While we were on the train we didn’t have to think of what awaited us on the other side of Tuesday. We could rock in the rhythm of the speeding train, drink, and laugh, as we reminisced and recited from memory all the different polls and pundits who put Hillary solidly ahead. The talking points we were receiving from Brooklyn were filled with happy news. They said Hillary had ended the campaign in a very strong position, up between four and five points over Trump nationwide with early voting turnout higher than the previous elections. Early voting was up 35 percent in Florida, half of all registered voters had already exercised their franchise in North Carolina and Colorado. Also, the talking points said, it had never been easier to vote, with more polling places in many states and longer hours. As I was reading the official statement from Brooklyn on my phone I was wondering if they were talking about the same election I was.
Expressing any doubt about her victory would not be polite, or even warranted. We had given our all to this election that had troubled and terrified us in a way no election ever had before. God willing, the next evening we would be celebrating with the whole world at the Javits Center. I needed to adopt the enthusiasm of my companions on the train ride. We were going to make history!
We were like children on vacation when we all piled into our SUV and started bumping around Manhattan. We went to the hotel and scattered for the night. I ended up having dinner with my old friends Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas at their apartment on the Upper East Side, but I didn’t make a late night of it.
The campaign had two Election Day operations: the war room and the boiler room. The war room was where Robby and his political team, the communications team and the campaign lawyers, would be. Any issues with the voting machines would go there, as well as Election Day interviews for the news stations. The boiler room was not a place for press. It was in a midtown Manhattan office building on West Forty-Fifth Street. I was part of the GOTV operation and decided I needed to be there at five the next morning to begin my calls to black radio stations in the East.
I had my script down, slightly different for every congressional district. “Hillary will be a fantastic president, like the president said, more experienced on the first day than either Barack or Bill.”… “And this is about Obama and his legacy and the way he has made us proud.”… “Trayvon Martin, if he had lived, he would be voting for the candidate his mom is endorsing: Hillary.”
As I was making these calls, I was also fielding calls about trouble in the swing states. As the polls opened that morning, problems came in from all over the country. One organizer called from Florida saying that the polls had been closed for the last hour. If some people do not vote early, they do not vote. They only give themselves thirty minutes to fulfill this civic duty, and when that thirty minutes is up, they are not likely to come back. I got on the phone with the county supervisor to find out what they were doing about this.
I was told that if I found a legal issue at a polling station, I should send it over to the lawyers at the war room. If it was a political issue, I would try to handle it. What if it was a cyberissue? We hadn’t addressed that problem in our preparations for Election Day. And when these problems started piling up on top of each other, the Russians were all I could think about. We had been warned about this, but no one heeded the warning. It was as if tampering with the election on such a scale strained our imaginations, and now the unimaginable looked like it was happening on Election Day. I changed my radio script. “Now I know many of you are at precincts where the machines aren’t working, or there’s some trouble with your registration. Stay in line. Don’t give up. Hillary needs you. Barack needs you, and so does your country. Everyone needs to vote.”
In Philadelphia the polls were not open when people showed up to vote. In Durham, North Carolina, the machines had broken down. It was almost 9:30 a.m., and they still were not back up. People couldn’t vote before work! I heard about a handful of problems coming out of Florida, but most of the problems were coming from Pennsylvania and North Carolina. I thought about the meeting with DHS. What if the machines had been tampered with?
In the middle of all this, the fire alarm went off, and we all had to vacate the building. I’d gotten there so early, I didn’t have a security pass to reenter the building. I had to talk my way in. Fortunately I found a security guard who recognized me.
When I got back into the boiler room, it was as if I was seeing it for the first time. I had been at my desk, which was quite a mess, and completely focused on my work as the other offices and conference areas filled up that morning. This cut me off from what the rest of the people there were doing. I had a piece of paper with names of people from the DNC who had done a good job whom I wanted to suggest for positions on the inaugural committee as well as in the new administration. I walked into a meeting room where Charlie and Minyon and their team were working and handed them this paper. They took it without looking at it and set it aside.
I stood there watching for a minute, then walked down to the conference room. There was not much activity in this room. Everyone was in a good mood, certain that we were only hours away from victory. The feeling of the room was surreal to me. They were discussing which jobs they wanted in the new administration and what roles they hoped to take in the inaugural committee. Meanwhile I was starting to panic. We might lose this thing.
I went back to my desk and began my calls again, my radio spots. When Julie Goodridge came later to bring me lunch, I had a hard time taking a break. I was on the edge of bursting into tears. I felt like I was stranding people who were waiting in line. Maybe these people just needed a little encouragement to hold that place until they could vote, and if I went to eat my sandwich they would abandon that spot. This was a race that would be won one vote at a time, and we could not afford to lose even one. Get a grip, Donna, I told myself. You are not single-handedly responsible for Hillary’s victory. I could only do what I could do, and I needed to eat lunch if I was going to make it through this day.
It occurred to me that maybe I was wrong. My gut might be leading me in the wrong direction. I had been so wrapped up in this cyber stuff, the idea that this election was being stolen from us by these dirty tricksters, that I had become nutty on this subject. After all, the opponent was Donald Trump. He had done so many outrageous things, too many to even count, that the end effect of all of that vulgarity and hostility had to tilt the scale toward Hillary. All the polls showed her winning, and some showed her doing it in a landslide, turning red states blue. If there were polls that showed her losing this, I hadn’t seen them. My heart and my mind wanted to be in sync with the feeling of triumph, but my troublesome gut was telling me something different. Why were there so few people coming out in Detroit? All the Rust Belt cities were reporting anemic turnout in the black communities. I needed to do what I could to turn that around.
Around 6 p.m. I started getting calls from Patrice and Julie, who were nudging me to leave the desk and get to the Javits Center. I didn’t think being there was the best use of my time. It was still early in the West, and there were many people to call. Plus the troubles in North Carolina and now Florida were not going away. After a while the calls and texts from my DNC staff started to infuriate me. Didn’t they know that what I was doing was the most important thing I could do? Finally, I walked back to the Loews Hotel to change my clothes for an interview scheduled with Katie Couric at nine. Julie brought the car around to the lobby to fetch me.
I was surprised to find that the staff that came to New York were in the car, too. I guess they were going to strong-arm me if I refused to leave. They were in a much different mood than I was. I was the bummer in the back seat. My mood brought everyone down. I was not joking. I was very focused and had a lot on my mind.
The Javits Center seemed eerie to me. People were partying when I felt like they should be working. I saw Stevie Wonder, a man I have known since I first started working in politics, and the first thing I wanted to say was, Can you make phone calls
? We need to get people out to the polls in Detroit. Of course that was ridiculous. The polls were closing in waves as the sun moved west across the country. I was saying the right things but not believing them. Oh, Northern Virginia always comes in late, I’d say, so don’t count that state out yet. Or I was talking about our sophisticated operation that was going to bring in Pennsylvania and Michigan when the cities started to report their numbers. I know how to sound reassuring.
By the time I got done with the Yahoo interview, my heart was dragging on the floor, but I seemed to be the only one in that mood. The numbers that the Hillary campaign was releasing were phenomenally positive: Michigan and Pennsylvania Clinton +5, Wisconsin Clinton +6. Where were they getting these numbers? I had people on the ground in Pennsylvania and Florida who were reporting that there was not much activity there. I knew that it was too late to influence Michigan, and my feeling was that without a strong response in the black community in Detroit, we had lost that state. The notion that Donald Trump had cracked the “blue wall” of reliably Democratic states seemed incomprehensible to me.
People started pulling at me to take selfies with them, but it was making me crazy to be there. We still had to fight. I walked out of the Javits Center into the crowded streets of Manhattan feeling very lonely. Didn’t people know? Didn’t they see? I got back to my desk at the boiler room and started another round of calls.
I stayed in the boiler room until 2 a.m., even though when they called Pennsylvania for Trump I knew it was over. Michigan crushed me. I kept thinking about Donnie telling me he needed more money there and about the people I had talked to that day on the radio who needed more time to vote. I knew it was truly over when I rang up the war room and asked if we were going to keep North Carolina. They said they had called it for Trump an hour ago.
I walked into the room where Charlie and Minyon had been sitting and she told me that Obama was getting on the phone with Hillary to tell her that she had to concede. I felt so sad for her, even at that distance, and because of the distance that had grown between us during this campaign. Minyon told me that at 1:30 a.m. John Podesta was going to address the crowd at the Javits Center and tell them to go home. A shiver came over me, a memory of the Gore defeat, where we had Bill Daley go out and address the crowd because Gore was still wrestling with the results, as I knew Hillary was tonight. With that eerie echo of 2000, I accepted that Donald Trump would be our next president. Not only that, the Russians had won.
I walked back to my hotel, head down, not wanting to talk to anyone. The boiler room was near Trump’s celebration at the New York Hilton. His elated supporters jammed the streets. Some of them asked me to take a selfie with them as I passed by, but I just couldn’t do it. I could not paste that smile on my face one more time. Not tonight.
I got into my room and lay on my bed with my clothes on. The whole thing made me numb. It was not like any other defeat I’ve experienced. Sometimes you know the loss is coming, and you can prepare for it. With Gore there was a similar feeling of confusion and fear because the system had broken down. In Gore we knew we would fight, and I got ready for the battle. I was unable to sleep on that Election Night because we were up discussing tactics. This loss was so much more devastating.
It was as if we had been battling blind. No one wanted to believe us that the hacking of the DNC was just the prelude. The press had misread every signal. In the final days of the campaign, when Trump said at every rally that the election was rigged, the commentators scoffed and called him a sore loser. He’s just preparing his supporters for his humiliating loss, they said. I remembered all the fuss about how Trump was ambiguous about whether he would accept the results of the election. If he refused to accept the results, the pundits would say, would this tarnish the beginning of Hillary’s presidency? WAKE UP! I had wanted to scream. He’s telling us flat out that it’s being rigged in his favor. But the Democrats weren’t supposed to say anything. If we started talking crazy like that, we might screw up Hillary’s victory party.
As the sun came up I knew I had to leave right away. I was supposed to take the noon train back to DC with the others from the DNC, but I needed to get back. The rest of the staff would be grieving, and I wanted to be there for them. I texted Patrice as I got onto the 9:00 Acela to DC. My body felt heavy and my spirit was dragging as I slumped into my seat feeling the defeat. As the train pulled out of New York City my phone rang. It was Robby Mook.
“Madam Chair, I’m so sorry,” he said. I could hear the tears in his voice. “I’m so sorry.”
“I know, Robby,” I said. “You did your best. You worked hard. We all did.”
After we hung up, I turned off my phone. People would be calling me now as it was getting close to nine and I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. We needed time to grieve. I had to muster courage to face the staff.
What would I say to them?
TWENTY
Grief and Regret
Mr. Singh was waiting to take me directly to the DNC when I exited the train from New York at noon. The weather in DC was damp, not drizzly or stormy, but more of that drip, drip, drip—like tears coming out of the sky—that had dogged the Democrats for the whole campaign. Washington, DC, felt like a tragedy had just befallen the town. I put out a formal statement from the party congratulating Donald Trump on his victory, but it felt phony to do that. This was a tradition in politics, and I wanted to make sure that I fulfilled my duty even though during the election Trump had done his best to trample all the norms and standards at every turn.
The mood at the office was heavyhearted. I could see that from the looks on the faces of Miss Natalie and Miss Barbara as they greeted me when I arrived at the office. They were trying to smile but were not really able to do so. No one had expected this defeat. Even though I had suspected it, and communicated my doubts about everyone else’s certainty, I was shocked, too, and sick to my stomach, although I would not share that with the staff. I had not wanted to be right, and accepting the reality of the fact that the country had just elected Donald Trump. I started to question what more we all could have done.
I gathered as many of the staff as I could for my lukewarm pep talk. We were going to pick ourselves up and rebuild, I said, even though the week before I had discussed in detail with them how we would redeploy the staff to work on the inaugural and had asked them to make a list of those who wanted to be considered for jobs in the new administration. This was a pep talk without much pep, another tradition in our politics that seemed deadly dutiful.
I left the office early to go to Georgetown to teach my afternoon class.
I always plan my lectures weeks in advance, but this afternoon I knew I would be doing my students a disservice if I kept to that plan. I sat in my office looking at exit polls and vote totals in counties in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, states I was shocked that we had lost. I was trying to figure out how to explain this to my students and to myself.
We had lost three key battleground states by fewer than 80,000 votes. The hardest part when you lose an election, like when Al Gore lost in 2000 by 537 votes, you think that’s just a few more door knocks, that’s eight phone calls, it’s one more rally. We had congressional seats where our candidate won, but Hillary lost the district. I wanted to do a postmortem to find out how we fell short in Wisconsin and in Michigan, and to take a look at how we got over the finish line in Minnesota, but not by much. The first thing I looked at was black women. In 2008 and 2012 black women were the highest performing voters for us in the whole country, but in this election our numbers fell from 70 percent to 64. That to me summed up how we had failed to persuade and to communicate because of our internal squabbles. To me campaigning is about persuading, but this campaign was about models and data. I knew data was important. I had used it in the campaigns I led, but my focus on energy, enthusiasm, and emotion had made me feel like a dinosaur. What electrified young people for Bernie was not data. It was the old-fashioned kind of politics that I knew, a
nd that the party needed to know again.
Each week as the election heated up, I had given the twenty-five students in my class a lesson in real time about the future of women in politics. When the class assembled, I tossed all of the polling away. I wanted to know what the students thought. Since the pundits clearly had not known anything, perhaps these young people would be better at deciphering the loss than those of us who were paid big bucks to do this.
I never sat when I taught the class, pacing back and forth as I fielded their questions. This day I was so tired that I could not pace. I had not slept that night and emotionally I was spent. I propped myself against the desk in front of the class.
“What do you think? What happened? Where did she go wrong?” I asked them.
We went around the class and each student had a say. Many of them were so outraged that Trump had won. They kept saying that Hillary was the most qualified person ever to seek the presidency. You can count on one hand the number of women who sought the presidency: Victoria Woodhull in 1872, before the women had the right to vote; Shirley Chisholm in 1972; Geraldine Ferraro, who was placed on the ticket in 1984 when we had this rebellion inside the Democratic Party; and Elizabeth Dole, who emerged as a very qualified woman on the Republican side in 2000. Hillary really was the most well positioned to run for the presidency, in terms of name recognition, party support, and resources.
My notes from that day are about our choice between a change candidate, whom a majority of Americans found odious and repugnant, and the Democratic nominee who had been on the national stage for more than twenty-five years. The vast majority of Americans disliked both candidates. But the preliminary exit polls had Clinton winning by thirteen points on who was best qualified. Her net favorability was five points higher than Trump, 36 to 41. In terms of the right temperament, she won by twenty points, 49 percent to 29 percent. And on honesty, she won 34 to 31 percent. Still, voters didn’t know her and trust her enough to put her in the White House.
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