Hillary Clinton complained to her team in 2015 that she was getting stuck with lame campaign lines that weren’t working, and pushed them harder to do a better job.
“HRC just called me and expressed a fair amount of frustration with how things are going,” wrote Dan Schwerin on June 8, 2015, according to an email leaked by WikiLeaks.
“She said we’ve given a series of very good policy speeches and in between we just keep giving her poll-tested lines that don’t work, like make the middle class mean something,” he wrote.
The email said Clinton liked an early formulation of a campaign speech in which she outlined the “four fights,” and said she felt like that line was the “one thing she feels like is actually working out there on the trail.”
“[O]h, and by the way, she had to come up with it herself because we didn’t give her anything better,” Schwerin wrote.
That email started a chain in which staffers scrambled to respond. Another aide, Kristina Schake, suggested that the team meet on how to improve the campaign messaging, and said she doubted Clinton herself would want to “rehash this all tomorrow in person.”
Adviser Robby Mook suggested that every “get on the phone to discuss quickly.”
