How and why Clinton lost
She was a lousy candidate; Comey’s letter played a bit role
Last week, FBI Director James Comey testified before the Senate, defending his decision to announce late in the 2016 campaign that his bureau had reopened its investigation into Hillary Clinton. Though he insisted he made the right call, he admitted that the thought his announcement swayed the election made him “mildly nauseous.”
So, did Mr. Comey influence the election? In a certain sense, he most certainly did. After all, the margin of Ms. Clinton’s defeat was so narrow — a shift of just 39,000 votes from Donald Trump to Clinton in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would have given her the victory — that his role cannot be overlooked. But by the same token, an election as close as that turns on a multitude of factors.
Fingering Mr. Comey as the primary culprit, or even one of the main culprits, misses the bigger factors — above all, that he was investigating a private server that Clinton imprudently set up. If she had not taken that step, there would have been nothing for him to investigate.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg. There were larger forces at work in 2016. It is very hard for the same party to win three consecutive terms to the White House. Such a feat has only been accomplished once since World War II, when George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan in 1988. Even when incumbent presidents are popular — as Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were — voters still are inclined to make a change.
Ms. Clinton did not give them much of a reason to stay the course. According to Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen — authors of “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign” — while she built a wellfinanced campaign apparatus, she never offered a simple reason for why she was running. Ms. Parnes and Mr. Allen also report that Ms. Clinton was caught off guard by public dissatisfaction with the status quo, and struggled to understand it.
She was also deeply unpopular. By the end of Mr. Obama’s first term, when Ms. Clinton stepped down as secretary of state, her favorable rating with Americans was nearly 60 percent. But as the details of the Benghazi fiasco came to light, her public standing slipped. It fell once more when her email imbroglio began. According to Ms. Parnes and Mr. Allen, the facts of the case were made worse by Ms. Clinton’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge that she made a mistake. By the time she finally did, the damage was done.
Ms. Clinton had an enormous advantage in running against Mr. Trump, who was even more disliked than she was. But according to the exit polls, voters surprised just about everybody — by voting for the candidate they disliked more. Mr. Trump won 15 percent of voters who had an unfavorable impression of him, while Ms. Clinton won 11 percent of those who viewed her unfavorably. That was enough for his win — and it just goes to show how voters just seem to itch for a change after one party has been in office for eight years.
It did not help that Ms. Clinton’s team forsook traditional campaign polling for “data analytics,” premised on sophisticated models of public behavior. This caused her handlers to miss the problems percolating in the vote-rich states of the Rust Belt. Indeed, Ms. Clinton never returned to Wisconsin after her primary victory against Bernie Sanders — and she lost the Badger State by 23,000 votes out of nearly 3 million cast.
In the big causal stew that explains Hillary Clinton’s defeat, FBI Director James Comey is no doubt one ingredient. But it is important to recognize that his role was relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, even if his influence came late in the cycle.
The full truth must account for the fact that Ms. Clinton was a lousy candidate — with personal baggage, no compelling message and a poor campaign. She was also running in a cycle when voters were looking to make a change. These are the main reasons she lost.