The press often seemed bored by the roundtables where these conversations happened. Critics dismissed them as staged or carefully controlled. But I wasn’t bored. I wanted to talk with people, not at them. I also learned a lot. To me, this was a big part of what running for President was supposed to be.
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Over the long months that I had weighed running a second time, I thought a lot about what kind of campaign I’d want. I certainly wanted one different from the one I ran during my 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama. I studied what he did right and I did wrong. There was more to learn after 2012, when the President put together another strong campaign that helped him win reelection over Mitt Romney by a healthy margin despite a lackluster economy. His operations were two of the best ever. I paid attention.
My low-profile first trip to Iowa reflected some of the lessons that I kept in mind as I started to put my own organization in place. In 2008, I had been criticized for arriving in Iowa like a queen, holding big rallies and acting like victory was inevitable. I never thought that was a fair description of me or our campaign; we believed I could prevail in a crowded and talented field, but we certainly didn’t take Iowa for granted. In fact, we recognized that it wasn’t an ideal first contest for me and spent a fair amount of 2007 trying to figure out how to make the best of it. Still, the criticism stuck, and I took it seriously. This time I was determined to run like an underdog and avoid any whiff of entitlement.
I also wanted to build on the best parts of my 2008 effort, especially the fighting spirit of our campaigns in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where I succeeded in forming a bond with working-class voters who felt invisible in George W. Bush’s America. I had dedicated my victory in the Ohio primary to everyone “who’s ever been counted out but refused to be knocked out, for everyone who has stumbled but stood right back up, and for everyone who works hard and never gives up.” I wanted to bring that spirit to the 2016 campaign, along with the best lessons of Obama’s victories.
We sought to set the right tone with my announcement video. It showed a series of Americans talking excitedly about new challenges they were taking on: two brothers starting a small business, a mom getting her daughter ready for the first day of kindergarten, a college student applying for her first job, a couple getting married. Then I appeared briefly to say that I was running for President to help Americans get ahead and stay ahead, and that I was going to work hard to earn every vote. This campaign wasn’t going to be about me and my ambitions. It would be about you and yours.
There were other lessons to put into action. In 2008, the Obama campaign had been way ahead of us in using advanced data analytics to model the electorate, target voters, and test messages. It focused relentlessly on grassroots organizing and winning the delegates who would actually decide the nomination. It also built a “no drama” campaign organization that largely avoided damaging infighting and leaks.
John Podesta and I talked with President Obama and David Plouffe about how to construct a team that could replicate these successes. Plouffe was a big fan of Robby Mook, whom I ultimately chose as campaign manager. Robby had impressed David by helping me win against the odds—and against him—in Nevada, Ohio, and Indiana in 2008. In all three states, he put together aggressive field programs and competed hard for every vote. Then he went on to manage my friend Terry McAuliffe’s successful longshot campaign for Governor of Virginia. Robby was on a roll—young but, like Plouffe, highly disciplined and levelheaded, with a passion for data and a talent for organizing.
Huma Abedin, my trusted and valued advisor for years, would be campaign vice chair. President Obama praised his pollsters Joel Benenson and John Anzalone and focus group expert David Binder, so I hired all three, as well as a veteran of the Obama data analytics team, Elan Kriegel. Navin Nayak came on board to coordinate all these different elements of opinion research. Here’s how to keep it all straight: pollsters call up a random sample of people and ask their opinions about candidates and issues; focus groups gather a handful of people together in a room for an in-depth discussion that can last several hours; and data analytics teams make a lot of survey calls, crunch huge amounts of additional demographic, consumer, and polling data, and feed it all into complex models that try to predict how people will vote. These are all staples of modern campaigns.
To help guide messaging and create ads, I hired Jim Margolis, a respected Obama veteran, and Mandy Grunwald, who had been with me and Bill since our first national campaign in 1992. They worked with Oren Shur, my director of paid media, and several talented and creative ad agencies. I thought Jim’s and Mandy’s partnership would represent the best of both worlds. That’s what I was going for with all my hiring decisions: mix the best available talent from the Obama campaigns with top-notch pros I already knew. The latter category included Dennis Cheng, who had raised hundreds of millions of dollars for my 2006 Senate reelection campaign and 2008 presidential campaign, and later helped build up the Clinton Foundation endowment; Minyon Moore, one of the most experienced political operatives in Democratic politics and a veteran of my husband’s White House; and Jose Villarreal, a business leader who had worked with me at State and came on board to serve as my campaign treasurer.
As I built my team, I was focused on two tricky areas: how to strike the right balance with President Obama and his White House, and—drumroll for emphasis—how to improve my relationship with the press.
The challenge of striking a balance with President Obama wasn’t personal at all. After four years in his Cabinet, we liked and trusted each other. There aren’t many people in the world who know what it’s like to run for President or live in the White House, but we had that in common, and it gave us a special bond. When he finally passed health care reform, something I had fought for long and hard, I was overjoyed and gave him a big hug before a meeting in the White House Situation Room. After his rough first presidential debate with Mitt Romney in 2012, I tried to cheer him up with a photoshopped image of Big Bird strapped to Mitt’s family car. (Romney had promised to slash funding for PBS, and also famously took road trips with his dog on the roof of his car.)
“Please take a look at the image below, smile, and then keep that smile near at hand,” I told the President.
“We’ll get this done,” he replied. “Just hold the world together five more weeks for me.”
Now that we had switched places, and I was the candidate and he was the cheerleader, the challenge for me was navigating the tension between continuity and change. On the one hand, I believed deeply in what he had accomplished as President and desperately wanted to make sure a Republican wouldn’t be able to undo it all. We might have areas of disagreement, such as on Syria, trade, and how to deal with an aggressive Russia, but by and large, I would defend his record, try to build on his accomplishments, and listen to his advice. He would call from time to time and share his thoughts on the race. “Don’t try to be hip, you’re a grandma,” he’d tease. “Just be yourself and keep doing what you’re doing.” I was proud to have Barack’s support, and nearly every day told audiences around the country that he didn’t get the credit he deserved for putting our country back together after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
At the same time, there were big problems that still needed fixing in America, and part of my job as candidate was to make it clear that I saw them and was ready to take them on. Inevitably, that meant pointing out areas where the Obama administration’s efforts had fallen short, even if the main culprit was Republican obstruction.
It was a fine line to walk, as it would have been for Vice President Biden or anyone who had served in the Obama administration. If I failed to strike the right balance, I ran the risk of either seeming disloyal or being cast as the candidate of the status quo, both of which would be damaging.
In one of the first meetings of our new team, in a conference room on the twenty-ninth floor of a Midtown Manhattan office building, Joel Benenson presented th
e results of his early opinion research. He said Americans had two main “pain points” that would likely shape their views of the election: economic pressure and political gridlock. The economy was definitely in better shape than it had been after the financial crisis, but incomes hadn’t begun to rise for most families, so people still felt like their progress was fragile and could be ripped away at any moment. And they had come to view dysfunction in Washington as a big part of the problem. They were right. I had seen that dysfunction firsthand and knew how hard it would be to break through it—although I think it’s fair to say I underestimated how my opponents would wrongly accuse me of being responsible for a broken system. I had a record of success working with Republicans over the years. I had plans for aggressive campaign finance reform, which would remove some of the profit motive behind the gridlock. And I believed we had a strong shot at making progress. The problem remained: how to find a compelling way to talk about the pain Americans felt and their dissatisfaction with how things were going in the country, without reinforcing Republican criticisms of the Obama administration, which would be self-defeating and just plain wrong.
Joel said I was starting from a strong place. Fifty-five percent of voters in the battleground states had a favorable view of me, compared with just 41 percent with an unfavorable view. Voters liked that I had worked for Obama after losing to him in 2008. They thought it showed loyalty and patriotism. They also thought I had done a good job as Secretary of State, and most believed I was ready to be President. But even though I’d been in the public eye for decades, they knew little about what I had actually done, much less why I had done it. This presented both a challenge and an opportunity. Despite having near-universal name recognition, I would have to reintroduce myself—not as an extension of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama but as an independent leader with my own story, values, and vision.
There were also some warning signs to worry about. While my approval ratings were high, just 44 percent of voters said they trusted me to be their voice in Washington. That told us that some people respected me but weren’t sure I was in it for them. I was determined to change that perception. The reason I had gotten into public service was to make life better for children and families, and now it was my job to make sure people understood that.
There was something else we needed to do: avoid repeating past problems with the political press corps. Over the years, my relationship with the political press had become a vicious cycle. The more they went after me, the more guarded I became, which only made them criticize me more. I knew that if I wanted 2016 to be different, I was going to have to try to change the dynamic and establish a more open and constructive give-and-take. There was some precedent. As a Senator, I got along surprisingly well with the rough-and-tumble journalists of New York. And I grew downright fond of the State Department press corps, which consisted largely of journalists who had written about foreign policy for years. We talked easily, went out together on the road, toured Angkor Wat in Cambodia, dined in a Bedouin tent in Saudi Arabia, danced in South Africa, and had adventures all over the globe. For the most part, they covered me fairly, and when I felt they didn’t, they were open to my criticism. Now I would try to establish a similar rapport with the political reporters covering the campaign. I knew they were under constant pressure to write stories that would drive clicks and retweets, and that negative stories sell. So I was skeptical. But it was worth a shot.
To help me do it, I hired Jennifer Palmieri, a savvy professional with strong press relationships. Jennifer had worked for John Podesta in the Clinton White House and at the Democratic think tank the Center for American Progress. Most recently, she had been President Obama’s Communications Director in the White House. The President loved Jennifer, and so did I. I asked Kristina Schake, a former top aide to Michelle Obama, and later Christina Reynolds, who had worked on the John Edwards and Obama campaigns, to be her deputies. They were joined by national press secretary Brian Fallon, a graduate of the acclaimed Chuck Schumer school of communications and a former spokesman for the Department of Justice, and Karen Finney, the former MSNBC host who had first worked for me in the White House. When Jennifer, Kristina, and I sat down together for the first time, I let two decades’ worth of frustrations with the press pour out. Buckle up, I said, this is going to be a rough ride. But I was ready to try whatever they recommended to get off on a better foot this time.
With my senior team coming together, we got to work building an organization that could go the distance. Presidential campaigns are like start-ups on steroids. You have to raise an enormous amount of money very quickly, hire a huge staff, deploy them across the country, and build a sophisticated data operation largely from scratch. As a candidate, you have to manage all that while maintaining a grueling campaign schedule that keeps you hundreds or thousands of miles from headquarters nearly every day.
In 2008, I had a good, hardworking team. But I allowed internal rivalries to fester and didn’t establish a clear chain of command until it was too late. Still, we came so close to winning. I vowed that this time we would do things differently.
I was determined to have the best data, the most field organizers, the biggest fund-raising network, and the deepest political relationships. I was thrilled that Beth Jones, a talented manager working at the White House, agreed to be campaign chief operating officer. To lead our organizing and outreach efforts, I turned to three political pros: Marlon Marshall, Brynne Craig, and Amanda Renteria. I also hired experienced organizers to run the key early states. In addition to Matt Paul in Iowa, there was Mike Vlacich, who helped reelect my friend Senator Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire and led my efforts to beat Trump there in November; Emmy Ruiz, who helped lead us to victory in the Nevada caucus before moving to Colorado for the general and helping us win there, too; and Clay Middleton, a longtime aide to Congressman Jim Clyburn, who helped us win a landslide victory in the South Carolina primary.
To infuse the campaign with a spirit of innovation, we got advice from Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and other top tech leaders, and hired engineers from Silicon Valley. Stephanie Hannon, an experienced engineer, became the first woman to serve as chief technology officer on a major presidential campaign. I hired one of President Obama’s former aides, Teddy Goff, to handle all things digital, along with my longtime advisor Katie Dowd and Jenna Lowenstein from EMILY’s List. They had a tough job on their hands with a less-than-tech-savvy candidate, but I promised to be a good sport about every Facebook chat, tweetstorm, and Snapchat interview they recommended.
To make sure we built the most diverse team ever assembled by a presidential campaign, I brought in Bernard Coleman as the first-ever chief diversity officer, made sure women were half the staff, and hired hundreds of people of color, including for senior leadership roles.
We put our headquarters in Brooklyn and the office soon teemed with idealistic, sleep-deprived twentysomethings. It felt like a cross between a tech start-up and a college dorm. I’ve been a part of a lot of campaigns going all the way back to 1968, and this was the most collegial and collaborative I’ve ever seen.
So how did it go?
Well, we didn’t win.
But I can say with zero equivocation that my team made me enormously proud. They built a fantastic organization in the early states and helped me win the Iowa caucus, despite tough demographics, as well as the Nevada caucus and the South Carolina primary. In the general election, they recruited fifty thousand more volunteers than the 2012 Obama campaign did and contacted voters five million more times. My team absorbed one gut punch after another and never gave up, never turned on one another, and never stopped believing in our cause. That doesn’t mean there weren’t disagreements and debates over a wide range of questions. Of course there were—it was a campaign, for heaven’s sake. But even on the night of our landslide defeat in the New Hampshire primary or during the worst days of the email controversy, nobody buckled.
And have I mentioned that we went on to w
in the national popular vote by nearly three million?
It was a terrific group of people. And I’m not just talking about the senior leadership. All the young men and women crowded around desks at headquarters in Brooklyn, working impossible hours . . . all the field organizers who were the heart and soul of the campaign . . . all the advance staff who lived out of suitcases for two years, organizing and staging events across the country . . . volunteers of every age and background—more Americans volunteered more time for the 2016 campaign than for any campaign in U.S. history. My team was full of dedicated people who left families and friends to move someplace new, knock on doors, make phone calls, recruit volunteers, and persuade voters. They worked intensely while juggling relationships, welcoming newborn babies, and handling other family obligations. Two of my young communications aides, Jesse Ferguson and Tyrone Gayle, kept working through difficult cancer treatments, never losing their devotion to the campaign or their senses of humor.
Some of my favorite moments out on the trail were when a volunteer would come up to me as I shook hands on a rope line after a rally. They’d whisper in my ear about what a great job our local organizer was doing or how welcoming our staff was to people who wanted to help and how their enthusiasm was infectious. That always made my day. The fact that so many of these young people have decided to stay in politics and keep up the fight despite our loss makes me very happy and proud.
Having said all that, of course the campaign didn’t go as planned. I ended up falling into many of the pitfalls I had worried about and tried to avoid from the start. Some of that was my own doing, but a lot of it was due to forces beyond my control.
Despite my intention to run like a scrappy challenger, I became the inevitable front-runner before I shook my first hand or gave my first speech, just by virtue of sky-high expectations.
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