Since the election, I’ve asked myself many times if I learned the wrong lessons from 2008. Was I fighting the previous war when I should have been focused on how much our politics had changed?
Much has been made about my campaign’s supposed overreliance on Obama-style big data, at the expense of more traditional political gut instinct and trusting folks on the ground. This is another criticism I reject. It’s true that some of our models were off—just like everyone else’s, including the media, the Trump campaign, everyone—probably because some Trump supporters refused to talk to pollsters or weren’t honest about their preferences or because people changed their minds. It’s also true that, like any large organization, we could have done a better job listening to the anecdotal feedback we were getting from folks on the ground. It’s not like we didn’t try. My team was constantly in touch with local leaders, and I had trusted friends reporting back to me from all over the country, including a big group of Arkansans—the Arkansas Travelers—who fanned out in nearly every state. I believe they helped us win the razor-close Missouri primary, and they were a constant source of information and perspective for me. But every precinct leader and party chair in the country wants more attention and resources. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong. You can’t make those decisions blind. You have to be guided by the best data available. This isn’t an either/or choice. You need both data and good old-fashioned political instinct. I’m convinced that the answer for Democrats going forward is not to abandon data but to obtain better data, use it more effectively, question every assumption, and keep adapting. And we need to listen carefully to what people are telling you and try to assess that too.
Still, in terms of fighting the previous war, I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t realize how quickly the ground was shifting under all our feet. This was the first election where the Supreme Court’s disastrous 2010 Citizens United decision allowing unlimited political donations was in full force but the Voting Rights Act of 1965 wasn’t because of another terrible decision by the court in 2013. I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions, while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans’ anger and resentment. I was giving speeches laying out how to solve the country’s problems. He was ranting on Twitter. Democrats were playing by the rules and trying too hard not to offend the political press. Republicans were chucking the rule book out the window and working the refs as hard as they could. I may have won millions more votes, but he’s the one sitting in the Oval Office.
Both the promise and the perils of my campaign came together on a warm and brilliantly sunny June day in 2015, when I formally announced my candidacy in a speech to thousands of supporters on Roosevelt Island in New York’s East River. Now the event seems almost like a quaint throwback to an earlier era of politics—a time when policies and polish were assets, not liabilities. Nonetheless, that hopeful, joyous day on Roosevelt Island will always rank as one of my favorites.
For weeks before the speech, I went back and forth with my team about what to say and how to say it. I’ve never been very adept at summing up my entire life story, worldview, and agenda in pithy sound bites. I was also acutely aware that, as the first woman to be a credible candidate for President, I looked and sounded different than any presidential candidate in our country’s history. I had no precedent to follow, and voters had no historical frame of reference to draw upon. It was exhilarating to enter uncharted territory. But uncharted, by definition, means uncertain. If I felt that way, I was sure that a lot of voters would feel even more wary about it.
I also knew that despite being the first woman to have a serious chance at the White House, I was unlikely to be seen as a transformative, revolutionary figure. I had been on the national stage too long for that, and my temperament was too even-keeled. Instead, I hoped that my candidacy—and if things worked out, my presidency—would be viewed as the next chapter in the long progressive struggle to make the country fairer, freer, and stronger, and to beat back a seriously scary right-wing agenda. This framing took me directly into the politically dangerous territory of seeking a so-called third term after Obama and being seen as the candidate of continuity instead of change, but it was honest. And I thought placing my candidacy in the grand tradition of my progressive forebears would help voters accept and embrace the unprecedented nature of my campaign.
So when Huma suggested launching the campaign on Roosevelt Island, named after Franklin Delano, I knew it was the right choice. I’m something of a Roosevelt buff. First on the list will always be Eleanor. She was a crusading First Lady and progressive activist who never stopped speaking her mind and didn’t give a damn what people thought. I return to her aphorisms again and again: “If I feel depressed, I go to work.” “A woman is like a teabag: you never know how strong she is until she’s in hot water.” There was a minor Washington tempest back in the 1990s when a newspaper claimed I was having séances in the White House to commune directly with Eleanor’s spirit. (I wasn’t, though it would have been nice to talk to her now and then.)
I’m also fascinated by Eleanor’s husband, Franklin, and her uncle Teddy. I was riveted by Ken Burns’s seven-part documentary about all three Roosevelts that aired on PBS in 2014. I was particularly struck by the parallels between what Teddy faced as President in the early years of the twentieth century, as the industrial revolution upended American society, and what we faced in the early years of the twenty-first century. In both eras, disruptive technological change, massive income inequality, and excessive corporate power created a social and political crisis. Teddy responded by breaking up powerful monopolies, passing laws to protect working people, and safeguarding the environment. He may have been a Republican, but he put the capital P in Progressive. He was also a shrewd politician who managed to fend off the demands of angry populists on his left, who wanted to go even further toward Socialism, and conservatives on his right, who would have let the robber barons amass even more wealth and power.
Teddy found the right balance and called it the “Square Deal.” I loved that phrase, and the more I thought about the challenges facing America in the years following the financial crisis of 2008–2009, the more I felt that what we needed was another Square Deal. We needed to regain our balance, take on the forces that had crashed our economy, and protect hardworking families shortchanged by automation, globalization, and inequality. We needed the political skill to restrain unchecked greed while defusing the most destructive impulses of resurgent populism.
On tough days out on the road, when reading the news felt like getting your teeth kicked in, I’d remember what Teddy said about those of us who climb into the arena. “It is not the critic who counts,” he said, but the competitor “who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds… who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”