Shattered Book Summary - Shattered Book explained in key points

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Shattered summary

Name: Shattered
Rating: 3.8 (25 reviews)
Author: Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes

Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes

Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

3.8 (25 ratings)

20 mins

Brief summary

Shattered is a political book that provides an inside look at Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 presidential campaign. It offers a detailed analysis of the campaign's strategic mistakes and the factors that led to Clinton's loss.

Topics

Democracy

Table of Contents

Shattered
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Uncover the inner workings of Hillary Clinton’s doomed 2016 presidential campaign.

Unless you’ve been living off the grid since November 2016, you probably know that Hillary Clinton is not the current president of the United States. Before her election campaign got underway, many pundits and analysts believed she had both the experience and stature to win against most of her potential Republican challengers. But it was not to be.

From Bernie Sanders’s unexpectedly serious challenge to her nomination to the email scandal that haunted her campaign before it even started, Clinton’s failed bid to enter the White House was riddled with obstacles that she was, in the end, unable to overcome.

Although external factors, particularly latent misogyny, certainly played a role, these blinks seek to present a broader view of her failure, rather than, for example, simply blaming Russian hackers.

Indeed, some of the blame for this momentous loss inevitably lies with Clinton herself.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why Clinton’s email scandal dogged her campaign up until the bitter end;
how infighting within Clinton’s team diluted her campaign’s message; and
that there is no single overriding reason that can explain Clinton’s failure.

Hillary Clinton had good reasons to run for president, but could never put together the campaign she needed to win.

In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton wasn’t sure about throwing her hat into the ring. After all, she’d been there and done that in 2008, losing the Democratic Party nomination to Barack Obama. That being said, there were some factors leaning in her favor.

For starters, Obama still had a good approval rating, and Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of State during his presidency had positioned her as one of the obvious choices to continue Obama’s legacy. But beyond that, after the elections in 2008 and 2012, the Democrats thought they would have a lock on the 270 electoral college votes necessary to take the White House.

People were referring to it as the Blue Wall, a series of states that had voted Democrat since 1992 and would assure the Democratic candidate the votes needed to win. Not only that, but Democrats also had a broad network of congressional politicians across the country, many of whom supported the Clintons and could turn voters out to the polls.

So, with these factors in mind, on June 13, 2015, Clinton publicly announced her candidacy for president. However, right from the start, her campaign lacked the strong narrative and inspiring message voters tend to look for.

In the end, successful candidates simply must put forward a message that’s both clear and compelling, one that tells voters precisely why they’re running for office. By contrast, Hillary’s first campaign speech was a mess; it was written by at least five different people, all of whom tried to shape it into something coherent. When it was finally delivered, the speech felt contrived and confused.

Some memorable lines that fell short were “America can’t succeed unless you succeed” and the insistence that she wanted “to make our economy work for you and every American.”

These lines fell flat because they were neither compelling nor memorable, but they also failed to shake the commonly held belief that Hillary felt entitled to be president, a problem her campaign would never overcome.

An ongoing FBI investigation caused constant problems for Clinton’s campaign.

So, Clinton’s campaign had an inauspicious launch, but her run was further hampered by a criminal investigation.

The whole affair, which turned into an ordeal of epic proportions, stemmed from her use of a personal email server between 2009 and 2013, while acting as Secretary of State. This scandal not only caused problems early on in her presidential run, but proved to be an obstacle for the duration of her campaign.

Bernie Sanders posed a serious challenge that Clinton and her team failed to anticipate.

Naturally, bad press about a confusing case of email security wasn’t the only problem the Clinton campaign faced. In fact, a much greater challenge came in the form of a 72-year-old senator from Vermont: Bernie Sanders.

That’s right; in 2016, all kinds of people were “feeling the Bern,” but nobody was feeling it quite as hot as Hillary Clinton. In many ways, Sanders was the Democratic equivalent of Donald Trump; both candidates tapped into strong anti-establishment sentiments that had been rising in the United States since the 2008 election and financial crisis.

Power struggles and infighting plagued the Clinton campaign.

Following the loss of the 2008 Democratic Party nomination, Hillary was dead set on using analytics to secure the delegates she needed in 2016. However, more core to her 2008 loss was the fact that her team was overwhelmed by infighting and people who were more interested in their personal careers than getting Clinton elected.

This toxic environment reproduced itself in 2016, and in no small way contributed to the eventual failure of her campaign. As an example, take the natural rivalry between Robby Mook, Clinton’s mid-30s, analytics guru campaign manager who led the so-called Mook Mafia, and Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta who, in his mid-60s, was a firm believer in the traditional politics of listening to voters.

An overreliance on data analytics came back to haunt the Clinton campaign down the line.

When Robby Mook was brought on as campaign manager for Clinton, it was because of the superb job he had done getting Terry McAuliffe elected as governor of Virginia in 2013, but was also the result of a recommendation from Obama’s trusted strategist, David Plouffe.

Mook was a great choice because of his close attention to data management and efficient campaign budgeting but, ironically, this laser focus likely hurt the Clinton campaign in the long run.

The Clinton campaign got a solid boost from the Democratic Party convention and televised debates.

So, Mook’s refusal to pour resources into traditional door-to-door campaigning might have hurt the campaign in the end, but his data-focused strategy did earn Hillary the delegates she needed to secure the party nomination.

Beyond that, even though the Democratic National Convention, or DNC, was a bit messy, it gave Hillary a decent bump in the polls. Even so, the road leading up to the DNC was rough. Bernie’s popularity continued to grow as the year progressed and, at the Philadelphia convention in late July, plenty of agitated Sanders supporters disrupted the proceedings with boos and heckles.

The FBI, Russian hackers and Wikileaks all contributed to an uncertain election day.

Trump was so upset about the remarks Clinton made in the opening debate that he stayed up past three in the morning, unloading rage-filled tweets on the internet, blathering on about “crooked Hillary.” However, that first debate would pale in comparison to the events of October 7, 2016.

On that day, three major events took place. First, at 2:30 in the afternoon, word came out that Russian hackers had broken into the emails of the Democratic National Committee and many people believed the act was intentionally intended to aid Trump. Substantiating this assumption, Trump immediately made a public appeal to the hackers to release Hillary’s private emails.

Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump on November 8, 2016.

As election day dawned, the Clinton campaign was practically certain they would win; Hillary was leading in every poll and political analysts had all but begun writing the story of the failed Trump campaign. However, despite these assurances, November 8th, 2016, was not the day the glass ceiling was broken in the United States.

As Hillary and her team watched the results come in, some were flabbergasted while others remained in denial. That being said, looking back at their loss, Clinton’s aides have some sense of what went wrong.

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What is Shattered about?

Shattered (2017) takes you behind the scenes of the 2016 US presidential election campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton. In these blinks, you’ll learn what went wrong for Clinton and her team, leading a seasoned politician to come second to a reality TV star in a tumultuous and bitter race for the nation’s highest office.

Who should read Shattered?

News and politics junkies
Citizens concerned about the future of the United States and the global political order
American voters who can’t figure out what happened in 2016

About the Author

Jonathan Allen is a journalist who writes for Politico, Bloomberg, Vox and the weekly political column Roll Call. In addition to his writing, he helps run the political news platform Sidewire.

Amie Parnes is the senior White House correspondent for the Washington, DC, newspaper the Hill, where she currently covers the Trump administration.

Categories with Shattered

Politics

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