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