The 3 Things Hillary Did Wrong
Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and What Happened in 2016
In anticipation of Hillary Clinton’s book, What Happened, the media’s running an excerpt in which she blames Bernie Sanders.
Sanders, Clinton argues, couldn’t challenge her on policy, so he attacked her character. And, though he came around to support her in the general election, the character assassination lingered, feeding into the Trump campaign’s narrative and hurting her general election performance with Sanders supporters.
That’s true. And besides the point.
Every candidate faces difficulties. Many face tough primary challenges. But Hillary made three big unforced errors. If she hadn’t, she would’ve won.
Bernie Hurt Hillary
In the primary, Sanders and Clinton presented similar policy platforms. They disagreed on foreign policy, but didn’t spend much time on it. Bernie’s campaign focused on economic issues, where their differences were mostly of degree rather than kind.
- Free college for everyone! No, only for families making less than $125,000.
- $12 minimum wage. No, $15!
- Expand health coverage with single payer! No, expand health coverage with Obamacare.
- Raise taxes on the rich. No, raise taxes on the rich a lot!
Sanders argued the system is fundamentally broken and Clinton, as a creature of that system, would perpetuate it. He castigated her as a tool of Wall Street, insinuating that, though they promised similar things — for example, overturning Citizens United and reforming campaign finance — she wouldn’t actually do it.
Check out this chart from the Voter Study Group, released in June 2017. Clinton supporters (blue) and Sanders supporters (green) line up on most policy questions. As you can see at the bottom, they’re nearly identical to each other — and to Obama supporters (black) — on attitudes towards economic inequality, government intervention, and immigration.
The biggest difference is at the top of the chart, “view that politics is a rigged game.” Sanders supporters also have less pride in America, and a greater “perception that ‘people like me’ are in decline.” That jibes with his narrative about a broken system, and his character attacks on Clinton.
A recent analysis by political scientist Brian Schaffner found that 12% of Sanders voters voted for Trump. In Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — the three closest races, and Trump’s electoral vote margin — it broke down like this:
Each of those is more than double Trump’s margin of victory.
And that doesn’t count the Sanders supporters who stayed home in the general election.
We don’t know how many Bernie voters who didn’t vote for Hillary chose not to because of his attacks on her character. But it’s reasonable to say Sanders played some role in her defeat.
Whose Fault Is It?
There's nothing wrong with politicians attacking their opponent to win a primary campaign — or, once victory appears out of reach, building leverage to influence policy. That’s the sort of thing winning candidates are supposed to overcome.
Perhaps Bernie overdid it, underestimating Trump’s chances and focusing too much on changing the Democratic party, rather than strengthening his preferred general election candidate. But he’s hardly the only person who underestimated Trump.
In an election as close as 2016, many things explain the outcome. They’re not mutually exclusive, and if any one of them went differently, Trump wouldn’t be president.
If you’re looking for someone to blame, Bernie and the Sanders-Trump voters are part of a long list:
The Republican Establishment
Trump won early primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina with a third of the vote. He didn’t get a majority until the 33rd contest, winning 343 votes in the Northern Mariana Islands to Ted Cruz’ 113. His first majority victory in a state came in the 42nd contest, New York.
The combined total of establishment candidates Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Jon Kasich beat Trump in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Add in Ted Cruz, and the group beat Trump handily in most contests.
Obviously some Bush, Rubio, Kasich, and especially Cruz voters would’ve switched to Trump. But if the establishment rallied around a single candidate, they could have won early contests and built momentum. Instead, they squabbled amongst themselves, convinced Trump would implode.
As a result, a large, divided field allowed a minority of voters to pick their party’s nominee, elevating someone they all lambasted as “not a real conservative.”
Loyal Republican Partisans
The biggest predictor of Trump support in 2016 was Republican Party ID. Many Republicans genuinely liked him. But others didn’t. And while some of them backed protest candidate Evan McMullin, stayed home, or sucked it up and voted Clinton, most voted Trump, because they’ll back any Republican over any Democrat.
Trump won 46.1% of the vote, and entered office with a 45% approval rating according to Gallup’s daily tracking poll. It’s down to 37%, and the drop includes a lot of Republican partisans.
However, as much as they disapprove of Trump, they despise Hillary, and if we reran the election today, many would vote the same way.
Trump Supporters
This was their choice. Most are still happy about it. Don’t ignore their agency.
Jill Stein
When you think back on all the crap Ralph Nader got for the 2000 election, and how much Bernie’s getting now, it’s amazing Stein got off so easy. Like Nader, Stein argued the two major party candidates were the same. And like Nader, her vote total exceeded the Republican’s margin of victory in the states that gave him the presidency.
She did seem to feel bad about it though.
James Comey
I’ve long been a Comey defender, in that I think he was in an impossible situation and did what he thought was right.
On July 5, 2016, he took the unusual step of publicly commenting on an FBI investigation, telling the public he thought Hillary’s private email server was “extremely careless” but “no reasonable prosecutor would bring” charges against her. He took heat from Republicans for exonerating Clinton, and from Democrats and some law enforcement professionals for editorializing rather than simply stating the FBI recommended against prosecution.
But he felt he needed to make that statement to uphold the integrity of the Bureau, because a few days earlier Bill Clinton made national news meeting privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac of the Phoenix airport. That tainted the public’s perception of the Justice Department’s impartiality.
On October 28, Comey wrote a letter informing Congress the FBI found emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer that “appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into Clinton. The letter leaked — as he must have known it would — and became headline news. Once the FBI investigated those emails, they learned there was no new information. Democrats, and some law enforcement officials, castigated Comey for taking this action so close to the election.
But Comey felt he had a legal obligation to write the letter because, in sworn testimony, he told Congress he would inform them of any future developments. He knew some FBI officers who believed the new information should be public would leak it if he didn’t say anything. Worried again about the public’s perception of the Bureau’s integrity, and convinced the information would become public whether he said anything or not, Comey wrote the letter.
And there’s a decent chance he, like so many others, thought Hillary would win, and therefore believed he was setting up the FBI to succeed under her presidency by avoiding accusations he kept the information quiet to help her.
That doesn’t mean I’m happy with how it all played out. Comey doesn’t seem to be happy either. In May 2017, he told Congress “it makes me mildly nauseous that we would have had an impact on the election.” But, all told, I think he acted with integrity throughout.
As Nate Silver shows, the Comey letter was the nation’s top news story for six straight days, up until three days before the election. And Hillary’s polling numbers dropped after it came out.
There are many possible explanations for that, but it’s likely the letter and subsequent coverage had at least some effect. It reinforced Sanders and Trump’s narrative about Clinton’s corruption, motivating some partisan Republicans to reluctantly vote Trump, and some wavering Democrats to stay home.
The Media
They’ve always been hard on Hillary, and they held her to a higher standard than Trump. Network news devoted more than three times as much airtime to Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.
Was the media worse to Hillary than any previous candidate? I don’t know. They’ve been harsh to some Republicans. They gave a lot of play to the debunked Swift Boat story about John Kerry, though not as much as Hillary’s emails. Regardless, they certainly didn’t help her candidacy.
Russia
It’s impossible to know how much foreign information operations trying to discredit Clinton influenced the election. But it’s more than zero.
Social Media
Facebook and Twitter haven’t really reckoned with it, but this is partially their fault.
Social media empowered previously marginalized constituencies, and created an ideal platform to disseminate propaganda. For example, Facebook just disclosed a Kremlin-linked company bought over $100,000 worth of ads on controversial issues — such as guns, immigration, race, and LGBT rights — microtargeting them at Americans whose profiles indicated they might be receptive. And various groups, including the alt-right and Russia’s infamous “troll army,” used both platforms to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories.
Donald Trump
Credit where it’s due. Democrats tell themselves Trump was a terrible candidate, but that’s because they’d never vote for him (and know few people who would).
But Trump masterfully manipulated the media, maximizing free publicity (good and bad). He launched focused attacks on his primary and general election opponents, while they tried many attacks against him. He appealed to a large, neglected constituency and got them to the polls. He won over some Obama voters and some Americans who don’t usually vote. And, despite losing some conservatives, Trump got more votes than any previous Republican candidate, beating Bush (2004) by a million, and Romney (2012) by 2 million.
He might not be a good president, and he was helped by Clinton’s high unfavorability. But he’s a good politician.
Hillary’s Mistakes
Like the criticisms against Bernie Sanders, all those factors contributed to her loss, and they’re all besides the point. To become president, every candidate has to overcome difficulties. And all of those were out of Hillary’s control (except, perhaps, a bit of media manipulation, both traditional and social).
Still, the race was there for the taking.
Here are Clinton’s three big, avoidable mistakes. Staffers surely played a role in these decisions, but the buck stops with the boss.
1 — Neglecting Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania
Clinton thought of these traditionally blue states as her firewall, allowing an electoral victory even if she lost big swing states like Ohio, North Carolina and Florida (which she did). The campaign was confident enough that it devoted little attention to them in October, spending time and money in traditionally red states like Arizona and Texas, trying to run up the score.
Michigan Democratic operatives said Clinton had 1/10th the number of paid canvassers as the 2004 Kerry campaign. Priorities USA, the biggest Democratic Super PAC, stopped buying ads in Pennsylvania in September. And Clinton never set foot in Wisconsin. Nor did Barack or Michelle Obama.
The warning signs were there — Sanders soundly won the open primary in Wisconsin, and unexpectedly won a narrow victory in Michigan — but the Clinton campaign dismissed them. Why would anyone who voted in a Democratic primary vote Trump?
Sensing something was wrong in the final days, Clinton and her top surrogates held rallies in Pennsylvania and Michigan. But it was too late.
2 — Making a Pitch for Educated Conservatives
Clinton saw an opening in the way Trump alienated conservatives during the Republican primary. She appealed to them in multiple speeches, presenting herself as the trustworthy choice on foreign policy and economic stewardship, in contrast to a populist, non-conservative wildcard.
Based on the way Trump campaigned, this was intellectually defensible. But it was a political mistake. It fed into progressives’ fear she was a Republican in disguise without winning over many conservatives, most of whom are loyal Republican partisans and have hated her for years.
In July 2016, Chuck Schumer made a prediction:
For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.
He was wrong. Mostly.
Clinton did, in fact, get slightly more votes in Philadelphia county than Obama 2012. But she got clobbered in rural Pennsylvania. In some of the state’s western counties, Trump beat Romney’s total by 10 percentage points or more.
The reason, which the Clinton campaign should have realized, is core tenets of conservatism — such as cutting taxes on the rich and reducing entitlements — are very unpopular. Polls show about 65% of Americans think the rich and corporations pay too little in taxes, compared to about 10% who think they pay too much.
In December 2016, McClatchy-Marist found that, to improve the economy, 61% of Americans think the government should focus on the minimum wage, job training and education, compared to 35% who favor cutting corporate taxes and business regulations.
And Pew found the majority of Americans dislike spending cuts. That’s true even for Republicans. The only area a majority of Republicans would cut is foreign aid.
Rejecting conservative orthodoxy was a positive for Trump, not a negative. Even among Republicans.
And Clinton played right into it.
3 — The Deplorables Speech
On September 10, Clinton said this:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.
She added that the other half “are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down,” and asked her audience to empathize. But few remember that part.
The “deplorables” bit went viral. Clinton tried to walk it back, but it was too late. She faced mounds of criticism for dismissing a large chunk of voters, and Trump supporters gleefully claimed the term as their own.
Maybe Clinton thought she was defending millions of Trump supporters from charges of racism. Maybe she was trying to motivate voters concerned about bigoted elements in the Trump campaign. Or maybe she shared her true feelings without considering the political implications.
Regardless, the comments galvanized her opponents, without giving her campaign a discernible boost.
What Happened
Notice how I didn’t mention emails, paid speeches, or anything else Clinton did before the campaign?
All candidates come with baggage. Every nominee has something in their past opponents will treat as history’s greatest scandal, whether it deserves it or not.
But, no matter what anyone else did, those three mistakes were entirely the Clinton campaign’s fault, and entirely avoidable.
Everyone makes mistakes. And things needed to break for Trump to make these Clinton mistakes decisive.
But if she didn’t make them, she’d be president.
