Book Review: Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (2017)

Cover of Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, 2017.

Journalist Jonathan Allen

Journalist Amie Parnes

In their 2017 book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes set out to answer the same question that Hillary Clinton’s 2017 book examined: what happened? Allen and Parnes were granted almost unlimited access to Clinton’s campaign throughout the primary and general election campaigns, with the understanding that the information they were privy to would not be put in print until after the election was over. What they found was lots of dissent and turmoil within Clinton’s campaign, as rival factions of advisors battled it out to capture Clinton’s ear.

Allen and Parnes also found a candidate who could not sum up in an elevator speech why she was running. As the book opens, Clinton is about to officially announce her candidacy. However, the speech she is about to give has gone through major revisions by multiple people. Allen and Parnes write: “But Hillary still struggled with the question of whether she was running for Bill Clinton’s third term, Obama’s third term, or her own first term.”(p.13) I think the authors have an excellent point. Throughout the campaign, Clinton’s message was essentially: “The last eight years have been great. And I will do things slightly differently to make them even better!” That’s a more difficult intellectual position to articulate than Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, who were both essentially shouting, “We gotta change everything!” 

Allen and Parnes also wrote that “Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her.” (p.13) “Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.” (p.18) I think that was the problem with Clinton’s candidacy. It was unclear why she was running, other than that it was finally her turn—after it had already seemed to be her turn in 2008, before Barack Obama spoiled everything. 

It’s a bit heavy-handed to say that Clinton’s campaign was “doomed,” especially since she actually won over 2.8 million more popular votes than Trump, but the authors paint a picture of a candidate and a campaign staff with no clear focus. As the authors write of Hillary, “In her view, it was up to the people she paid to find the right message for her—a construction deeply at odds with the way Sanders and Trump built their campaigns around their own gut feelings about where to lead the country.” (p.138)

Campaign manager Robby Mook’s parsimonious ways come in for a lot of criticism in the book. Mook had just skeleton organizations in many states, and state campaign workers were constantly badgering the national staff for more resources. Clinton raised $1.4 billion dollars, according to The Washington Post. So why was there a need to economize at all? If $1.4 billion dollars isn’t enough money to run an effective Presidential campaign, then how much more money do you need?

Mook was also one of the staffers most enamored of the campaign’s analytics modeling—which proved in retrospect to be extremely flawed. Bill Clinton was always pushing the campaign to reach out more to working-class white voters, but Mook’s repeated refrain was that the data didn’t match Bill’s anecdotes. Well, someone was wrong, and it wasn’t the former President. (p.237) An internal Clinton memo warned that 3-4 points should be added to Trump’s poll numbers. This savvy piece of advice might have caused Clinton’s team to reflect on their strategies, but it seems to have gone unheeded. (p.228)

Clinton’s analytics team was in favor of trying to boost turnout among the Democratic base, rather than trying to change the minds of undecided voters. This leads to another difficult issue the Clinton campaign faced—most people had probably made up their minds about Hillary Clinton back in 1992. One Clinton aide said, “The big challenge of this whole race was there were so many voters who were ungettable.” (p.397)

I think Clinton’s team took it for granted that they would get every single vote that Obama got in 2012, plus lots more votes from women. That obviously proved to be a huge mistake, as the so-called “Blue Wall” did not hold. According to exit polling, Clinton got 54% of the votes of all women, down from Obama’s 55% in 2012. In addition, Clinton’s numbers were down compared to Obama’s in 2012 among African Americans, Asians, and Hispanic/Latinos. Although the authors don’t touch upon this in the book, third parties may have played a role in Clinton’s defeat as well. Nationally, 5.9 million people voted for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. That's 4.3% of the vote. Clinton lost Michigan by 11,000 votes. Gary Johnson got 172,000 votes in Michigan, and Jill Stein got 50,000. In a race with so many close states, those third parties may have made a difference. 

While it’s impossible to pin the reason for Clinton’s loss on any one factor, Shattered does an excellent job of going behind the scenes in Clinton’s campaign to reveal the problems they faced. If you’re interested in politics, it’s a fascinating, if frustrating, read.