Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

by Jonathan Allen

Hillary’s campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling of impending doom with a simple mantra: We’re not allowed to have nice things.

This is the story of how it all unraveled again for Hillary. We expect that it will generate a feeling of righteousness, and perhaps a touch of sympathy, in those of you who don’t like her. For many of Hillary’s millions of supporters, we know that it will leave you feeling shattered all over again.

Hillary had tried to put together a team this time that would feature far less internal drama than her failed 2008 bid. Back then, big personalities had clashed openly, aired dirty laundry and strategy details in the press, and sometimes pursued their own goals at the expense of hers. In the intervening years, she’d assigned a lot of the blame for her loss to the warring inside her campaign. But that was hardly the only ailment from 2008 that she hoped to remedy. She hadn’t sold a vision for the country. She’d run away from being a woman instead of leaning into the unique aspect of her political story. To manage her campaign, she’d tapped a friend rather than the top pro. She’d let her husband run wild on the trail. And she had failed to take advantage of the latest technology to build a movement of grassroots supporters and donors.

On Wednesday, April 29, Sanders’s aide Michael Briggs called over to the Democratic National Committee to ask whether he could use a room in the janky old headquarters building a few blocks southeast of the Capitol. Sanders wanted to launch his campaign, and he’d been told that Senate rules precluded him from doing that inside the Capitol. He was in a jam, and he was hoping the DNC would help out. Mo Elleithee, then the communications director for the DNC, fielded the call and took the request to the chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida lawmaker who pledged neutrality in the primary but was widely viewed as a Clinton ally. DNC officials believed that it wasn’t appropriate to give Sanders the imprimatur of the party, or at least that was a good enough reason to turn him down. Wasserman Schultz made the decision: no. It was the first of many instances in which Wasserman Schultz’s actions convinced Sanders’s team that she was putting her thumb on the scale for Clinton.

First, Hillary was already inaccessible to most of her own staff, preferring to communicate through Abedin. So, a phone call featuring both Hillary and Bill was a real rarity. But more important, the scapegoating tone and tenor revealed that the Clintons were either living on another planet or at least having emotional and intellectual difficulty coming to terms with the reality that only Hillary was culpable and only Hillary could turn things around.

The most important hallmark of a winning campaign—unity forged by success—was absent.

And yet her best performance had come under the umbrella of a Benghazi investigation that naturally portrayed her as the defendant. Survival was a victory, but no other candidate had to endure the horrible optics of being hauled before a congressional committee to testify about the deaths of four Americans.

MSNBC the night before and, while brushing

It was an issue that wouldn’t ever go away: Hillary was being advised by people who thought they knew her—she’d been in the public eye for most or all of their adult lives—but really didn’t have a feel for who she was at her core.

the cohort that had gained power internally was almost entirely male.

This is because we made poor choices about where we traveled, she thought. She e-mailed Mook to tell him she believed she’d spent too much time in the cities of Detroit and Flint and not enough in the working-class white suburbs around them.

her message was off for Michigan, she had refused to go hard against trade; Mook had pinched pennies and failed to put organizers on the ground; the polling and analytics were a touch too rosy, meaning the campaign didn’t know Bernie was ahead; she had set up an ambiguous decision-making structure on the campaign; 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 list went on and on. The underlying truth—the one many didn’t want to admit to themselves—was that the person ultimately responsible for these decisions, the one whose name was on the ticket, hadn’t corrected for these problems, all of which had been brought to her attention before primary day. She’d stuck with the plan, and it had cost her.

Kevin de León, a leader in the California assembly, was dropped.

* THE leader of the Senate. Also, why?

Afterward, the campaign essentially sided with the protesters, reiterating that Hillary should have picked different terms to describe gangsters. The feeling inside the campaign was that Bill had helped Bernie in a state where African American turnout and support were key to Hillary holding off the surge. He was going to have to stay focused.

“FACT: Donald Trump can defeat Hillary Clinton and become the 45th President of the United States.” Hillary, the memo went on to say, should not “underestimate his capacity to draw people to the polls who normally do not vote.” That could “tip the scales in key states (and put certain states in play that would otherwise be more safely Democratic),” the adviser wrote, adding that in assessing polls, “I’d routinely add three or four points to whatever they say about his support.”

Mook, always attentive to cash flow, knew that it was much more costly to try to persuade undecided voters to back Hillary than it was to register her supporters or to make sure they went to the polls. The analytics team could also conduct

Raj Shah, the party’s research director, outlined the buckets of messaging against Clinton: a creature of Washington, a corrupt insider influenced by foreigners, untrustworthy, unaccomplished at State, and a liberal Democrat after eight years of the liberal Democratic Obama presidency.

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. That said, they had also learned from early surveys that most voters didn’t hold Bill’s infidelity against Hillary.

“The best way to fund organizing is through the state parties and coordinated campaigns, but that’s not available until there’s a presumptive nominee,” said

Trump was winning primaries because he was a torch-bearing outsider ready to burn the nation’s institutions to the ground. Bernie was offering the same thing on the Democratic side, and he had flown in from off the political radar screen to give Hillary fits. In January 2016, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, a former Clinton White House aide and sometime critic of both Clintons, had beseeched Podesta to open Hillary’s eyes to the changing world around her. With Bernie and Republicans attacking her as an agent of the establishment and an avatar of the status quo, Greenberg argued, Hillary had to make political reform a central part of her campaign.

“With people struggling financially, they want to make sure government works for them and they want to make sure taxpayers get their money’s worth. That includes many base Democratic voters.” Hillary was running in the wrong year to ignore the power of promises to rein in establishment excesses. But she would never put forward an ethics agenda.

The rise of populism, and particularly right-wing populism, wasn’t a phenomenon limited to American politics. Brits were locked in a tense battle between those who wanted to exit the European Union and those who wanted to remain. Populist figures with nationalistic tendencies—like Nigel Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, and Norbert Hofer in Austria—were on the rise across Europe. By ceding the reformer mantle to Sanders—and to Trump—Hillary was dismissing a whole world’s worth of evidence that she was running into the headwinds of history.

“Rose Garden” strategy—the term for an incumbent president who stays at home and uses the trappings of the office to campaign rather than getting out on the hustings. For years, she’d been in the bubble of elite circles in Washington, New York, and foreign capitals. Whether or not she understood their concerns, she was literally out of touch with voters. Bill hungered for, and sought, more casual discussions with them.