They Always Wanted TrumpInside Team Clinton’s year-long struggle to find a strategy against the opponent they were most eager to face.
By GABRIEL DEBENEDETTI November 07, 2016
A set of tables stood where the bed should have been in the 12th-floor Manchester hotel room Hillary Clinton’s aides were using as a New Hampshire war room. It was February 6 and their candidate was 44 miles east, desperately trying to excite New Englanders at a Portsmouth rally after limping out of Iowa essentially tied against her challenger.
But New Hampshire was a lost cause, and her team knew it. So instead of watching Clinton deliver a speech, members of her senior team huddled around a television in the room that served as a home base for campaign chairman John Podesta, manager Robby Mook, chief strategist Joel Benenson and communications director Jennifer Palmieri. They watched, in shock, as the man they had feared most as Republican nominee tanked under an assault designed to boot him from the GOP primary race.
By the end of the night, the narrative was set: Marco Rubio had just lost it all on the debate stage across town from that Radisson hotel room, stuck in a robotic delivery of canned lines under Chris Christie's brutal cross-examination.
In Brooklyn headquarters, staff in the 11th-floor nerve center called the Nevada room broke into giddy laughter every time the increasingly desperate Rubio repeated himself. But back in Manchester, the new reality hit Clinton’s inner circle like a ton of bricks—there might be no one left who could stop Donald Trump from clinching the Republican nomination.
“When Rubio got taken out in New Hampshire on the debate stage, that was a moment when I said, ‘OK, this looks like it,’” said former New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Kathy Sullivan. “He was the golden child at that point, and then was just destroyed.”
“That’s when I realized that there was something bigger going on,” added one of Clinton’s longtime friends and advisers who remembers watching in disbelief, feeling in the moment that the ground was shifting underneath the campaign. Trump “is a master manipulator and a master of the counterintuitive. He knows exactly how to get things done. It’s disgusting to watch. But it’s effective.”
Even with that view emerging so early in the contest (it would be 16 more weeks before Trump clinched his party’s nomination), Clinton’s team would struggle in the ensuing months to land on a strategy that would stick. Within days of that February GOP debate, Clinton’s aides started considering how to redraw the battleground map it had been relying on for well over a year, assessing Colorado’s and Virginia’s swing-state status and re-running the numbers on suburban white women and young Latinos. They would direct the Democrat to try out, and ditch, one campaign slogan after another. And as she finally wriggled out of the primary to face Trump, the strategy was still evolving, producing dramatic tactical shifts — from embracing disaffected Republicans to firing up liberals, from previewing an uplifting closing stretch to savaging Trump with an unprecedented television ad barrage.
“I asked a Clinton staffer about this,” said Sullivan, who around that time briefly went online to research Irish double-citizenship out of her revulsion with the Republican nominee-to-be. “He said, ‘Well, you know, now we have to save the republic.’"
It was a great paradox after nearly a year of virtual certainty—and outright enthusiasm—about their ultimate opponent that her team would swing between overconfidence, denial and disbelief as it struggled to concoct an electoral formula for stopping Trump.
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