In all the post-mortems following Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss to President Trump in November, there’s plenty of blame to go around: the media, the campaign team, James Comey, the pollsters and more have all been blamed. But there’s one person above all who deserves blame: Hillary Clinton.
A new book from campaign journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes that focuses mostly on the Clinton campaign finds warring factions within the campaign unable to create a unified message for the candidate and the candidate herself inept at navigating these frictions.
Vox’s Jeff Stein pointed to the problem with the candidate herself, and as Allen and Parnes wrote:
[Clinton] was coming to grips with the idea that, even with years to think about it, the campaign team she’d built was no better than its 2008 predecessor at helping her find an articulable vision for the country.
This jibes with others who have studied the campaign. A study last month from Wesleyan University found that the Clinton campaign was the least issues-focused of any modern presidential campaign. What the Clinton campaign did, in the absence of finding an actual vision, was just to emphasize Clinton’s personality, the historic nature of her bid to become the first woman president, and the negatives of Trump’s personality.
It wasn’t the Clinton campaign’s problem that the candidate couldn’t find a message and settled on a terrible strategy. It was the candidate herself. She had the path cleared for her in the Democratic primary, facing only a tepid bid from a longtime-socialist from Vermont. Clinton ran as a status-quo candidate in a change election and couldn’t turn the Obama coalition out to the polls.
That’s on her. It’s not on Comey, or pollsters, or the media. The election featured narrow margins in a good number of states, yes, and it’s possible that a better message or a better campaign strategy could have saved Clinton. But in retrospect, it’s incredible that she, or anyone, thought that Democrats had a structural advantage. Democrats lost huge in Obama’s mid-term elections. Obama’s re-election in 2012 was by a much narrower margin than in 2008. The economy was not bad, but it also wasn’t great. Voters were fatigued by the Obama era.
Clinton was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign against a flawed candidate who enjoyed a good number of structural advantages. The 2016 electoral loss is on her – first, and foremost.
Kevin Glass (@KevinWGlass) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. Previously he was director of outreach and policy at The Franklin Center and managing editor at Townhall. His views here are his own.
If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.
