How Hillary Clinton blew the election
ANALYSIS: The polls said she had a lead over Donald Trump but Hillary Clinton’s hopes of becoming America’s first female president are over.
World
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HILLARY Clinton has blown the election that was hers to lose.
By repeatedly underestimating the power of the seething hatred coursing beneath the surface of America for her elite Washington DC power base, Ms Clinton has lost the presidency while looking the other way.
She knew she wasn’t liked, but assumed her political experience would see Americans fall in behind her because Donald Trump was an unknown.
Fatally underestimating just how much America was looking for an unknown, she made no efforts to present herself as removed from the history that dogged her.
Ms Clinton campaigned on her record — but an America wanting a break from establishment politics wouldn’t vote for her record.
MORE: ‘I’m a woman and Trump’s got my vote’
The signs had been there all along.
During the course of a vicious campaign, she was lampooned for a history that Americans knew too well — her husband’s infidelity, the Benghazi crisis, strange dealings of the Clinton Foundation and the scandal of her private email server.
She was labelled by pundits as “shrill”, having “animatronic plasticity” and raising questions of “ambition versus authenticity”.
She repeatedly struggled in polls of trustworthiness.
But she and her surrogates including her husband Bill Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama skirted around the country beating the drum that Ms Clinton would be the most qualified, most experienced president in history.
This was true. But in an era of rejecting the establishment, those were not points that would win with the masses.
Apart from campaigning on a record that didn’t impress the electorate, from the moment Clinton announced her candidacy last May, she made a series of slip ups.
MORE: Inside the candidates’ inner circle
Firstly, her campaign underestimated the impact her private server email controversy would have on the voting population. Her campaign officials would repeatedly say it wasn’t an issue that resonated in Middle America and so Ms Clinton only talked about it when she had to.
But this translated as arrogant and instead the issue festered, growing in toxicity until FBI boss James Comey delivered the final blow 11 days out from the election. His announcement two days out that he saw no criminal behaviour mattered for nought — millions of early votes had flooded.
Secondly, the Clinton campaign fatally underestimated Donald Trump.
For much of the primary season she and her surrogates would hardly mention him. She lost key time in which to mount an aggressive attack.
He kept flourishing while she wasn’t looking.
Thirdly, she underestimated her trust problem. Never was this more stark than when she elected to hide a diagnosis of pneumonia for fear she’d seem unhealthy. Pneumonia never would have been a deal breaker in the way hiding it was.
In her final day on the campaign trail, Ms Clinton urged America not just to vote against something but vote for something.
This was a fundamental miscalculation — America had no interest in voting for her.
With decades of public service under her belt, the path to the top job was always Ms Clinton’s for the taking.
But even if the trajectory to election victory was obvious, it was never easy.
After her devastating defeat in the primaries of 2008, Ms Clinton repeatedly indicated she didn’t fancy putting herself through the circus one more time.
Not only had she lost to Barack Obama, but colleagues and friends had betrayed her in shifting their alliances to him.
In October 2008 she described the likelihood of running for president again as “probably close to zero”.
She said she wouldn’t do it again in interviews in 2010, 2011 and 2012.
But at some point, she changed her mind. It was a gamble that last night didn’t pay off.
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