These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Every major polling organization miscalled the 2016 election, predicting a win for Hillary Clinton. It had been a narrow contest. Clinton won the popular vote; Trump won in the Electoral College. The Kennedy School post-election debrief served as one of the earliest formal reckonings with what, exactly, had happened. After the Republican campaign managers finished taking stock, the Democrats spoke. “Hillary, a lot of people don’t recall, came to electoral politics late in her career,” her campaign manager, Robby Mook, said. “She got her start with the Children’s Defense Fund . . .” Clinton’s campaign had failed to say much of anything new about Hillary Clinton, a candidate Americans knew only too well. Mook apparently had little to add. Bernie Sanders’s manager looked wan. He shook his head. “We almost did it.”154 The more obvious explanations for Clinton’s loss went, on the whole, unstated. Obama had failed to raise up a new generation of political talent. The Democratic National Committee, believing Clinton’s nomination and even her victory to be inevitable, had suppressed competition. Clinton, dedicating her time to fund-raising with wealthy coastal liberals from Hollywood to the Hamptons, failed to campaign in swing states and hardly bothered to speak to blue-collar white voters. After Trump won the nomination, she failed to do much of anything except to call out his flaws of character, even though Trump’s most vocal supporters had pointed out, from the very beginning,...