Clinton concedes to Trump

The former secretary of state’s surrender came in a private phone call with the GOP nominee early Wednesday morning just minutes after she sent her campaign chairman, John Podesta, to assure supporters that she wasn’t ready to concede defeat.

Clinton volunteers and supporters packed into the Javits Center in New York City Tuesday night for an Election Day rally featuring addresses from key Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and a massive screen displaying campaign commercials alongside live election coverage from cable and network television.

As the evening wore on, and as Trump notched one electoral victory after another, the mood in the glass ceiling’d arena turned grim.

“If we don’t win Michigan, we don’t win,” Felipe Gutierrez, who sits on the Democratic nominee’s National Finance Committee, told the Washington Examiner. “I think we’ve done all that we can, do and we hope for the best outcome.”

“It’s disappointing that [Americans] haven’t gone out and voted,” he sighed.

Several other despondent-looking Clinton supporters declined to comment, with a few explaining sadly that they didn’t feel like talking. One campaign volunteer would only say of the election, “It’s too much.”

By early Wednesday morning, it became clear Clinton didn’t have a path to the White House, and the celebratory mood in the Javits Center turned quickly from joy to despair.

Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, addressed volunteers who were still in the arena at around 2:00 a.m Eastern Time, promising that the campaign would fight on until the last vote was counted. But that vow proved to be hollow as Clinton conceded defeat a mere matter of minutes after Podesta had left Javits.

In media, the Democratic nominee’s stone-faced surrogates appeared stunned as they repeated in their own words that Donald Trump had won the presidency.

Clinton, who sold herself as a candidate who would both maintain the policies of the Obama administration while bringing change to the nation’s capital, spent months trying to convince voters that she offered a fresh and inclusive vision for the country.

The failed Democratic presidential candidate also spent months trying to get out from under the shadow of the scandals involving her family’s foundation and her use of a private and unauthorized email server when she worked at the State Department.

In a fight that many in politics and media claimed was unlike anything they had ever seen, Trump was quick to exploit voter distrust for Clinton by branding her “Crooked Hillary.” The billionaire businessman and his army of surrogates loudly and repeatedly applied this moniker, and it appears to have had an impact.

The GOP nominee’s constant claim that Clinton was a “crooked” elitist contributed to her overall struggle to maintain trust with voters, which was a problem that existed even before the public learned of the lengths to which she and her team went to maintain private emails servers when she worked at the State Department.

As a result of Trump’s frequent attacks on Clinton’s trustworthiness, coupled with separate questions raised by the FBI’s investigation of her homebrew server, the Democratic nominee’s favorability numbers fell in the final days of the election, and all this while voter enthusiasm among Democrats slipped behind Republican enthusiasm for their nominee.

On Tuesday, despite her robust get out the vote operation, a unified Democratic Party, a massive cash advantage, a resume traditionally expected of presidential candidates and her attempts to sell herself as an inclusive and “big-hearted” candidate, Clinton’s campaign fell short of the mark, and she lost to a billionaire businessman from Queens, N.Y., and his promise to “make America great again.”

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This article has been updated.