Hillary Clinton said she had a misconception of how her ideas would be covered by the media during the 2016 election and she did not respond quickly enough to make appropriate adaptations to her messaging.
“You know, I really believed that — I think in retrospect it was a misconception or certainly out of sync with the time in which we’re living and the candidate I ended up running against,” Clinton said Monday at Warner Theater during a promotional event of her new book, What Happened.
“I did have this idea based on my prior experiences in presidential campaigns really going way back into the late 60’s and 70’s that it mattered greatly if you could make clear what you wanted to achieve.”
Clinton said previously it had been important to effectively communicate with the public what one planned to do once taking office, even if the details had not been figured out. That way, the public could evaluate whether the president was fulfilling their promises.
“We spent a lot of time making sure that everything I said about policy and how we pay for things and all of that was just bulletproof because I kept thinking at some point it’s really going to matter,” she said. “And for all sorts of reasons, it didn’t and so I think I stayed way too focused on a path that was not the direction that the campaign was heading because of the pressures from outside forces, because of the reality TV candidate I was running against.
“I think that I was not as adept or as quick to try to figure out, ‘Okay, what is a better way for me to try to communicate this?’ So, you know, these are things that, you do the best you can and you think you’re running one kind of campaign and you realize that the press is not covering the policy you’re putting out every day. They’re covering an empty podium.”
Clinton said she kept thinking her campaign would finally resonate with people because she believed Americans did care about jobs, infrastructure, and healthcare, but there still was a disconnect and she was not as quick to make adjustments along the way.
Clinton’s book was released Sept. 12 and recounts her journey during the 2016 election. She has cast blame for her 2016 loss on a number of people and other factors, including former FBI Director James Comey, the media, and the Electoral College.
