It was wise of Hillary Clinton to acknowledge this week that her failed 2016 presidential campaign was imperfect.
But it was a bit of a stretch of her to also pin the loss to Donald Trump on a Russian hack of Democratic insiders’ emails, the untimely acknowledgment by the FBI director that his agency had reopened its investigation into her use of a private email server, and voter prejudice against women.
Certainly, some of these developments were a factor. The Russian-engineered theft of internal communications of the Democrats — and the strategically spaced release of those emails — hurt Clinton among the leftward base of her party, which felt that its preferred candidate, socialist Bernie Sanders, hadn’t gotten a fair shake in the primaries. James Comey’s decision, 11 days before the election, to resurrect questions about the email server was certainly suspicious, made even more so by his withholding until after the election that the FBI was concurrently looking into allegations that Russia had coordinated with the Trump campaign to influence the election.
Still, it wasn’t like Trump had smooth sailing either. In fact, many observers believed his campaign was dead in the water after he got busted by a 10-year-old recording in which he bragged about being able to wantonly grope women in their private parts because of his fame and wealth.
Such a revelation would have sunk most any other politician. That it didn’t sink Trump indicated there was a significant segment of the electorate — so ready for dramatic change or so turned off by Clinton — for whom anyone but her was preferable, despite the alternative’s crass behavior.
Strategically, Clinton failed to understand that the Rust Belt had become precarious for her column. Trump spoke directly to worried voters from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, in states hit hard by the ongoing transition from a manufacturing economy to a technology-based one. He promised he would bring back their jobs from overseas. Whether he actually can do it seems doubtful, but those voters felt encouraged that Trump not only sympathized with their situation but pledged to do something about it.
Clinton, speaking at a women’s luncheon in New York City on Tuesday, did make the valid point that she got 3 million more votes across the country than Trump — which sinks the idea that bias against women hurt her. But Trump won 31 states to her 19, giving him the Electoral College votes he needed to be the 45th president.
Clinton was done in by a lot of factors, but mostly by her own errors in judgment while in office — such as promising to keep Clinton Foundation donors separate from her job as secretary of state but then completely failing to do so. The public didn’t trust her. It’s as simple as that. In those key states that swung the election, voters who didn’t really like either candidate held their noses and voted more for Trump than for her.
Do not weep for Clinton, though. Her runner-up award was a nice book deal, and Clinton says she’s going through the painful process of reliving the campaign while writing.
If she’s truthful, which would be somewhat uncharacteristic of her, it will be an interesting read.
