I felt pride, humility, and nerves. Pride because I knew we had given everything we had. Humility because I knew the campaign would be the easy part; governing in this contentious time would be hard. And nerves because elections are always unpredictable. Most of the polling and analysis looked positive. The day before, my chief pollster, Joel Benenson sent me an encouraging report. He said I was leading Trump by 5 points in a direct head-to-head, and by 4 points when third parties were factored in. “You’re going to bring this home,” Joel told me. Still, I knew our campaign faced hurricane-force headwinds, thanks to Comey and the Russians. Anything was possible.
Voting turned out to be the highlight of the day.
When we arrived at the Peninsula Hotel in the late afternoon, the word was, “Things are looking good.” The streets were clogged with police officers and Secret Service agents. Our hotel was just a block away from Trump Tower. Both candidates would be within a stone’s throw from each other as the results came in.
I tried to keep my head clear. Unlike my husband, who devours every exit poll and stray anecdote on Election Days, I didn’t want to hear it. I’m not convinced the breathless reporting during the day is reliable. And why stress about something you can no longer do anything about? In a few hours, we would all know the outcome.
For weeks, I had been carrying around heavy binders full of memos relating to the transition and the first decisions I would have to make as President Elect. There were Cabinet Secretaries to pick, a White House staff to hire, and a legislative agenda to begin working on with Congress. I loved diving into the details of governing, but in the homestretch of the campaign, it was hard to focus on anything past Election Day. Late at night, I would set aside time before bed to read a transition memo or review a few résumés. Sometimes I’d fall asleep halfway through. Other times I’d get fired up and call my team with some idea or plan I wanted us to get ready to pursue on Day One.
On Election Day, with the campaign all but finished, I had a chance to think in earnest about the work ahead. It was exciting. The hundreds of detailed policies we had proposed over the past twenty months hadn’t gotten the press attention they deserved, but they provided a solid foundation for getting right to work tackling the nation’s problems. I decided that first out of the gate would be an ambitious infrastructure program to create jobs while improving our roads, rails, airports, ports, mass transit systems, and broadband networks. There was a good chance the Democrats would retake the Senate, but I expected to face a hostile Republican majority in the House. In theory, infrastructure should have bipartisan appeal, but we’d learned that partisanship could overwhelm everything. So outreach would have to start right away.
The challenge went well beyond rounding up enough Republican votes to pass an infrastructure package. The election had further divided our country in troubling ways. Trust in government and in our fellow Americans was at historic lows. We were yelling at one another across deep fault lines of class, race, gender, region, and party. It would be my job to try to help bridge those divides and bring the country together. No President could do it alone, but it was important to set the right tone from the beginning. And I knew the press was poised to judge my transition and first hundred days on the basis of how well I reached out to disaffected Trump voters.
My first test—and opportunity—would be the speech on election night, which would be watched by tens of millions of Americans. It would be my final act as a candidate and my first act as President Elect. The advance staff, led by Greg Hale, had built an amazing set in the Javits Center in Midtown Manhattan. I would walk out beneath an actual glass ceiling and stand on a stage the shape of America. The podium would be right over Texas. When the votes were counted, we hoped the symbolic glass ceiling would be shattered forever. I had been thinking about what I wanted to say for a few weeks. My speechwriters Dan Schwerin and Megan Rooney had been working with Jake Sullivan and Jennifer Palmieri on a draft. I knew they also had a draft concession speech under way as well, but I preferred not to think much about that.
Once I got settled in our suite on the top floor of the Peninsula, I asked Dan and Megan to come up. Bill and Jake joined us, and we sat in a small office going over the latest draft. One challenge was how to balance the need to reach out to Trump voters and sound a note of reconciliation, while also giving my supporters the triumphant victory celebration they deserved. There was also history to consider. If everything went as we hoped, I would be giving this speech as the first woman elected President. We had to find a way to mark the significance of the moment without letting it overwhelm everything else.
Most of all, I wanted to reassure Americans about the strength of our democracy. The election had tested our faith in many ways. Trump had violated every norm in the book, including warning that he might not accept the results of the vote if it went against him. The Russians had interfered. So had the Director of the FBI, against long-standing Justice Department policy. And the news media had turned the whole thing into an absurd circus. A lot of Americans wondered what it all meant for our future. I wanted to answer those fears with a strong victory, a smooth transition, and an effective presidency that delivered real results. Winning with a broad coalition would help counter the idea that the country was hopelessly divided. I would argue that despite our differences, a strong majority of Americans had come together in defense of our core values.
We worked on an opening for the speech that would convey that confidence. The election, I would say, showed that “we will not be defined only by our differences. We will not be an ‘us versus them’ country. The American dream is big enough for everyone.” I would promise to be a President for all Americans, not just those who voted for me, and I’d talk about how much I had learned over the course of the campaign by listening to people share their frustrations. I would be candid about how hard it had been to respond to the anger many felt and how painful it was to see our country so divided. But, I’d say, the outcome showed that “if you dig deep enough, through all the mud of politics, eventually you hit something hard and true: a foundation of fundamental values that unite us as Americans.”
I wanted to end the speech on a personal note. Throughout the campaign, my mother’s story had been an emotional touchstone. Her perseverance spoke to the perseverance our country needed to overcome its own adversity, as well as the long struggle for women’s rights and opportunities. With help from the poet Jorie Graham, we had written a closing riff for the speech that made me tear up every time I read it. I want to share it here because, as you know, I never got a chance to deliver it that night:
This summer, a writer asked me: If I could go back in time and tell anyone in history about this milestone, who would it be? And the answer was easy: my mother Dorothy. You may have heard me talk about her difficult childhood. She was abandoned by her parents when she was just eight years old. They put her on a train to California, where she was mistreated by her grandparents and ended up out on her own, working as a housemaid. Yet she still found a way to offer me the boundless love and support she never received herself…
I think about my mother every day. Sometimes I think about her on that train. I wish I could walk down the aisle and find the little wooden seats where she sat, holding tight to her even younger sister, alone, terrified. She doesn’t yet know how much she will suffer. She doesn’t yet know she will find the strength to escape that suffering—that is still a long way off. The whole future is still unknown as she stares out at the vast country moving past her. I dream of going up to her, and sitting down next to her, taking her in my arms, and saying, “Look at me. Listen to me. You will survive. You will have a good family of your own, and three children. And as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up and become the President of the United States.”