influence our election.” The charge actually drew more conclusions than the intelligence

community had publicly, and Trump deflected by saying there was no proof Russia was behind the theft and leaking of the Podesta e-mails.

One volunteer who phone-banked from Brooklyn several times in October was assigned to make calls to registered Democrats in Florida. The main goal was to make sure these swing-state Democrats had received mail-in ballots. But the volunteer was also tasked with asking for whom the voter intended to cast his or her ballot—information that would be relayed to the analytics team. The majority of respondents either said outright that they weren’t going to vote for Clinton or declined to say whom they would support, which surprised the volunteer. After all, these were registered Democrats. More

alarming, some of them reported they would vote for Trump. After one session, the volunteer left the phone-banking area to mingle with the paid staff on another floor. “The energy in the room juxtaposed to the lack of enthusiasm I was hearing on the calls. Campaign staffers seemed so confident,” the volunteer said. “They were acting like they had this in the bag.”

Sure, she won the debate, but all anyone could talk about was Trump’s audacious pregame gimmick. Afterward, her aides didn’t know what to say. They were afraid to tell her that she’d won because they weren’t certain that her victory on the debate stage would break through Trump’s masterful manipulation of the media.

The resurrection of the e-mail scandal and the go-negative response highlighted the fundamental challenge that the campaign never solved, one that probably couldn’t have been solved. “We had trouble moving numbers with a positive message,” one of the aides said.

At a rally in Flint, Michigan, in early October, Bill Clinton had given voice to the frustrations of working- and middle-class voters who saw their health insurance premiums rising in the Obamacare era. “You’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half,” he’d said. “It’s the craziest thing in the world.”

Specifically, the Clinton team could see Trump closing ground across the Rust Belt. It was the area that he had targeted, despite conventional wisdom that held the Democratic “blue wall” would come through for Hillary in the end. Suddenly, Trump’s quixotic ride into the heartland looked a lot more strategically sound, and Hillary’s attention to expanding the electoral map seemed misguided. Her aides knew the trend lines were bad, and they had no way of making sure their survey data was accurate.

In Mook’s mind, the two forms were indistinguishable in terms of testing the horse race, and he was worried about overspending, even after the Comey letter produced a windfall of contributions from concerned Democrats. So he declined to use pollsters to track voter preferences in the final three weeks of the campaign. Some Clinton aides and advisers thought that was an unwise decision because it robbed him of another data point against which to check the analytics. “They just cut it too tight to the edge and that was because of that absolute belief of Elan. And then it was Robby not wanting to spend money, and it was no checks and balances and transparency in the system,” said one person who thought Mook could have done more to understand where Hillary stood in the stretch run. “That’s how you end up with realizing it too late.” There’s no guarantee that Hillary’s pollsters would have come up with different numbers, but many officials on the campaign and in the larger Democratic Party believed at the time that Mook relied too much on analytics.

So Hillary never went to Wisconsin—the state where she had been forced to cancel her first planned joint appearance with Obama earlier in the year. Despite a major field operation in the state, her organizers were frustrated that Mook wouldn’t provide basic resources like campaign literature so they could try to persuade voters to back Hillary. “What is the point of having a hundred people on the ground if you’re not giving them any of the tools to do the work?” said one veteran Democratic organizer familiar with the Wisconsin operation. “That should be part of the plan.” The complaint echoed those of campaign leaders across the battleground states.

The analysts felt like they could trust their data in part because early voting in swing states matched up well with their projections. They didn’t think there was any reason to expect that Election Day turnout would vary significantly. The memo that one Hillary adviser had sent months earlier warning that they should add three or four points to Trump’s poll position was a distant memory.

Everything Hillary was hearing and seeing pointed to a victory. Even Sullivan, the incorrigible pessimist, thought she was going to win in the final days. Nearly a decade after she’d launched her first campaign for the presidency, the glass ceiling was within Hillary’s reach and the hammer of the American electorate was in her grasp. She would finally get the chance to run the country that she loved. “In those final days she believed she was going to win. And she was probably more bearish than most of us,” said one senior campaign aide. “She was getting comfortable with the idea that it was going to happen. She was thinking a lot about government.” But while Hillary was measuring the drapes in the Oval Office, her team was mismeasuring the electorate.

Now, a bunch of outsiders had determined it was time for Hillary, the first woman ever nominated for the presidency, to give up. She was losing Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The AP had called the race. President Obama had urged her to end it. And the data-wielding millennials on her own team saw no remaining path to victory. But for Moore and a handful of other true Hillary loyalists, many of whom had lived through Al Gore’s too-quick concession in 2000, it wasn’t time to concede. Not yet. The numbers might flip by morning. “It’s too murky,” Moore insisted.

But Hillary was already midsurrender. “Give me the phone, I’m calling him,” she’d instructed her aides. It took a few minutes—giving Moore time to register her objections—but Huma Abedin finally connected with Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway. Huma handed the phone to Hillary, who put it to her cheek and uttered two

words she’d never expected to hear in her own voice: “Congra...

The concession version of Hillary’s speech, a grim assignment that had fallen to Rooney several days earlier, remained tucked away, undiscussed.

No, Schale explained, Trump’s numbers weren’t just big, they were unreal. In rural Polk County, smack-dab in the center of the state, Hillary would collect 3,000 more votes than Obama did in 2012—but Trump would add more than 25,000 votes to Mitt Romney’s total. In Pasco County, a swath of suburbs north of Tampa–St. Petersburg, Trump outran Romney by 30,000 votes.

Not only were Florida and North Carolina, separately, the keystone states for two of Hillary’s three paths to victory, but the campaign had poured money, time, and surrogates into both of them. Hillary had closed her campaign just hours earlier with a midnight rally in Raleigh, and her first joint appearance with Obama, back in June, had been in Charlotte. She had unveiled her running mate, Tim Kaine, in Florida. She could afford to lose one or both of the states, but the chances of her winning the presidency would shrink dramatically.

“Sorry to be the one to tell you,” Smith said in an Arkansas drawl echoing the former president’s, “but we’re not going to win Florida.” Bill hung up and called Governor