Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

by Jonathan Allen

“The questions are supposed to be giving people a sense of how you think,” this aide explained. “Her instinct is to answer the question very narrowly.”

“There’s a difference for voters between what offends you and what affects you.”

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.

As president, it was his job to safeguard the integrity of the political process.

Her approach, guided by Mook and informed by the demands of winning the primary, was to build a coalition focused on core strengths: African Americans, Latinos, college-educated whites, and women. But the more she catered to them, the more she pushed away other segments of the electorate. The number crunchers

They understood the value of slicing and dicing voters to make efficient decisions, but they also felt that Hillary should be doing more to show that she wanted every vote. Some of them believed that instead of basing her campaign on Obama’s core coalition, she should have begun with the working-class whites and Latinos who fueled her 2008 run and built out.