For example, some critics have said that everything hinged on me not campaigning enough in the Midwest. And I suppose it is possible that a few more trips to Saginaw or a few more ads on the air in Waukesha could have tipped a couple thousand votes here and there.
But let’s set the record straight. We always knew that the industrial Midwest was crucial to our success, just as it had been for Democrats for decades, and contrary to the popular narrative, we didn’t ignore those states. In Pennsylvania, where public and private polls showed a competitive race similar to 2012, we had nearly 500 staff on the ground, 120 more than the Obama campaign deployed four years before. We spent 211 percent more on television ads in the state. And I held more than twenty-five campaign events there during the general election. We also blanketed Pennsylvania with high-profile surrogates like President Obama and Vice President Biden. In Michigan, where the polls showed us ahead but not by as much as we’d like, we had nearly 140 more staff on the ground than Obama did in 2012, and spent 166 percent more on television. I visited seven times during the general election. We lost both states, but no one can say we weren’t doing everything possible to compete and win.
If there’s one place where we were caught by surprise, it was Wisconsin. Polls showed us comfortably ahead, right up until the end. They also looked good for the Democrat running for Senate, Russ Feingold. We had 133 staff on the ground and spent nearly $3 million on TV, but if our data (or anyone else’s) had shown we were in danger, of course we would have invested even more. I would have torn up my schedule, which was designed based on the best information we had, and camped out there. As it is, while I didn’t visit Wisconsin in the fall, Tim Kaine, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and other high-profile surrogates did. So what went wrong? We’ll get to that. But bear in mind that Trump received roughly the same number of votes in Wisconsin that Mitt Romney did. There was no surge in Republican turnout. Instead, enough voters switched, stayed home, or went for third parties in the final days to cost me the state.
Here’s the bottom line: I campaigned heavily across Pennsylvania, had an aggressive ground game and lots of advertising, and still lost by 44,000 votes, more than the margin in Wisconsin and Michigan combined. So it’s just not credible that the best explanation for the outcome in those states—and therefore the election—was where I held rallies.
Another easy explanation that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny is that I lost because I didn’t have an economic message. Joe Biden said the Democratic Party in 2016 “did not talk about what it always stood for—and that was how to maintain a burgeoning middle class.” He said, “You didn’t hear a single solitary sentence in the last campaign about that guy working on the assembly line making sixty thousand bucks a year and a wife making $32,000 as a hostess in a restaurant.” I find this fairly remarkable, considering that Joe himself campaigned for me all over the Midwest and talked plenty about the middle class.
Also, it’s just not true. Not even close. Vox did an analysis of all my campaign events and found that I talked about jobs, workers, and the economy far more than anything else. As the Atlantic put it in a piece titled, “The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class,” I ran on “the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history” and talked more about jobs in my convention speech than Trump did in his, as well as in our first debate, which was watched by eighty-four million people.
Throughout the campaign we always tried to have a positive track of advertising on the air, laying out what I was for and where we needed to go economically. We did that even when we were also running spots highlighting Trump’s unfitness for office. We actually filmed one ad outside the Milwaukee offices of a company called Johnson Controls, which was trying to get out of paying taxes in America by moving its headquarters overseas—what’s known as a “corporate inversion.” It was so cold that day I could barely feel my feet, but I insisted on doing it because I was furious about the shell game the company was playing at the expense of its workers and the American people. I talked about Johnson Controls’ tax scheme virtually every day on the trail for months. So we can debate whether my economic message was effective, but you can’t claim I didn’t have one.
Here’s one story that helps explain why this is so frustrating. The day after I accepted the nomination in Philadelphia, Bill and I hit the road with Tim Kaine and his wife, Anne, for a bus tour through factory towns across Pennsylvania and Ohio. It reminded me of our exhilarating bus trip in 1992 with Al and Tipper Gore. That was one of my favorite weeks of the entire ’92 campaign. We met hardworking people, saw gorgeous country, and everywhere we went we felt the energy of a country ready for change. Twenty-four years later, I wanted to recapture that. We loaded onto our big blue bus, with “Stronger Together” emblazoned on the sides, and set out on a 635-mile journey. At every stop, Tim and I talked about plans to create jobs, raise wages, and support working families. In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in rural Cambria County, we shared our ideas with steelworkers in a factory manufacturing wire for heavy industry. Afterward, one of the workers, a crane operator, told a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer that he didn’t usually vote in presidential elections but might turn out this time because he liked what he heard. “I liked the idea of trying to get better wages for working-class people,” he said. “We need them.” It was music to my ears.
But you probably don’t remember hearing anything about this bus tour. In fact, you may well have heard that I didn’t campaign like this at all; that I ignored the Rust Belt, didn’t have an economic message, and couldn’t connect with working-class voters. Why the disconnect? The very same week that Tim and I were driving around Pennsylvania and Ohio, Donald Trump was picking a high-profile fight with the Khans, the grieving Gold Star parents of a fallen Muslim American war hero. That sucked up all the oxygen in the media. It was a short-term disaster for Trump, and his poll numbers tumbled. But it was also part of a pattern that over the long-term ensured that my economic message never got out and let Trump control the tempo of the race.
Was I Doomed from the Start?
Some pundits have also said my campaign was doomed from the start, either because of my weaknesses as a candidate or because America was caught up in a historic wave of angry, tribal populism sweeping the world. Maybe. But don’t forget that I won the popular vote by nearly three million, roughly the same margin by which George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in 2004. It’s hard to see how that happens if I’m hopelessly out of step with the American people.
Still, as I’ve discussed throughout this book, I do think it’s fair to say there was a fundamental mismatch between how I approach politics and what a lot of the country wanted to hear in 2016. I’ve learned that even the best plans and proposals can land on deaf ears when people are disillusioned by a broken political system and disgusted with politicians. When people are angry and looking for someone to blame, they don’t want to hear your ten-point plan to create jobs and raise wages. They want you to be angry, too.
You can see the same dynamic in a lot of personal relationships. I have friends who often get frustrated with their spouses who, instead of listening to them vent about a problem and commiserating, jump straight into trying to solve it. That was my problem with many voters: I skipped the venting and went straight to the solving.
Moreover, I have come to terms with the fact that a lot of people—millions and millions of people—decided they just didn’t like me. Imagine what that feels like. It hurts. And it’s a hard thing to accept. But there’s no getting around it.
Whenever I do a job, such as Senator or Secretary of State, people give me high ratings. But when I compete for a job—by running for office—everything changes. People remember years of partisan attacks that have painted me as dishonest and untrustworthy. Even when they’re disproven, those attacks leave a residue. I’ve always tried to keep my head down and do good work and hope to be judged by the results. That’s usually worked, but not
this time.
It seems as if many Trump voters were actually voting against me, more than they were voting for him (53 percent to 44 percent, in a September Pew Research Center poll). In exit polls, a significant number of people said they thought Trump was unqualified or lacked the temperament to be President . . . yet voted for him anyway. Of the 61 percent of all voters who said he was unqualified, 17 percent still voted for him. Of the 63 percent who said he didn’t have the right temperament, 19 percent voted for him. The exit polls found that 18 percent of all voters viewed both me and Trump negatively, but they went for him 47 percent to 30 percent. Their antipathy toward me must have been even stronger than their concerns about his qualifications and temperament.
I’m not surprised by these findings. Gallup compiled a word cloud depicting everything Americans read, saw, or heard about me during several months of the campaign. It was dominated by a single giant word: email. Much smaller, but also visible were the words lie and scandal. Interestingly, in Trump’s word cloud, immigration and Mexico stand out much more than jobs or trade. More on that shortly.
I don’t believe all the negative feelings about me were inevitable. After all, I had high approval ratings when I left the State Department. This was the result of a relentless barrage of political attacks and negative coverage. But I also know that it was my job to try to break through all that noise and convince the American people to vote for me. I wasn’t able to do it.
So yes, I had my shortcomings as a candidate. And yes, there was indeed a global populist wave and an anti–third term tradition in America. But—and this is important for determining what tilted the outcome of the election—those structural factors didn’t pop up as a big surprise at the end. They were in play throughout the campaign. They probably kept the race closer than was justified based on our contrasting policy proposals and conduct, my record in public office, and the achievements of the Obama administration. If these factors were decisive, however, I should have been behind the whole way. And yet, despite consistent headwinds, nearly every public and private poll over two years showed me ahead, often way ahead.
By the homestretch, after two conventions and three debates watched by record numbers of Americans, I had emerged with clear momentum and a solid lead. Vox’s Ezra Klein called it “the most effective series of debate performances in modern political history.” I was in a stronger position than President Obama had been four years before. So either all those surveys over all those months were wrong, or something changed in the final days of the race to shift enough voters in key states to make a difference.
Were all the polls wrong? We know now that some surveys were off, especially in Wisconsin, especially at the end. It’s likely that some Trump voters refused to participate in surveys and so their feedback was missed, and that some people weren’t truthful about their preferences. But overall, national polls in 2016 were slightly more accurate than they were in 2012. That year, the final polling average understated President Obama’s actual victory by 3.1 points. In 2016, according to the website RealClearPolitics, the final average was off by just 1.2 points. In a race this close, that’s not nothing. But it’s hardly a massive error.
So no, all the polls weren’t wrong. It’s possible that my lead throughout the race was slightly overstated—but not significantly. It’s reasonable to conclude, therefore, that something important and ultimately decisive happened at the very end.
The Bottom Falls Out
The evidence backs up the idea that there was a late shift away from me and toward Trump and third-party candidates. My support was strong in early voting across the country, and early-vote turnout roughly matched what our models predicted. But things collapsed in the final days and on Election Day itself.
In real time, it was hard to appreciate how fragile our position was. As I mentioned earlier, Joel Benenson’s polling showed a solid lead in the final week. Our data analytics team was also surveying thousands of people each night. “We have seen our margins tighten across the battleground states,” Elan Kriegel reported on November 3. But, he continued, “our national toplines have been +3 each of the last four nights.” We were up by the same 3-point margin in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, he said. Democratic Senate campaigns and party committees were seeing similar numbers, and some were even more optimistic.
Exit polls would later find that voters who were still making up their minds in those final days broke strongly for Trump. In Pennsylvania, a state with no early voting allowed at all, the margin among late-deciders was 54 to 37. In Wisconsin, where 72 percent of people voted on Election Day, it was 59 to 30. In Michigan, where 73 percent of people voted on Election Day, it was 50 to 39. And the pattern extended beyond the Midwest. In Florida, late-deciders went for Trump 55 to 38. That late surge was enough to put all these states in Trump’s column.
Normally, campaigns have a decent sense of how undecided voters are likely to break, based on their past vote history and demographics. And history shows that most people who tell pollsters they’re considering a third-party candidate will “come home” in the end. In the final days of the 2016 campaign, the voters you would expect to return to the Republican Party did so. But that didn’t happen on our side. Many Democratic-leaning voters flirting with third-party candidates ended up actually pulling the lever for them. And some undecided voters we expected to ultimately choose us went to Trump instead or stayed home.
That included suburban moderates who might have voted for Republicans in the past but didn’t like Trump and had been looking for an acceptable alternative right up until the end. On Election Day, a lot of them held their noses and voted for him anyway. It’s revealing to compare the results in the suburbs of Denver and Las Vegas, where the vast majority vote early and I did well enough to carry both Colorado and Nevada, with the results in the Philadelphia suburbs, where nearly everyone voted on Election Day. The final Franklin & Marshall Poll in Pennsylvania, based on interviews nearly all conducted before October 28, found I had a 36-point margin over Trump in the four counties of the Philadelphia suburbs, leading 64 percent to 28 percent. By Election Day, I only beat Trump there by about 13 points. That loss of suburban support in the final week meant I couldn’t match Trump’s strength in rural areas and ended up narrowly losing the state.
Working-class white women also moved en masse in the final days. Trump led among this group nearly the whole campaign, but according to the NBC–Wall Street Journal poll, I had closed to within just 4 points during the October debates. Then, in the final week, Trump’s margin grew to 24 points.
The Comey Effect
What happened in the homestretch that caused so many voters to turn away from me?
First, and most importantly, there was the unprecedented intervention by then FBI Director Jim Comey.
His October 28 letter about the investigation into my emails led to a week of wall-to-wall negative coverage. A look at five of the nation’s top newspapers found that together they published 100 stories mentioning the email controversy in the days after Comey’s letter, nearly half of them on the front page. In six out of seven mornings from October 29 to November 4, it was the lead story in the nation’s news cycle. Trump understood that Comey’s apparent imprimatur gave his “Crooked Hillary” attacks new credibility, and Republicans dumped at least $17 million in Comey-related ads into the battleground states. It worked.
On November 1 and 2, my campaign conducted focus groups with independent, swing voters in Philadelphia and Tampa, Florida. The undecideds weren’t ready to jump to Trump yet, but in retrospect, the warning signs were blinking red. “I have concerns about this whole Weiner thing. I find it unsettling. I had been leaning toward Hillary, but now I just don’t know,” said one Florida voter. “I was never a fan of either one, but this email thing with Clinton has me concerned the past few days. Will they elect her and then impeach her? Was she giving away secret information?” said another.
Outside focus groups were hearing similar things.
Researchers who track what consumers are talking about, essentially a word-of-mouth index, found “a sudden change,” with a 17-point drop in net sentiment for me, and an 11-point rise for Trump. According to Brad Fay of Engagement Labs, which applies well-established consumer research techniques to study elections, “The change in word-of-mouth favorability metric was stunning, and much greater than the traditional opinion polling revealed.”
Those concerns we heard in the focus groups help explain why Comey’s letter was so devastating. From the beginning of the general election, we had understood the race to be a contest between voters’ fear of risk and desire for change. Convincing Americans that electing Trump was just too big a risk was our best shot at overpowering the widespread desire for a change after eight years of Democratic control. In demographic terms, our strategy depended on compensating for expected weakness with working-class white voters (a trend that had been getting worse for Democrats for a long time) by doing better among college-educated suburban moderates—precisely the people most likely to be concerned about risk.
Before October 28, there was every reason to believe this strategy would work. Voters thought Trump was unqualified and temperamentally unfit. They worried he might blunder into a war. And they thought I was steady, qualified, and safe. Comey’s letter turned that picture upside down. Now voters were worried my presidency would be dogged by more investigations, maybe even impeachment. It was “unsettling,” as that Florida voter put it. When both candidates seemed risky, then the desire for change reasserted itself and undecideds shifted to Trump or a third party.
In the week that followed Comey’s letter, Nate Silver found that my lead in national polling dropped by about 3 points, and my chances of winning the election shrunk from 81 percent to 65 percent. In the average battleground state, my lead was down to just 1.7 points—and the fact that there were few if any polls still in the field that late in the game in places such as Wisconsin meant that the damage could easily have been worse.
What Happened Page 39