Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:What_Happened_audiobook_1.png
Let’s start here: It’s hard to write a book about your own failure. And that was Hillary Clinton’s task in What Happened. Silicon Valley and the business press are full of schlock extolling the virtues of failure, but that’s shit people write after they’ve succeeded. They look back at how they learned from failure. Lessons from the road, and other nonsense.
That’s not the kind of failure Hillary Clinton is writing about in What Happened. What Happened is like writing a book about that time you hit a home run in Game 7 of the World Series, but you got thrown out because you inexplicably forgot to touch first base on the way in. Then your team lost. And then you retired.
Al Gore made a movie after he lost the presidency, and he forged ahead with a new career in stopping climate change. I don’t see a tomorrow for Hillary Clinton’s political career, even on the scale of Al Gore. It’s all the day after November 8. The presidency was supposed to be it for her: the defining moment of the career of the first woman president.
So that’s the kind of failure she’s writing about in her book. I’m not a fan of Hillary Clinton’s politics. I didn’t caucus for her in the primaries or vote for her in the general election. And I’m not interested in revisiting that debate. I’ve said what I have to say on those issues.
But I do think it took some chutzpah for her to write about the election, especially so soon after it. What Happened is supposed to be the story of how that event…well, happened.
What Clinton Did Well
Clinton is at her best when she’s writing about her personal experience as a political figure and when she’s giving advice to people seeking a career in politics, especially women.
I think a lot of Boomer women, especially white Boomer women, highly identified with Clinton and her campaign. And reading What Happened gives one at least some sense of why. Her personal anecdotes are mostly good. And Clinton has a lot of valuable things to say about how to balance a career in politics with one’s personal life.
That’s all worth reading.
What Clinton Did Not Do Well
What Happened contains a lot of score-settling, petty remarks, and largely inaccurate summaries of controversies from the 2016 campaign. A lot of political autobiographies are like that. I suppose it’s tough to resist the temptation to use a giant platform like a bestselling book to hit some enemies.
Just gloss over all that crap. That part isn’t worth engaging.
Clinton’s Explanation for Why She Lost
Clinton is not an analytic philosopher. We shouldn’t expect her to write like one, and she doesn’t. Consequently, I’ll clean up the explanation a bit to put it in a form for discussion. Here’s her explanation, as I read it:
A ‘perfect storm’ led to Hillary Clinton’s loss.
The main proximate cause was James Comey’s October 28 statement to Congress on the Hillary Clinton email investigation. More minor proximate causes include Russian interference, Wikileaks, fake news and slanted media coverage, Bernie Sanders’s criticisms of Clinton’s ties to Wall Street, and Jill Stein’s Green Party candidacy.
The major ultimate causes were racial and economic anxieties along with the desire for a ‘change’ candidate.
A Note on Sexism
Many of Hillary Clinton’s defenders (e.g., Rebecca Traister, Susan Bordo) front-load sexism when talking about Clinton’s loss. And so people who haven’t read Clinton’s book might assume she posits sexism as the ultimate cause.
She really doesn’t. She talks about sexism in What Happened, particularly insofar as people engaged in misogynistic attacks against her and other women lawmakers throughout her career. But she largely backs off on chalking up her loss to Trump as due to sexism.
Evaluating Clinton’s Argument: Proximate Causes
I find the argument compelling in many ways. First, on proximate causes, I think Clinton is mostly correct. If you look at the exit polls, you’ll find that people who decided their vote in the final month backed Trump over Clinton 48-40. That moved a lot of votes, and it’s a decent mark of who Comey swayed.
Clinton’s minor proximate causes, though, are a stretch. There’s not a lot of evidence for the impact of Russian interference or fake news. We know there was a lot of Russian content on Facebook, though not especially well targeted at the right states and much of it viewed after the election rather than before. In an election decided by about 80,000 votes, it wouldn’t take a lot of impact to tip the election. But the election was so close that just about anything could’ve tipped it.
Listing Bernie Sanders as a proximate cause is especially weak. Sanders probably helped Clinton rather than hurt her, as I’ve pointed out previously. More Clinton primary voters supported John McCain in 2008 than Sanders primary voters supported Trump in 2016. Also keep in mind that many Sanders voters were young independents without a long record of voting Democratic. From that, Sanders likely brought a lot of voters to Clinton who’d have otherwise stayed home.
Clinton’s case would’ve been much stronger had she just listed Comey and called it a day.
Evaluating Clinton’s Argument: Ultimate Causes
Second, there’s the issue of ultimate causes. Her appeal to racial and economic anxieties sounds plausible enough. I’ve said a bit about anxiety before, so I don’t plan to repeat that here. But there are two reasons why I think these weren’t the ultimate causes of Clinton’s loss.
Both involve comparing Hillary Clinton’s results to Barack Obama’s.
First, Obama is rather obviously black. And he won. Twice. We could be forgiven the naïve impression that if a black man can defeat white racial anxiety, a white woman can. But we can move beyond naïve impressions. There’s some evidence that Obama lost votes in 2008 because of his race, possibly as much as 5%. Nevertheless, he won the election. Surely Clinton didn’t lose as many votes to racial anxiety as the first black president did.
However, Clinton may have a handy response to this. Maybe she’s thinking along the lines of, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who argues for a narrative of black power (Obama) followed by white backlash (Trump). On this line of thinking, Clinton bore the brunt of a white backlash.
But that brings me to my second reason. Relative to Obama, Clinton actually did better with white voters than non-white voters. The reason is that she did so much better among white women that it overcame her deficit to Obama among white men. Relative to the national popular vote, Clinton did about 2 points better among whites than Obama did in 2012. By contrast, Clinton did much worse than Obama among black and Latinx voters, especially black men and Latinx women.
That’s the opposite of what we’d see if racial or economic anxieties were the ultimate cause of Clinton’s loss.
Clinton’s appeal to the desire for a ‘change’ candidate, on the other hand, is probably correct. The electorate wanted change. Voters saw Clinton as an extension of Obama or a worse version of him. Back to the exit polls, 62% of voters said the country is on the wrong track. Among voters who disliked both Clinton and Trump, Trump won 47-30.
Those are numbers that have a lot of explanatory power.
Sexism Again
Finally, I’ll add that Clinton probably could’ve pushed harder for inclusion of sexism in the list of ultimate causes. I doubt it was the primary factor, but I do think it was a factor. I’ll note that she has discussed misogyny in interviews. Misogyny and sexism are related, but not the same thing.
There are various pragmatic reasons why Clinton might’ve avoided discussing sexism as an ultimate cause. In particular, she may have been sensitive to the potential perception that she was “blaming” sexism for her own shortcomings. But whatever the reason, it struck me as an omission.
Clinton’s Campaign
The most frustrating thing about reading Clinton’s book is the total lack of responsibility she assigns to her campaign. She takes personal responsibility for the loss at the outset of the book. But she doesn’t really admit any campaign mistakes, opting instead to avoid criticism of her campaign staff or its decisions.
It’s quite an omission. Any analysis of the 2016 election ought to begin with the question: why was it even close in the first place? Trump was the least popular candidate in recorded history. Any half-way decent Democrat should’ve won.
The best book on the 2016 election, so far, is Shattered by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. And they hammer the Clinton campaign pretty hard.
Allen and Parnes argue that Clinton failed to craft a campaign message that resonated with a broad range of people. In their narrative, she relied on narrow data analytics, only campaigned to her base, and failed to respond effectively to the email scandal. Clinton spent little time in the states that decided the election (e.g., Wisconsin), and too much time in states where she had little chance of winning (e.g., Arizona, Ohio). They interviewed Clinton’s staff during the campaign, and they had an explicit agreement with Team Clinton to hold publication until after the election. So this wasn’t just ex post facto reasoning.
Clinton doesn’t respond to any of this in her book. And that was a mistake. It seems to me that Allen and Parnes are largely correct. These problems go a long way toward explaining why the election was so close in the first place, and thus why Comey impacted the final results.
What Happened: A Conclusion
I’ll take a crack at offering an explanation for Clinton’s loss. Here goes.
Clinton was a deeply unpopular candidate who ran a campaign that didn’t craft a central message or appeal to a broad audience. She did well within her partisan base and defeated a massively unpopular candidate in the popular vote. But it wasn’t enough to win the electoral college. Many voters were looking for a new message, and Clinton didn’t provide it.
In terms of proximate causes, the Comey letter did significant damage. But it would’ve never mattered had Clinton crafted an effective message and taken the kind of lead she should’ve had.
Any Democrat with a decent approval rating should’ve defeated Trump. Among the candidates who actually ran for president in 2016 (as opposed to merely flirted with the idea of running), Bernie Sanders was the candidate who would’ve put the Democrats in the best position to win.
