Why did Hillary Clinton lose last week’s presidential election? The candidate herself believes James Comey, the FBI director who notified Congress in an October 28 letter that he was reopening the inquiry into her private emails, was to blame. Her campaign, meanwhile, has cited “a host of uncontrollable headwinds,” asserting that her team did all they could in an unforeseeably difficult environment.
Many Democrats, however, are less forgiving of the campaign and its strategy. It may be true that the Comey letter shaved a crucial few points off Clinton’s vote in the home stretch. But critics believe a better campaign would have left her less exposed to a last-minute surprise. If not for a series of miscalculations, these critics contend, the Comey letter wouldn’t have had the impact it did—and she might be president-elect today.
“I truly believe she was ahead two weeks out and had a catastrophic last two weeks,” a senior operative for an uncoordinated pro-Clinton effort, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me. “But that she was even in a position to have been able to lose in the last two weeks was the result of a lot of forces laid in place before that.”