S1 EP 33: Five Insights From the Clinton Campaign Memoir, Shattered

In this episode, the Magellan team discusses five insights into the 2016 Clinton Presidential Campaign memoir, Shattered. It is a fascinating book, and delivers a well-documented, truthful story of what happened to the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. 

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign is a New York Times best seller that came out this past April. The book is co-authored by veteran journalists Jonathan Allen of Politico and Bloomberg News, and senior White House correspondent for the The Hill, Amie Parnes. These journalists were very familiar with their subject, having penned another book about Hillary Clinton back in 2014, called HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton. That book told a mostly positive story of Hillary Clinton’s time as Secretary of State.

Insight #1: It Was Never Clear Why Hillary was Running

Ask yourself, what was Hillary Clinton’s message? Why was she running for President? The first chapter of the book, centered on the run-up to her official campaign announcement, describes a chaotic speech writing process with too many cooks in the kitchen, a process that attempted to articulate why she was running. As a source close to Hillary describes:

This was the chance to make a credible persuasive case for why she wants to be President. She had to answer the why question. It’s not because of her mother. Her mother’s an inspiration, but that is not why. It has to sort of feel like kind of a call to action, a galvanizing, ‘I’m bringing us together around this larger-than-all-of-us’ idea or cause, and I don’t think it did that. I don’t think it did either of those. (p. 17)

Another top aide is more blunt: “I would have had a reason for running…or I wouldn’t have run.” (p. 18)

Insight #2: The Campaign Did Not Conduct Any Traditional Polling in the Month Before Election Day, and Relied Much Too Heavily on Analytics (Which Were Wrong)

Jumping ahead to Election Night, it’s revealed that the Clinton Campaign relied much too heavily on their analytics and their predictive modeling of the electorate:

…John Anzalone tapped out a message to a reporter who asked what was happening. “Wish we knew,” he wrote. “Our analytics models were just really off. Time to go back to traditional polling. This happened in the primaries as well. They just put too much faith in analytics. We did not do any tracking by pollsters for the last month. Just maddening.” (p. 381)

As Anzalone notes, relying so heavily on the analytics wouldn’t have been such a huge problem, except for the fact that the models were wrong. For example, early on Election Night, it became clear to on-the-ground operatives that Hillary was in trouble in Florida, and her campaign was caught completely off guard:

Yeah, Trump was winning exurban and rural areas, but surely Democratic hot spots like Miami-Dade and Broward would erase the deficit.

No, Schale explained, Trump’s numbers weren’t just big, they were unreal. In rural

Polk County, smack-dab in the center of the state, Hillary would collect 3,000 more votes than Obama did in 2012 – but Trump would add more than 25,000 votes to Mitt Romney’s total. In Pasco County, a swath of suburbs north of Tampa- St. Petersburg, Trump outran Romney by 30,000 votes. Pasco was one of the counties Schale was paying special attention to because the Tampa area tended to attract retirees from the Rust Belt – folks whose political leaning reflected those of hometowns in the industrial Midwest. In particular, Schale could tell, heavily white areas were coming in hard for Trump…

A frightening realization slowly took hold of Mook and Kriegel as they watched results pour in from must-win states. Their vaunted model was way off in Florida. Worse, they had missed the mark in North Carolina too. (p. 375-377)

Earlier in the book, on page 367, we learn about campaign manager Robby Mook’s rationale for the decision to rely heavily on analytics:

He had learned from David Plouffe…that old-school polling should be used for testing messages and gauging the sentiments of the electorate and that analytics were just as good for tracking which candidate was ahead and by how much in each state. Plus, the analytics were quicker and much cheaper. (emphasis added)

The question then becomes, why, on a campaign with incredible resources, were they pinching pennies when it came to traditional polling? It truly was a crippling mistake, because it meant that they couldn’t see what was happening on the ground, particularly in Rust Belt states, and they couldn’t re-allocate campaign resources in an attempt to help save Michigan and Wisconsin, which were absolutely crucial to any of the scenarios in which Hillary could hit 270 Electoral College votes.

There is another factor at play here, however. By August, the campaign knew that Hillary was unlikely to win in Ohio or Iowa, but “the imperative to avoiding signaling this to the press and the public drove some of the decision-making. That is, they kept real campaigns going on in those states just to keep up the appearance that they were competitive.” (p. 312)

Insight #3: Hillary’s Failure to Win the Votes of Working-Class White Voters Should Not Have Been Surprising…Bernie Did A Lot of Damage

Of course, we don’t need Shattered to know that the Rust Belt had the potential to be very problematic for Hillary. We can know that just from looking at Democratic Primary Election results. Bernie bested her by nearly 20,000 votes in Michigan, 32,000 votes in Indiana and a whopping 135,000 votes in Wisconsin. Still, the book provides fascinating insight into the interworkings of the campaign and its failure to appeal to working-class whites, particularly in Chapter 11, Canary in the Auto Plant:

On one call…Hillary pushed for information on why Bernie killed her with working-class whites, the demographic group that had been her most consistent support network in 2008…She had counted on adding parts of the Obama coalition to her white working-class base this time around, but it felt like those once-loyal friends had abandoned her. “Why aren’t they with me? Why can’t we bring them on board?” she demanded. (p. 177-178)

Allen and Parnes describe how she received conflicting input from her campaign team and advisors, with younger advisors believing in the “Obama coalition-plus” model, while older staff thought she should have started with her base from the 2008 Primaries, meaning “working class…not just working-class white – women, firefighters.” The authors then provide their own explanation for Hillary’s troubles with the working class:

The real answer: she’d become the candidate of minority voters on social justice issues while Bernie was hitting her as a corrupt, Wall Street-loving champion of the “rigged” financial system that took advantage of working-class voters. (p.178)

Insight #4: Hillary’s Campaign Failed to Focus on Persuading Voters

Related to all of the above insights, because it was driven by anxiety over money and by the analytics, and because it surely played a factor in Hillary’s disastrous showing among working-class whites, was the decision to focus almost exclusively on turning out base Democratic voters, rather than persuading voters. This was an issue from as early as the New Hampshire primary, when Bill Clinton clashed with Robby Mook and wanted to get the campaign out of the cities and to talk to more rural voters. To Mook, such a strategy was inefficient, yet as Allen and Parnes note:

During the primaries, Mook’s obsession with efficiency had come at the cost of broad voter contact in states that would become important battlegrounds in the general election. It led him to send the Clintons to big cities, where black and Latino voters would produce major delegate hauls. Putting Hillary in Detroit, for example, was the most efficient way of building voters for the primary and the general election, but it meant that she wasn’t in mostly white Macomb County, just outside the city…Mook was giving up on persuading voters who weren’t inclined to support Hillary because it was less efficient to go after them.

“It’s hard if you try; it’s even harder if you don’t try,” one senior aide said of the decision to forgo appearances in white suburbs.

On some level, the decision to forgo persuasion was driven by a short calendar. By the time Hillary finally won the nomination after a tougher than expected fight with Bernie, it was too late to build the ground forces that are key to knocking on doors and persuading voters. It was also presumed that voters already had a wealth of information and well-formed opinions about Hillary, which meant that attempting to persuade them was especially inefficient. Still, the fact that the campaign, in large part, didn’t even try to persuade voters in key battleground states was surely a contributing factor to Hillary’s loss.

Insight #5: E-mails, E-mails, E-mails

Clearly, a lot of the media narrative throughout the campaign was focused on e-mails, both Hillary’s private e-mail server and, in the last month of the campaign, the cyberattacks on the DNC and especially John Podesta. There is an entire chapter of the book dedicated to “The Summer of the Server” detailing how Hillary failed to grasp the potential for the story to turn into a full-blown scandal, and had taken far too long to issue any kind of public apology for the way she had handled her e-mail at the State Department.

Then, in the month before Election Day, the release of the e-mails from John Podesta’s e-mail account became, as the authors describe, a “slow-bleed story line that plagued her longer than the Access Hollywood video hobbled Trump.” In the end, voters conflated all of the “e-mail” storylines into one, to an effect that, according to campaign insiders, was decisive in her defeat.