What Happened

Get Caught Trying

I ran for President because I thought I’d be good at the job. I thought that of all the people who might run, I had the most relevant experience, meaningful accomplishments, and ambitious but achievable proposals, as well as the temperament to get things done in Washington.

America was doing better than any other major country, but there was still too much inequality and too little economic growth. Our diversity was an advantage, spurring creativity and vitality, but rapid social and economic change alienated people who thought too much was happening too fast and felt left out. Our position in the world was strong, but we had to cope with a combustible mix of terrorism, globalization, and the advances in technology that fueled them both.

I believed that my experiences in the White House, Senate, and State Department equipped me to take on these challenges. I was as prepared as anyone could be. I had ideas that would make our country stronger and life better for millions of Americans.

In short, I thought I’d be a damn good President.

Still, I never stopped getting asked, “Why do you want to be President? Why? But, really—why?” The implication was that there must be something else going on, some dark ambition and craving for power. Nobody psychoanalyzed Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or Bernie Sanders about why they ran. It was just accepted as normal. But for me, it was regarded as inevitable—people assumed I’d run no matter what—yet somehow abnormal, demanding a profound explanation.

After the election, I thought a lot about this. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman, and we’re not used to women running for President. Maybe it’s because my style of leadership didn’t fit the times. Maybe it’s because I never explained myself as bluntly as this.

So let me start from the beginning and tell you how and why I made the decision to run.

“You might lose,” Bill told me. “I know,” I said. “I might lose.”

The problems started with history. It was exceedingly difficult for either party to hold on to the White House for more than eight years in a row. In the modern era, it had happened only once, when George H. W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan in 1989. No nonincumbent Democrat had run successfully to succeed another two-termer since Vice President Martin Van Buren won in 1836, succeeding Andrew Jackson.

There was still a lot of pent-up anger and resentment left over from the financial crash of 2008–2009, and while that had happened on the Republicans’ watch, Democrats had presided over a recovery that had been too slow.

There also was “Clinton fatigue” to consider. Pundits were already complaining that the election would be an exhausting contest between two familiar dynasties: the Clintons and the Bushes.

Then there was the matter of my gender. No woman had ever won the nomination of a major party in the history of our country, let alone the presidency. It’s easy to lose sight of how momentous that is, but when you stop to consider what it means and the possible reasons behind it, it’s profoundly sobering.

It was a chilly day in autumn 2014, and Bill and I had been having the same conversation for months now. Should I run for President for a second time? Lots of talented people were ready to jump on board with my campaign if I ran. The press and most of the political class assumed I was already running. Some of them were so convinced by the caricature of me as a power-hungry woman that they couldn’t imagine me doing anything else. I, on the other hand, could imagine lots of different paths for myself.

I already knew how it felt to lose. Until you experience it, it’s hard to comprehend the ache in your gut when you see things going wrong and can’t figure out how to fix them; the sharp blow when the results finally come in; the disappointment written on the faces of your friends and supporters. Political campaigns are massive enterprises with thousands of people working together toward a common goal, but in the end, it’s intensely personal, even lonely. It’s just your name on the ballot. You’re embraced or repudiated all by yourself.

The race against Barack Obama in 2008 was close and hard-fought. By the end, he led in the all-important delegate count, but our popular vote totals were less than one-tenth of a percent apart. That made it all the more painful to accept defeat and muster up the good cheer to campaign vigorously for him. The saving grace was the respect I had for Barack and my belief that he would be a good President who would do everything he could to advance the values we both shared. That made it a lot easier.

Did I want to put myself through a grueling race all over again?

My life after leaving politics had turned out to be pretty great. I had joined Bill and Chelsea as a new board member of the Clinton Foundation, which Bill had turned into a major global philanthropy after leaving office. This allowed me to pursue my own passions and have an impact without all the bureaucracy and petty squabbles of Washington. I admired what Bill had built, and I loved that Chelsea had decided to bring her knowledge of public health and her private sector experience to the foundation to improve its management, transparency, and performance after a period of rapid growth.

At the 2002 International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Bill had a conversation with Nelson Mandela about the urgent need to lower the price of HIV/AIDS drugs in Africa and across the world. Bill figured he was well positioned to help, so he began negotiating agreements with drugmakers and governments to lower medicine prices dramatically and to raise the money to pay for it. It worked. More than 11.5 million people in more than seventy countries now have access to cheaper HIV/AIDS treatment. Right now, out of everyone being kept alive by these drugs in developing countries around the world, more than half the adults and 75 percent of the children are benefiting from the Clinton Foundation’s work.

After recovering from heart-bypass surgery in 2004, Bill joined with the American Heart Association to start the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which has helped more than twenty million students in more than thirty-five thousand American schools enjoy healthier food and more physical activity. The Alliance made agreements with major beverage companies to reduce calories in drinks available in schools by 90 percent, and also partnered with Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative.

The foundation is also fighting the opioid epidemic in the United States; helping more than 150,000 small farmers in Africa increase their incomes; and bringing clean energy to island nations in the Caribbean and Pacific.

In 2005, Bill started the Clinton Global Initiative, a new model of philanthropy for the twenty-first century that brought together leaders from business, government, and the nonprofit sector to make concrete commitments for action on everything from distributing clean water, to improving energy efficiency, to providing hearing aids to deaf children. The annual conferences highlighted the most exciting commitments and their results. No one could just show up and talk; you had to actually do something. After twelve years, CGI members, and their affiliates in CGI America and CGI International, had made more than 3,600 commitments, which have improved the lives of more than 435 million people in more than 180 countries.

Among CGI’s greatest hits were sending 500 tons of medical supplies and equipment to West Africa for those fighting the Ebola epidemic, and helping raise $500 million to support small businesses, farms, schools, and health care in Haiti. In the United States, at no expense to taxpayers, CGI helped launch an amazing partnership led by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to meet President Obama’s goal of 100,000 new STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) teachers. And it supported the creation of America’s largest private infrastructure fund—$16.5 billion invested by public employee pension funds, led by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU)—which has created 100,000 jobs and provided skills training to a quarter-million workers every year.

When I joined the foundation in 2013, I teamed up with Melinda Gates and the Gates Foundation to launch an initiative called No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project to advance rights and opportunities for women and girls around the world. I also created a program called Too Small to Fail to encourage reading, talking, and singing to infants and toddlers to help their brains develop and build vocabulary. And Chelsea and I started a network of leading wildlife conservation organizations to protect the endangered African elephants from poachers. None of these programs had to poll well or fit on a bumper sticker. They just had to make a positive, measurable difference in the world. After years in the political trenches, that was both refreshing and rewarding.

I knew from experience that if I ran for President again, everything Bill and I had ever touched would be subject to scrutiny and attack—including the foundation. That was a concern, but I never imagined that this widely respected global charity would be as savagely smeared and attacked as it was. For years, the foundation and CGI had been supported by Republicans and Democrats alike. Independent philanthropy watchdogs CharityWatch, GuideStar, and Charity Navigator gave the Clinton Foundation top marks for reducing overhead and having a measurable positive impact. CharityWatch gave it an A, Charity Navigator gave it four stars, and GuideStar rated it platinum. But none of that stopped brutal partisan attacks from raining down during the campaign.

I have written about the foundation at some length here because a recent analysis published in the Columbia Journalism Review showed that during the campaign there was twice as much written about the Clinton Foundation as there was on any of the Trump scandals, and nearly all of it was negative. That gets to me. As Daniel Borochoff, the founder of CharityWatch, put it, “If Hillary Clinton wasn’t running for President, the Clinton Foundation would be seen as one of the great humanitarian charities of our generation.” I believe that’s exactly what it is and what it will continue to be, and I was proud to be a part of it.

Beyond my work with the foundation, I also spent time in 2013 and 2014 writing a book called Hard Choices about my experiences as Secretary of State. The book was long—more than six hundred pages about foreign policy!—but I still had more stories left on the cutting room floor and a lot more things I wanted to say. If I didn’t run for President, there could be more books to write. Maybe I could teach and spend time with students.

What’s more, like many former government officials, I found that organizations and companies wanted me to come talk to them about my experiences and share my thoughts on the world—and they’d pay me a pretty penny to do it. I continued giving many speeches without pay, but I liked that there was a way for me to earn a very good living without working for any one company or sitting on any boards. It was also a chance to meet interesting people.

I spoke to audiences from a wide range of fields: travel agents and auto dealers, doctors and tech entrepreneurs, grocers and summer camp counselors. I also spoke to bankers. Usually I told stories from my time as Secretary of State and answered questions about global hot spots. I must have recounted the behind-the-scenes story of the raid that brought Osama bin Laden to justice at least a hundred times. Sometimes I talked about the importance of creating more opportunities for women, both around the world and in corporate America. I rarely got partisan. What I had to say was interesting to my audiences, but it wasn’t especially newsworthy. Many of the organizations wanted the speeches to be private, and I respected that: they were paying for a unique experience. That allowed me to be candid about my impressions of world leaders who might have been offended if they heard. (I’m talking about you, Vladimir.)

Later, my opponents spun wild tales about what terrible things I must have said behind closed doors and how as President I would be forever in the pocket of the shadowy bankers who had paid my speaking fees. I should have seen that coming. Given my record of independence in the Senate—especially my early warnings about the mortgage crisis, my votes against the Bush tax cuts, and my positions in favor of financial regulation, including closing the tax loophole for hedge funds known as carried interest—this didn’t seem to be a credible attack. I didn’t think many Americans would believe that I’d sell a lifetime of principle and advocacy for any price. When you know why you’re doing something and you know there’s nothing more to it and certainly nothing sinister, it’s easy to assume that others will see it the same way. That was a mistake. Just because many former government officials have been paid large fees to give speeches, I shouldn’t have assumed it would be okay for me to do it. Especially after the financial crisis of 2008–2009, I should have realized it would be bad “optics” and stayed away from anything having to do with Wall Street. I didn’t. That’s on me.

This is one of the mistakes I made that you’ll read about in this book. I’ve tried to give an honest accounting of when I got it wrong, where I fell short, and what I wish I could go back and do differently. This isn’t easy or fun. My mistakes burn me up inside. But as one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, says, while our mistakes make us want to cry, the world doesn’t need more of that.

The truth is, everyone’s flawed. That’s the nature of human beings. But our mistakes alone shouldn’t define us. We should be judged by the totality of our work and life. Many problems don’t have either/or answers, and a good decision today may not look as good ten or twenty years later through the lens of new conditions. When you’re in politics, this gets more complicated. We all want—and the political press demands—a “story line,” which tends to cast people as either saints or sinners. You’re either revered or reviled. And there’s no juicier political story than the saint who gets unmasked as a sinner. A two-dimensional cartoon is easier to digest than a fully formed person.

For a candidate, a leader, or anyone, really, the question is not “Are you flawed?” It’s “What do you do about your flaws?” Do you learn from your mistakes so you can do and be better in the future? Or do you reject the hard work of self-improvement and instead tear others down so you can assert they’re as bad or worse than you are?

I’ve always tried to do the former. And, by and large, so has our country, with our long march toward a more perfect union.

But Donald Trump does the latter. Instead of admitting mistakes, he lashes out, demeans, and insults others—often projecting by accusing others of doing what he himself has done or is about to do. So if he knows that the Donald J. Trump Foundation is little more than a personal piggy bank, he’ll turn around and accuse, with no evidence, the well-respected Clinton Foundation of being corrupt. There’s a method to this madness. For Trump, if everyone’s down in the mud with him, then he’s no dirtier than anyone else. He doesn’t have to do better if everyone else does worse. I think that’s why he seems to relish humiliating people around him. And it’s why he must have been delighted when Marco Rubio tried to match him in slinging crude personal insults during the primaries. Of course, it hurt Rubio much more than Trump. As Bill likes to say, never wrestle a pig in the mud. They have cloven hooves, which give them superior traction, and they love getting dirty. Sadly, Trump’s strategy works. When people start believing that all politicians are liars and crooks, the truly corrupt escape scrutiny, and cynicism grows.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to 2014, and deciding to run for President.

We’ve talked about my work at the foundation, my book, and my speeches, but by far the best part about my life after government—and probably the most compelling reason not to run—was being a grandmother. I loved it even more than I’d expected. Bill and I found ourselves looking for any excuse to drive down to Manhattan so we could drop by Chelsea and Marc’s and see little Charlotte, who was born that September. We became the world’s most enthusiastic babysitters, book readers, and playmates. We were doubly blessed when Aidan arrived in June 2016.

Running for President again would mean putting all this—my wonderful new life—on hold and climbing back on the high wire of national politics. I wasn’t sure I was ready to do that.

My family was incredibly supportive. If I wanted to run, they would be there for me 100 percent. Chelsea had campaigned relentlessly in 2008, becoming a superb surrogate and sounding board for me. Bill knows more than almost anyone alive about what it takes to be President. He was convinced I was the best person for the job and strenuously denied that this was just a husband’s love talking.

Still, the obstacles were daunting. Yes, I had left the State Department with some of the highest approval ratings of anyone in public life—one poll from the Wall Street Journal and NBC News in January 2013 put me at 69 percent. I was also the most admired woman in the world, according to the annual Gallup poll. Ah, the good old days.

But I knew that my high approval rating was partly because Republicans had been willing to work with me when I was Secretary and praised my service. They had trained their fire on President Obama and largely left me alone. Also, the press corps covering me in those years genuinely cared about the work of diplomacy and the issues I dealt with, which meant the news coverage of my work was substantive and, for the most part, accurate. I knew it would be different if I ran for President again. And as Bill said—and history supported—the country’s perennial desire for change would make it hard for any Democrat to win, especially one like me who was closely tied to the current administration.

In 2014, President Obama’s approval rating was stuck in the low 40s. Despite the administration’s best efforts, the economic recovery was still anemic, with wages and real incomes stagnating for most Americans. The administration had botched the rollout of the new health care marketplaces, a centerpiece of the President’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act. A new terrorist group, ISIS, was seizing territory in Iraq and Syria and beheading civilians live on the internet. There was even a terrifying Ebola epidemic in Africa that many Americans worried would jump to the United States. Thankfully, the Obama administration reacted swiftly to shore up our public health defenses and support Ebola response efforts in West Africa. Despite the facts, conservative partisans warned breathlessly—and with zero evidence—that ISIS terrorists would sneak across our southern border and bring Ebola with them. It was a right-wing conspiracy theory trifecta.

In the run-up to the 2014 midterms, Bill and I both campaigned hard across the country for endangered Democratic incumbents and competitive challengers. Late at night, we’d compare notes about the anger, resentment, and cynicism we were seeing, and the vicious Republican attacks fueling it.

For years, GOP leaders had stoked the public’s fears and disappointments. They were willing to sabotage the government in order to block President Obama’s agenda. For them, dysfunction wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. They knew that the worse Washington looked, the more voters would reject the idea that government could ever be an effective force for progress. They could stop most good things from happening and then be rewarded because nothing good was happening. When something good did happen, such as expanding health care, they would focus on tearing it down, rather than making it better. With many of their voters getting their news from partisan sources, they had found a way to be consistently rewarded for creating the gridlock voters say they hate.

The success of this strategy was becoming evident. In 2014, in Georgia and North Carolina, I campaigned for two smart, talented, independent-minded candidates who should have had a good chance to win: Michelle Nunn and Senator Kay Hagan. Both races were tight up until the end. But days before the election, a savvy Georgia political observer confided to me that he’d seen private polling that showed Nunn and other Democrats cratering. Republicans were using fears about ISIS and Ebola to scare people and raise questions about whether a Democrat, especially a woman, could really be tough enough on national security.

In several states, Republicans ran an ad mixing images of Ebola responders in hazmat suits with photos of President Obama playing golf. It’s ironic to remember that now, with Donald Trump spending about 20 percent of his new presidency at his own luxury golf clubs. I sometimes wonder: If you add together his time spent on golf, Twitter, and cable news, what’s left?

Bill told me about a particularly troubling conversation he had with an old friend who lived up in the Ozarks of northern Arkansas. He had become an endangered species in Arkansas—a still-loyal, progressive Democrat. Bill called and asked our friend if he thought two-term Senator Mark Pryor could be reelected. Mark was a moderate Democrat with a golden name. (His father, David, was an Arkansas legend, having served as Congressman, Governor, and Senator.) Mark had voted for Obamacare because he believed everyone deserved the high-quality health care he received when he suffered from cancer as a young man. Our friend said he didn’t know, and he and Bill agreed the best way to find out was to visit a certain country store deep in the Ozarks where a couple hundred people regularly came out of the woods to buy food and talk politics.

When our friend got back, he called Bill and told him what the store owner had said: “You know, I always supported Clinton, and I like Mark Pryor a lot. He’s a good man and fair to everyone. But we’re going to give Congress to the Republicans.” The store owner was no fool. He knew the Republicans wouldn’t do anything for him and his neighbors. But he thought the Democrats hadn’t done anything, either. “And at least the Republicans won’t do anything to us,” he said. “The Democrats want to take away my gun and make me go to a gay wedding.”

Sure enough, Mark lost big on Election Day to Tom Cotton, one of the most right-wing members of Congress. It wasn’t that voters were turning away from the policies Mark and other Democrats had championed—in fact, in the same election, they passed an increase in the state’s minimum wage. But the politics of cultural identity and resentment were overwhelming evidence, reason, and personal experience. It seemed like “Brexit” had come to America even before the vote in the United Kingdom, and it didn’t bode well for 2016. Our party might have won the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, but the political landscape for the 2016 race was shaping up to be extremely challenging.

As if all this wasn’t enough to worry about, there was also the simple, inescapable fact that I was turning sixty-eight years old. If I ran and won, I would be the oldest President since Reagan. I suspected there’d be waves of rumor-mongering about my health—and everything else in my life. It would be invasive, crass, and insidious. But contrary to persistent rumors made up and spread by the right-wing media, my health was excellent. I had recovered fully from the concussion I suffered in late 2012. And the whole world could see I had no trouble keeping up a punishing travel schedule. I admired the likes of Diana Nyad, who at the age of sixty-four became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. When she finally emerged back on dry land, she offered three pieces of advice: Never ever give up. You’re never too old to chase your dreams. And even if something looks like a solitary sport, it’s a team effort. Words to live by!

Still, is this how I wanted to spend my time? Did I really want to put myself back in front of the firing squad of national politics for years on end, first in the campaign and then, hopefully, in the White House? Some of my dearest friends—including my longtime advisors and former chiefs of staff in the White House and the State Department, Maggie Williams and Cheryl Mills—told me I would be crazy to do it. Plenty of other people in my position had passed up the chance to run: everyone from General Colin Powell, to Mike Bloomberg, to New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who came so close to running, he had an airplane waiting on the tarmac to take him to New Hampshire when he finally decided “no.”

So why did I do it?

I did it because when you clear away all the petty and not-so-petty reasons not to run—all the headaches, all the obstacles—what was left was something too important to pass up. It was a chance to do the most good I would ever be able to do. In just one day at the White House, you can get more done for more people than in months anywhere else. We had to build an economy that worked for everyone and an inclusive society that respected everyone. We had to take on serious national security threats. These were issues already on my mind all the time, and they would all require a strong, qualified President. I knew I would make the most of every minute. Once I started thinking about it that way, I couldn’t stop.

As it happened, the person who gave me the chance to serve as Secretary of State would once again play a decisive role.

A month after I left the State Department in 2013, Barack and Michelle invited Bill and me to join them for a private dinner in the White House residence. The four of us talked about our kids and the experience of raising them in the fishbowl of the White House. We discussed life after the Oval Office. Barack and Michelle mused about maybe one day moving to New York, just as we had done. That prospect still felt very far away. We all had high hopes for Barack’s second term. There was a lot of unfinished business, both at home and around the world. We ended up staying for hours, talking late into the night. If (back in the heated days of 2008) any of us could have gotten a glimpse of that evening, we wouldn’t have believed it.

Over the next year or so, the President and I kept in regular touch. He invited me back for lunch that summer, and the two of us sat out on the terrace outside the Oval Office eating jambalaya. I think he was just a tiny bit jealous of my newfound freedom, which was a good reminder of how all-consuming the job is. We had lunch again the following spring. Some of the time the President and I talked about work, especially the foreign policy challenges he was facing in the second term. But gradually, as 2013 turned into 2014, our conversations turned more frequently to politics.

President Obama knew the challenges facing Democrats. He never took his reelection for granted, and while it was a resounding win in 2012 (the legitimately resounding kind), he knew that his legacy depended to a large degree on a Democratic victory in 2016. He made it clear that he believed that I was our party’s best chance to hold the White House and keep our progress going, and he wanted me to move quickly to prepare to run. I knew President Obama thought the world of his Vice President, Joe Biden, and was close to some other potential candidates, so his vote of confidence meant a great deal to me. We had our differences in both style and substance, but overwhelmingly we shared the same values and policy goals. We both saw ourselves as pragmatic progressives trying to move the country forward in the face of implacable opposition from a Republican Party that had been taken over by the radical-conservative Tea Party fringe and was in thrall to its billionaire backers. I shared the President’s sense of urgency about how much was at stake in 2016, but I still wasn’t entirely sold that running was the right decision for me.

As I had found when he insisted that I become Secretary of State and literally wouldn’t take no for an answer, President Obama is a persuasive and persistent advocate. In the summer of 2013, David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager who engineered my defeat in 2008, offered to provide any help and advice he could as I planned my next steps after leaving the State Department. I invited him over to my house in Washington, and quickly saw why the President had leaned on him so much. He really knew his stuff. We met again in September 2014, when he visited my house once more to give me a presentation about what it would take to build a winning presidential campaign. He spoke in detail about strategy, data, personnel, and timing. I listened carefully, determined that if I did jump into the race, I would avoid the mistakes that had dogged me the last time. Plouffe emphasized that time was of the essence, as hard as that was to believe more than two years before the election. In fact, he said I was late already and urged me to get started. He was right.

For me, political campaigns have always been something to get through in order to be able to govern, which is the real prize. I’m not the most natural politician. I’m a lot better than I’m usually given credit for, but it’s true that I’ve always been more comfortable talking about others rather than myself. That made me an effective political spouse, surrogate, and officeholder, but I had to adjust when I became a candidate myself. At the beginning, I had to actively try to use the word I more. Luckily, I love meeting people, listening, learning, building relationships, working on policy, and trying to help solve problems. I would have loved to meet all 320 million Americans one at a time. But that’s not how campaigns work.

In the end, I came back to the part that’s most important to me. We Methodists are taught to “do all the good you can.” I knew that if I ran and won, I could do a world of good and help an awful lot of people.

Does that make me ambitious? I guess it does. But not in the sinister way that people often mean it. I did not want to be President because I want power for power’s sake. I wanted power to do what I could to help solve problems and prepare the country for the future. It’s audacious for anyone to believe he or she should be President, but I did.

I started calling policy experts, reading thick binders of memos, and making lists of problems that needed more thought. I got excited thinking about all the ways we could make the economy stronger and fairer, improve health care and expand coverage, make college more affordable and job training programs more effective, and tackle big challenges, such as climate change and terrorism. It was honestly a lot of fun.

I talked with John Podesta, a longtime friend who had been Bill’s Chief of Staff in the White House and was also a top advisor to President Obama. If I was going to do this again, I would need John’s help. He promised that if I ran, he’d leave the White House and become chairman of my campaign. He thought we could put together a fantastic team very quickly. An energetic grassroots group called Ready for Hillary was already drumming up support. All of that was very reassuring.

I thought back to what made me run for Senate the first time. It was the late 1990s and Democrats in New York were urging me to run, but I kept turning them down. No First Lady had ever done anything like that before. And I hadn’t run for office since I’d been student government president at Wellesley College.

One day I visited a school in New York with the tennis star Billie Jean King for an event promoting an HBO special about women in sports. Hanging above our heads was a big banner proclaiming the title of the film, Dare to Compete. Before my speech, the seventeen-year-old captain of the high school basketball team introduced me. Her name was Sofia Totti. As we shook hands, she bent down and whispered in my ear, “Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton. Dare to compete.” Something just clicked. For years, I had been telling young women to step up, participate, go for what you believe in. How could I not be willing to do the same? Fifteen years later, I was asking myself the same question.

There wasn’t one dramatic moment where I declared, “I’m doing it!” Bill and I closed out 2014 with a trip to the beautiful home of our friends Oscar and Annette de la Renta in the Dominican Republic. We swam, ate good food, played cards, and thought about the future. By the time we got back, I was ready to run.

The most compelling argument is the hardest to say out loud: I was convinced that both Bill and Barack were right when they said I would be a better President than anyone else out there.

I also thought I’d win. I knew that Republicans had moved much further from the vital center of American politics than Democrats had, as nonpartisan political scientists have documented. But I still believed that the United States was a pretty sensible country. Previous generations faced much worse crises than anything we’ve seen, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, from World War II to the Cold War, and they responded by electing wise and talented leaders. Only rarely have Americans gotten carried away by extremes or enthralled by ideology, and never for long. Both major political parties, despite the madness of their respective nominating processes, nearly always managed to weed out the most extreme candidates. Before 2016, we’d never elected a President who flagrantly refused to abide by the basic standards of democracy and decency. If I was the best-qualified candidate, had good ideas about the future, held my own on the trail and in the debates, and demonstrated a capacity to get things done with both Republicans and Democrats, it was reasonable to believe I could get elected and be able to govern effectively.

That’s why I ran.

There are things I regret about the 2016 campaign, but the decision to run isn’t one of them.

I started this chapter with some lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem “East Coker” that I’ve always loved:

When I first read that, as a teenager in Park Ridge, Illinois, it struck a chord somewhere deep inside, maybe in that place where dim ancestral memories of indomitable Welsh and English coal miners hid alongside half-understood stories from my mother’s childhood of privation and abandonment. “There is only the trying.”

I went back to that poem a few years later, in 1969, when my classmates at Wellesley asked me to speak at our graduation. Many of us were feeling dismayed and disillusioned by the Vietnam War and the racial injustice in America, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and our seeming inability to change our country’s course. My paraphrasing gave Eliot’s elegant English verse a Midwestern makeover: “There’s only the trying,” I told my classmates, “again and again and again; to win again what we’ve lost before.”

In the nearly fifty years since, it’s become a mantra for me and our family that, win or lose, it’s important to “get caught trying.” Whether you’re trying to win an election or pass a piece of legislation that will help millions of people, build a friendship or save a marriage, you’re never guaranteed success. But you are bound to try. Again and again and again.

Getting Started

You could say my campaign for President began with a snappy internet video filmed in April 2015 outside my home in Chappaqua. Or you could point to my formal announcement speech that June on Roosevelt Island in New York. But I think it started with something a lot more ordinary: a Chipotle burrito bowl.

If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, you probably don’t spend much time in the carnival fun house of cable and internet news. It was April 13, 2015, in Maumee, Ohio. Chipotle was a pit stop on my road trip from New York to Iowa, home of the first-in-the-nation caucus. It was a purposefully low-key trip. No press, no crowds. Just me, a few staff, and Secret Service agents. We bundled into an oversized black van I call “Scooby” because it reminds me of the Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine (our van has less shaggy psychedelic charm, but we love it just the same), and set out on our thousand-mile journey. I had a stack of memos to read and a long list of calls to make. I had also googled every NPR station from Westchester to Des Moines—all set for a long drive.

In Maumee, we pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall off the highway for lunch. I ordered a chicken burrito bowl with a side of guacamole. Nick Merrill, my traveling press secretary, made fun of me for eating it out of the little cup with a spoon, bypassing the chips. Nobody in the restaurant thought it was remarkable that I was there. In fact, nobody recognized me. Bliss!

But when members of the press found out, they reacted like a UFO had landed in Ohio and an extraterrestrial had wandered into a Chipotle. CNN ran grainy footage from the restaurant’s security camera, which made it look a little like we were robbing a bank. The New York Times did an analysis that concluded my meal was healthier than the average Chipotle order, with fewer calories, saturated fat, and sodium. (Good “get” for the Times; they really ate CNN’s lunch on that one.) The whole thing felt silly. To paraphrase an old saying, sometimes a burrito bowl is just a burrito bowl.

Soon I was back in Iowa, the state that handed me a humbling third-place finish in 2008. Like the road trip, I wanted this first visit to be no-frills. I would do more listening than talking, just as I had at the start of my first Senate campaign in New York. My new state director, Matt Paul, who knew Iowa inside and out after years of working for Governor Tom Vilsack and Senator Tom Harkin, agreed. Iowans wanted to get to know their candidates, not just listen to them give speeches. That’s exactly what I wanted, too.

When Donald Trump started his campaign, he seemed confident that he already had all the answers. He had no ideological core apart from his towering self-regard, which blotted out all hope of learning or growing. As a result, he had no need to listen to anyone but himself.

I approached things differently. After four years traveling the world as Secretary of State, I wanted to reconnect with the problems that were keeping American families up at night and hear directly about their hopes for the future. I had a core set of ideas and principles but wanted to hear from voters to inform new plans to match what was really going on in their lives and in the country.

One of the first people I met in New Hampshire, another early contest state, provided a case in point. Pam was a grandmother in her fifties with gray hair and the air of someone who carries a lot of responsibility on her shoulders. She was an employee of a 111-year-old family-run furniture business I visited in Keene. We were talking about how to help small businesses grow, but Pam had a different challenge on her mind. Her daughter had gotten hooked on pain medication after giving birth to a baby boy, which led to a long struggle with drug addiction. Eventually Child and Family Services started calling Pam, warning that her grandson could end up in foster care. So she and her husband, John, took the child in, and Pam found herself back in the role of primary caretaker she thought she had finished years before.

Pam wasn’t the complaining type. This was a labor of love, and she was glad to pick up the slack, especially now that her daughter was in treatment. But she was worried. A lot of families in town were facing similar struggles. In New Hampshire, more people were dying from drug overdoses than from car crashes. The number of people seeking treatment for heroin addiction had soared 90 percent over the past decade. For prescription drugs, the number was up 500 percent.

I knew a little about this. At the time, Bill and I were friends with three families who had lost young adult children to opioids. (Sadly, that number has now grown to five.) One was a charismatic young man who worked at the State Department while he was in law school. A friend of his offered some pills, he took them, went to sleep that night, and never woke up. Others took drugs after drinking, and their hearts stopped. After these tragedies, the Clinton Foundation partnered with Adapt Pharma to make available free doses of the opioid antidote naloxone (Narcan), which can save lives by helping prevent overdoses, to every high school and college in the United States.

On that first visit to New Hampshire, in a coffee shop in downtown Keene, a retired doctor leaned in and asked, “What can you do about the opioid and heroin epidemic?” It was chilling to hear that word, epidemic, but it was the right one. In 2015, more than thirty-three thousand people died from overdosing on opioids. If you add to that the number from 2014, it’s more Americans than were killed in the entire Vietnam War. Resources for treatment couldn’t come close to keeping up. Parents liquidated their savings to pay for their kids’ treatment. Some called the police about their own children because they had tried everything else.

Yet despite all this, substance abuse wasn’t getting much national attention, either in Washington or in the national media. I didn’t think about it as a campaign issue until I started hearing stories like Pam’s in Iowa and New Hampshire.

I called my policy team together and told them we had to get working right away on a strategy. My advisors fanned out. We held town hall meetings and heard more stories. In one session in New Hampshire, a substance abuse counselor asked anyone who had been impacted by the epidemic to raise his or her hand. Nearly every hand in the room went up. A woman in treatment told me, “We’re not bad people trying to get good. We’re sick people trying to get well.”

To help her and millions of others do that, we came up with a plan to expand access to treatment, improve training for doctors and pharmacists prescribing prescription drugs, reform the criminal justice system so more nonviolent drug offenders end up in rehab instead of prison, and make sure every first responder in America carries naloxone, which is close to a miracle drug.

This became a model for how my campaign operated in those early months. People told me story after story about the challenges their families faced: student debt, the high cost of prescription drugs and insurance premiums, and wages too low to support a middle-class life. I’d use those conversations to guide the policies already being hammered out back in our Brooklyn headquarters. I wanted my policy shop to be bold, innovative, industrious, and, most importantly, responsive to people’s real-life needs. Jake Sullivan, my director of policy planning at the State Department; Ann O’Leary, a longtime advisor of mine who shared my passion for children and health care policy; and Maya Harris, a veteran civil rights advocate, built and led a great team.

You can compare this to how Trump operated. When the opioid epidemic finally started getting news attention, he jumped on it as a way of making people believe that America was falling apart. But once he became President, he turned his back on everyone who needed help by seeking to cut money for treatment.

The press often seemed bored by the roundtables where these conversations happened. Critics dismissed them as staged or carefully controlled. But I wasn’t bored. I wanted to talk with people, not at them. I also learned a lot. To me, this was a big part of what running for President was supposed to be.

Over the long months that I had weighed running a second time, I thought a lot about what kind of campaign I’d want. I certainly wanted one different from the one I ran during my 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama. I studied what he did right and I did wrong. There was more to learn after 2012, when the President put together another strong campaign that helped him win reelection over Mitt Romney by a healthy margin despite a lackluster economy. His operations were two of the best ever. I paid attention.

My low-profile first trip to Iowa reflected some of the lessons that I kept in mind as I started to put my own organization in place. In 2008, I had been criticized for arriving in Iowa like a queen, holding big rallies and acting like victory was inevitable. I never thought that was a fair description of me or our campaign; we believed I could prevail in a crowded and talented field, but we certainly didn’t take Iowa for granted. In fact, we recognized that it wasn’t an ideal first contest for me and spent a fair amount of 2007 trying to figure out how to make the best of it. Still, the criticism stuck, and I took it seriously. This time I was determined to run like an underdog and avoid any whiff of entitlement.

I also wanted to build on the best parts of my 2008 effort, especially the fighting spirit of our campaigns in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where I succeeded in forming a bond with working-class voters who felt invisible in George W. Bush’s America. I had dedicated my victory in the Ohio primary to everyone “who’s ever been counted out but refused to be knocked out, for everyone who has stumbled but stood right back up, and for everyone who works hard and never gives up.” I wanted to bring that spirit to the 2016 campaign, along with the best lessons of Obama’s victories.

We sought to set the right tone with my announcement video. It showed a series of Americans talking excitedly about new challenges they were taking on: two brothers starting a small business, a mom getting her daughter ready for the first day of kindergarten, a college student applying for her first job, a couple getting married. Then I appeared briefly to say that I was running for President to help Americans get ahead and stay ahead, and that I was going to work hard to earn every vote. This campaign wasn’t going to be about me and my ambitions. It would be about you and yours.

There were other lessons to put into action. In 2008, the Obama campaign had been way ahead of us in using advanced data analytics to model the electorate, target voters, and test messages. It focused relentlessly on grassroots organizing and winning the delegates who would actually decide the nomination. It also built a “no drama” campaign organization that largely avoided damaging infighting and leaks.

John Podesta and I talked with President Obama and David Plouffe about how to construct a team that could replicate these successes. Plouffe was a big fan of Robby Mook, whom I ultimately chose as campaign manager. Robby had impressed David by helping me win against the odds—and against him—in Nevada, Ohio, and Indiana in 2008. In all three states, he put together aggressive field programs and competed hard for every vote. Then he went on to manage my friend Terry McAuliffe’s successful longshot campaign for Governor of Virginia. Robby was on a roll—young but, like Plouffe, highly disciplined and levelheaded, with a passion for data and a talent for organizing.

Huma Abedin, my trusted and valued advisor for years, would be campaign vice chair. President Obama praised his pollsters Joel Benenson and John Anzalone and focus group expert David Binder, so I hired all three, as well as a veteran of the Obama data analytics team, Elan Kriegel. Navin Nayak came on board to coordinate all these different elements of opinion research. Here’s how to keep it all straight: pollsters call up a random sample of people and ask their opinions about candidates and issues; focus groups gather a handful of people together in a room for an in-depth discussion that can last several hours; and data analytics teams make a lot of survey calls, crunch huge amounts of additional demographic, consumer, and polling data, and feed it all into complex models that try to predict how people will vote. These are all staples of modern campaigns.

To help guide messaging and create ads, I hired Jim Margolis, a respected Obama veteran, and Mandy Grunwald, who had been with me and Bill since our first national campaign in 1992. They worked with Oren Shur, my director of paid media, and several talented and creative ad agencies. I thought Jim’s and Mandy’s partnership would represent the best of both worlds. That’s what I was going for with all my hiring decisions: mix the best available talent from the Obama campaigns with top-notch pros I already knew. The latter category included Dennis Cheng, who had raised hundreds of millions of dollars for my 2006 Senate reelection campaign and 2008 presidential campaign, and later helped build up the Clinton Foundation endowment; Minyon Moore, one of the most experienced political operatives in Democratic politics and a veteran of my husband’s White House; and Jose Villarreal, a business leader who had worked with me at State and came on board to serve as my campaign treasurer.

As I built my team, I was focused on two tricky areas: how to strike the right balance with President Obama and his White House, and—drumroll for emphasis—how to improve my relationship with the press.

The challenge of striking a balance with President Obama wasn’t personal at all. After four years in his Cabinet, we liked and trusted each other. There aren’t many people in the world who know what it’s like to run for President or live in the White House, but we had that in common, and it gave us a special bond. When he finally passed health care reform, something I had fought for long and hard, I was overjoyed and gave him a big hug before a meeting in the White House Situation Room. After his rough first presidential debate with Mitt Romney in 2012, I tried to cheer him up with a photoshopped image of Big Bird strapped to Mitt’s family car. (Romney had promised to slash funding for PBS, and also famously took road trips with his dog on the roof of his car.)

“Please take a look at the image below, smile, and then keep that smile near at hand,” I told the President.

“We’ll get this done,” he replied. “Just hold the world together five more weeks for me.”

Now that we had switched places, and I was the candidate and he was the cheerleader, the challenge for me was navigating the tension between continuity and change. On the one hand, I believed deeply in what he had accomplished as President and desperately wanted to make sure a Republican wouldn’t be able to undo it all. We might have areas of disagreement, such as on Syria, trade, and how to deal with an aggressive Russia, but by and large, I would defend his record, try to build on his accomplishments, and listen to his advice. He would call from time to time and share his thoughts on the race. “Don’t try to be hip, you’re a grandma,” he’d tease. “Just be yourself and keep doing what you’re doing.” I was proud to have Barack’s support, and nearly every day told audiences around the country that he didn’t get the credit he deserved for putting our country back together after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

At the same time, there were big problems that still needed fixing in America, and part of my job as candidate was to make it clear that I saw them and was ready to take them on. Inevitably, that meant pointing out areas where the Obama administration’s efforts had fallen short, even if the main culprit was Republican obstruction.

It was a fine line to walk, as it would have been for Vice President Biden or anyone who had served in the Obama administration. If I failed to strike the right balance, I ran the risk of either seeming disloyal or being cast as the candidate of the status quo, both of which would be damaging.

In one of the first meetings of our new team, in a conference room on the twenty-ninth floor of a Midtown Manhattan office building, Joel Benenson presented the results of his early opinion research. He said Americans had two main “pain points” that would likely shape their views of the election: economic pressure and political gridlock. The economy was definitely in better shape than it had been after the financial crisis, but incomes hadn’t begun to rise for most families, so people still felt like their progress was fragile and could be ripped away at any moment. And they had come to view dysfunction in Washington as a big part of the problem. They were right. I had seen that dysfunction firsthand and knew how hard it would be to break through it—although I think it’s fair to say I underestimated how my opponents would wrongly accuse me of being responsible for a broken system. I had a record of success working with Republicans over the years. I had plans for aggressive campaign finance reform, which would remove some of the profit motive behind the gridlock. And I believed we had a strong shot at making progress. The problem remained: how to find a compelling way to talk about the pain Americans felt and their dissatisfaction with how things were going in the country, without reinforcing Republican criticisms of the Obama administration, which would be self-defeating and just plain wrong.

Joel said I was starting from a strong place. Fifty-five percent of voters in the battleground states had a favorable view of me, compared with just 41 percent with an unfavorable view. Voters liked that I had worked for Obama after losing to him in 2008. They thought it showed loyalty and patriotism. They also thought I had done a good job as Secretary of State, and most believed I was ready to be President. But even though I’d been in the public eye for decades, they knew little about what I had actually done, much less why I had done it. This presented both a challenge and an opportunity. Despite having near-universal name recognition, I would have to reintroduce myself—not as an extension of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama but as an independent leader with my own story, values, and vision.

There were also some warning signs to worry about. While my approval ratings were high, just 44 percent of voters said they trusted me to be their voice in Washington. That told us that some people respected me but weren’t sure I was in it for them. I was determined to change that perception. The reason I had gotten into public service was to make life better for children and families, and now it was my job to make sure people understood that.

There was something else we needed to do: avoid repeating past problems with the political press corps. Over the years, my relationship with the political press had become a vicious cycle. The more they went after me, the more guarded I became, which only made them criticize me more. I knew that if I wanted 2016 to be different, I was going to have to try to change the dynamic and establish a more open and constructive give-and-take. There was some precedent. As a Senator, I got along surprisingly well with the rough-and-tumble journalists of New York. And I grew downright fond of the State Department press corps, which consisted largely of journalists who had written about foreign policy for years. We talked easily, went out together on the road, toured Angkor Wat in Cambodia, dined in a Bedouin tent in Saudi Arabia, danced in South Africa, and had adventures all over the globe. For the most part, they covered me fairly, and when I felt they didn’t, they were open to my criticism. Now I would try to establish a similar rapport with the political reporters covering the campaign. I knew they were under constant pressure to write stories that would drive clicks and retweets, and that negative stories sell. So I was skeptical. But it was worth a shot.

To help me do it, I hired Jennifer Palmieri, a savvy professional with strong press relationships. Jennifer had worked for John Podesta in the Clinton White House and at the Democratic think tank the Center for American Progress. Most recently, she had been President Obama’s Communications Director in the White House. The President loved Jennifer, and so did I. I asked Kristina Schake, a former top aide to Michelle Obama, and later Christina Reynolds, who had worked on the John Edwards and Obama campaigns, to be her deputies. They were joined by national press secretary Brian Fallon, a graduate of the acclaimed Chuck Schumer school of communications and a former spokesman for the Department of Justice, and Karen Finney, the former MSNBC host who had first worked for me in the White House. When Jennifer, Kristina, and I sat down together for the first time, I let two decades’ worth of frustrations with the press pour out. Buckle up, I said, this is going to be a rough ride. But I was ready to try whatever they recommended to get off on a better foot this time.

With my senior team coming together, we got to work building an organization that could go the distance. Presidential campaigns are like start-ups on steroids. You have to raise an enormous amount of money very quickly, hire a huge staff, deploy them across the country, and build a sophisticated data operation largely from scratch. As a candidate, you have to manage all that while maintaining a grueling campaign schedule that keeps you hundreds or thousands of miles from headquarters nearly every day.

In 2008, I had a good, hardworking team. But I allowed internal rivalries to fester and didn’t establish a clear chain of command until it was too late. Still, we came so close to winning. I vowed that this time we would do things differently.

I was determined to have the best data, the most field organizers, the biggest fund-raising network, and the deepest political relationships. I was thrilled that Beth Jones, a talented manager working at the White House, agreed to be campaign chief operating officer. To lead our organizing and outreach efforts, I turned to three political pros: Marlon Marshall, Brynne Craig, and Amanda Renteria. I also hired experienced organizers to run the key early states. In addition to Matt Paul in Iowa, there was Mike Vlacich, who helped reelect my friend Senator Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire and led my efforts to beat Trump there in November; Emmy Ruiz, who helped lead us to victory in the Nevada caucus before moving to Colorado for the general and helping us win there, too; and Clay Middleton, a longtime aide to Congressman Jim Clyburn, who helped us win a landslide victory in the South Carolina primary.

To infuse the campaign with a spirit of innovation, we got advice from Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and other top tech leaders, and hired engineers from Silicon Valley. Stephanie Hannon, an experienced engineer, became the first woman to serve as chief technology officer on a major presidential campaign. I hired one of President Obama’s former aides, Teddy Goff, to handle all things digital, along with my longtime advisor Katie Dowd and Jenna Lowenstein from EMILY’s List. They had a tough job on their hands with a less-than-tech-savvy candidate, but I promised to be a good sport about every Facebook chat, tweetstorm, and Snapchat interview they recommended.

To make sure we built the most diverse team ever assembled by a presidential campaign, I brought in Bernard Coleman as the first-ever chief diversity officer, made sure women were half the staff, and hired hundreds of people of color, including for senior leadership roles.

We put our headquarters in Brooklyn and the office soon teemed with idealistic, sleep-deprived twentysomethings. It felt like a cross between a tech start-up and a college dorm. I’ve been a part of a lot of campaigns going all the way back to 1968, and this was the most collegial and collaborative I’ve ever seen.

So how did it go?

Well, we didn’t win.

But I can say with zero equivocation that my team made me enormously proud. They built a fantastic organization in the early states and helped me win the Iowa caucus, despite tough demographics, as well as the Nevada caucus and the South Carolina primary. In the general election, they recruited fifty thousand more volunteers than the 2012 Obama campaign did and contacted voters five million more times. My team absorbed one gut punch after another and never gave up, never turned on one another, and never stopped believing in our cause. That doesn’t mean there weren’t disagreements and debates over a wide range of questions. Of course there were—it was a campaign, for heaven’s sake. But even on the night of our landslide defeat in the New Hampshire primary or during the worst days of the email controversy, nobody buckled.

And have I mentioned that we went on to win the national popular vote by nearly three million?

It was a terrific group of people. And I’m not just talking about the senior leadership. All the young men and women crowded around desks at headquarters in Brooklyn, working impossible hours… all the field organizers who were the heart and soul of the campaign… all the advance staff who lived out of suitcases for two years, organizing and staging events across the country… volunteers of every age and background—more Americans volunteered more time for the 2016 campaign than for any campaign in U.S. history. My team was full of dedicated people who left families and friends to move someplace new, knock on doors, make phone calls, recruit volunteers, and persuade voters. They worked intensely while juggling relationships, welcoming newborn babies, and handling other family obligations. Two of my young communications aides, Jesse Ferguson and Tyrone Gayle, kept working through difficult cancer treatments, never losing their devotion to the campaign or their senses of humor.

Some of my favorite moments out on the trail were when a volunteer would come up to me as I shook hands on a rope line after a rally. They’d whisper in my ear about what a great job our local organizer was doing or how welcoming our staff was to people who wanted to help and how their enthusiasm was infectious. That always made my day. The fact that so many of these young people have decided to stay in politics and keep up the fight despite our loss makes me very happy and proud.

Having said all that, of course the campaign didn’t go as planned. I ended up falling into many of the pitfalls I had worried about and tried to avoid from the start. Some of that was my own doing, but a lot of it was due to forces beyond my control.

Despite my intention to run like a scrappy challenger, I became the inevitable front-runner before I shook my first hand or gave my first speech, just by virtue of sky-high expectations.

The controversy over my emails quickly cast a shadow over our efforts and threw us into a defensive crouch from which we never fully recovered. You can read plenty more about that later in this book, but suffice it to say that one boneheaded mistake turned into a campaign-defining and -destroying scandal, thanks to a toxic mix of partisan opportunism, interagency turf battles, a rash FBI director, my own inability to explain the whole mess in a way people could understand, and media coverage that by its very volume told the voters this was by far the most important issue of the campaign. Most people couldn’t explain what it was really all about or how the allegations that I was a threat to national security squared with the support I had from respected military and civilian national security experts, including Republicans and Independents, but they understandably came away with the impression I had done a big, bad thing.

One result was that, right away, I was back in my usual adversarial relationship with the press, clamming up and trying to avoid “Gotcha!” interviews at a time when I needed to be reintroducing myself to the country. I watched my approval numbers drop and my disapproval and distrust numbers rise, as my message about all the things I wanted to do as President was blocked or overwhelmed.

There were other disappointments as well. In 2008, critics had slammed me for not being accessible to voters and avoiding traditional grip-and-grin campaigning. This time they went the other way and ridiculed my intimate listening sessions. “Where are the rallies? Why can’t she draw a crowd?” they’d ask. That “enthusiasm” question never really went away, even when we drew large crowds.

Other than Iowa and Nevada, where we built extensive organizations, I struggled in caucuses just as I had the last time. By their structure and rules, caucuses favor the most committed activists who are willing to spend long hours waiting to be counted. That gave the advantage to the insurgent left-wing candidacy of Bernie Sanders. My advantage came in primaries, which have secret ballots and all-day voting, like a typical election, and much higher turnout. The difference was most clear in Washington State, which held both a caucus and a primary. Bernie won the caucus in March, and I won the primary in May, in which three times as many people voted. Unfortunately, most of the delegates were awarded based on the caucus.

Ultimately, none of this mattered much after I built up a large delegate lead in March. What did matter, and had a lasting impact, was that Bernie’s presence in the race meant that I had less space and credibility to run the kind of feisty progressive campaign that had helped me win Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2008.

One piece of advice that President Obama gave me throughout the campaign was that we needed more message discipline, and he was right. In 1992, Bill relied on James Carville and Paul Begala to help him shape his winning message, and they made sure that everyone in the campaign—including the candidate—stuck to it day after day after day. In 2016, my campaign was blessed with many brilliant strategists, and they helped me develop a message, Stronger Together, that reflected my values and vision and a clear contrast with Trump. It may not have been catchy enough to break through the wall of negative coverage about emails—maybe nothing could—but it was the case I wanted to make. And when voters got a chance to hear from me directly, at the convention and in the debates, polls showed they liked what they heard.

It’s true, though, that we struggled to stay on message. My advisors had to deal with a candidate—me—who often wanted something new to say, as opposed to just repeating the same stump speech over and over. In addition, more than in any race I can remember, we were constantly buffeted by events: from the email controversy, to WikiLeaks, to mass shootings and terrorist attacks. There was no such thing as a “normal day,” and the press didn’t cover “normal” campaign speeches. What they were interested in was a steady diet of conflict and scandal. As a result, when it came to driving a consistent message, we were fighting an uphill battle.

Add all this together, and I think you get a picture of a campaign that had both great strengths and real weaknesses—just like every campaign in history. There are important lessons to learn from what we got right and what we got wrong. But I totally reject the notion that it was an unusually flawed or dysfunctional campaign. That’s just wrong. My team battled serious headwinds to win the popular vote, and if not for the dramatic intervention of the FBI director in the final days, I believe that in spite of everything, we would have won the White House. I’ve been criticized harshly by political pundits for saying that, and even some of my supporters have said they agree with me but I shouldn’t say it. If you feel this way, I hope you’ll keep going and give my response a fair reading.

Since the election, I’ve asked myself many times if I learned the wrong lessons from 2008. Was I fighting the previous war when I should have been focused on how much our politics had changed?

Much has been made about my campaign’s supposed overreliance on Obama-style big data, at the expense of more traditional political gut instinct and trusting folks on the ground. This is another criticism I reject. It’s true that some of our models were off—just like everyone else’s, including the media, the Trump campaign, everyone—probably because some Trump supporters refused to talk to pollsters or weren’t honest about their preferences or because people changed their minds. It’s also true that, like any large organization, we could have done a better job listening to the anecdotal feedback we were getting from folks on the ground. It’s not like we didn’t try. My team was constantly in touch with local leaders, and I had trusted friends reporting back to me from all over the country, including a big group of Arkansans—the Arkansas Travelers—who fanned out in nearly every state. I believe they helped us win the razor-close Missouri primary, and they were a constant source of information and perspective for me. But every precinct leader and party chair in the country wants more attention and resources. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong. You can’t make those decisions blind. You have to be guided by the best data available. This isn’t an either/or choice. You need both data and good old-fashioned political instinct. I’m convinced that the answer for Democrats going forward is not to abandon data but to obtain better data, use it more effectively, question every assumption, and keep adapting. And we need to listen carefully to what people are telling you and try to assess that too.

Still, in terms of fighting the previous war, I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t realize how quickly the ground was shifting under all our feet. This was the first election where the Supreme Court’s disastrous 2010 Citizens United decision allowing unlimited political donations was in full force but the Voting Rights Act of 1965 wasn’t because of another terrible decision by the court in 2013. I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions, while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans’ anger and resentment. I was giving speeches laying out how to solve the country’s problems. He was ranting on Twitter. Democrats were playing by the rules and trying too hard not to offend the political press. Republicans were chucking the rule book out the window and working the refs as hard as they could. I may have won millions more votes, but he’s the one sitting in the Oval Office.

Both the promise and the perils of my campaign came together on a warm and brilliantly sunny June day in 2015, when I formally announced my candidacy in a speech to thousands of supporters on Roosevelt Island in New York’s East River. Now the event seems almost like a quaint throwback to an earlier era of politics—a time when policies and polish were assets, not liabilities. Nonetheless, that hopeful, joyous day on Roosevelt Island will always rank as one of my favorites.

For weeks before the speech, I went back and forth with my team about what to say and how to say it. I’ve never been very adept at summing up my entire life story, worldview, and agenda in pithy sound bites. I was also acutely aware that, as the first woman to be a credible candidate for President, I looked and sounded different than any presidential candidate in our country’s history. I had no precedent to follow, and voters had no historical frame of reference to draw upon. It was exhilarating to enter uncharted territory. But uncharted, by definition, means uncertain. If I felt that way, I was sure that a lot of voters would feel even more wary about it.

I also knew that despite being the first woman to have a serious chance at the White House, I was unlikely to be seen as a transformative, revolutionary figure. I had been on the national stage too long for that, and my temperament was too even-keeled. Instead, I hoped that my candidacy—and if things worked out, my presidency—would be viewed as the next chapter in the long progressive struggle to make the country fairer, freer, and stronger, and to beat back a seriously scary right-wing agenda. This framing took me directly into the politically dangerous territory of seeking a so-called third term after Obama and being seen as the candidate of continuity instead of change, but it was honest. And I thought placing my candidacy in the grand tradition of my progressive forebears would help voters accept and embrace the unprecedented nature of my campaign.

So when Huma suggested launching the campaign on Roosevelt Island, named after Franklin Delano, I knew it was the right choice. I’m something of a Roosevelt buff. First on the list will always be Eleanor. She was a crusading First Lady and progressive activist who never stopped speaking her mind and didn’t give a damn what people thought. I return to her aphorisms again and again: “If I feel depressed, I go to work.” “A woman is like a teabag: you never know how strong she is until she’s in hot water.” There was a minor Washington tempest back in the 1990s when a newspaper claimed I was having séances in the White House to commune directly with Eleanor’s spirit. (I wasn’t, though it would have been nice to talk to her now and then.)

I’m also fascinated by Eleanor’s husband, Franklin, and her uncle Teddy. I was riveted by Ken Burns’s seven-part documentary about all three Roosevelts that aired on PBS in 2014. I was particularly struck by the parallels between what Teddy faced as President in the early years of the twentieth century, as the industrial revolution upended American society, and what we faced in the early years of the twenty-first century. In both eras, disruptive technological change, massive income inequality, and excessive corporate power created a social and political crisis. Teddy responded by breaking up powerful monopolies, passing laws to protect working people, and safeguarding the environment. He may have been a Republican, but he put the capital P in Progressive. He was also a shrewd politician who managed to fend off the demands of angry populists on his left, who wanted to go even further toward Socialism, and conservatives on his right, who would have let the robber barons amass even more wealth and power.

Teddy found the right balance and called it the “Square Deal.” I loved that phrase, and the more I thought about the challenges facing America in the years following the financial crisis of 2008–2009, the more I felt that what we needed was another Square Deal. We needed to regain our balance, take on the forces that had crashed our economy, and protect hardworking families shortchanged by automation, globalization, and inequality. We needed the political skill to restrain unchecked greed while defusing the most destructive impulses of resurgent populism.

On tough days out on the road, when reading the news felt like getting your teeth kicked in, I’d remember what Teddy said about those of us who climb into the arena. “It is not the critic who counts,” he said, but the competitor “who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds… who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

I also was inspired by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program of the 1930s, which saved capitalism from itself following the Great Depression, and by his vision of a humane, progressive, internationalist America. Four Freedoms Park, at the tree-lined tip of Roosevelt Island, commemorates the universal freedoms FDR proclaimed during World War II: freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear. It’s a picturesque spot with a striking view of the New York skyline. Announcing my candidacy there felt right.

The final few days were a flurry of marking up drafts and rewriting lines with Dan Schwerin, my longtime speechwriter, who had been with me since the Senate. As the campaign went on, he would be joined by Megan Rooney, a wonderful writer who spent four years traveling the world with me at State and then went to the White House to write for President Obama. Despite our best efforts, when the morning of June 13 dawned, I was still not quite satisfied. I turned to the bottom of page 4, the key moment in the speech, when I was supposed to say, “That’s why I’m running for President.” What followed, “to make our economy work for you and for every American,” was true and important. It was the result of deliberation and debate with my senior advisors, culminating a few days before around the table in my dining room in Washington. I had put down a draft in frustration, declared myself finished with all the slogans and sound bites, and said that I was really running for President to make the economy work for everyone, and why didn’t we just say that and be done with it?

But something was missing—emotional lift, a sense that we were setting out on a common mission to secure our shared destiny. I remembered a note that Dan and I had received a few days earlier from Jim Kennedy, a great friend who has a deft way with words. He reflected on a line from Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech: “Our strength is our unity of purpose.” America is a family, Jim noted, and we should have one another’s backs. In that moment, I had no idea that the election would turn into a contest between the divisiveness of Donald Trump and my vision of an America that’s “stronger together.” But it felt right to call for shared purpose, to remind Americans that there is much more that unites us than divides us.

I picked up my ballpoint pen and, playing off Jim’s language, wrote, “We Americans may differ, bicker, stumble, and fall; but we are at our best when we pick each other up, when we have each other’s back. Like any family, our American family is strongest when we cherish what we have in common and fight back against those who would drive us apart.”

A few hours later, I was standing at the podium in the blinding June sun, looking out at the excited faces of cheering supporters. I saw little kids perched on their parents’ shoulders. Friends smiled up at me from the front row. Bill, Chelsea, and Marc were glowing with pride and love. The stage was shaped like our campaign logo: a big blue H with a red arrow cutting across the middle. All around it, a sea of people clapped, hollered, and waved American flags.

I allowed myself a moment to think, “This is really happening. I am going to run for President, and I am going to win.” Then I started to speak. It was hard to read the teleprompter with the sun in my eyes, but I knew the words well by this point. It was a long speech, full of policies and insights developed over the previous months of listening to people such as Pam in New Hampshire. That’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But I thought it was the kind of speech a candidate for the most important job in the world ought to give: serious, substantive, honest about the challenges ahead, and hopeful about our ability to meet them.

I told a couple jokes. “I may not be the youngest candidate in this race,” I said, “but I will be the youngest woman President in the history of the United States.” Little did I know that, in fact, I would end up being the youngest candidate, running against septuagenarians Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

I was pleased with how the speech was received. The journalist Jon Allen, who has followed me over the years, declared, “Clinton pretty much nailed the vision thing.” Jared Bernstein, Joe Biden’s former top economic advisor, smartly described it as a “reconnection agenda” (I loved that) that aimed to “reunite economic growth with the prosperity of middle- and low-income families.”

But it was E. J. Dionne, one of my favorite political commentators, who had the most thought-provoking—and, in retrospect, haunting—reaction. “Hillary Clinton is making a bet and issuing a challenge. The bet is that voters will pay more attention to what she can do for them than to what her opponents will say about her,” E. J. wrote. “The challenge is to her Republican adversaries: Can they go beyond low-tax, antigovernment bromides to make credible counteroffers to the nurses, truckers, factory workers, and food servers whom Clinton made the heroes of her Roosevelt Island narrative about grace under pressure?”

We know now that I lost that bet—not because a Republican came along and made a more credible counteroffer to middle-class voters but because Donald Trump did something else: appeal to the ugliest impulses of our national character. He also made false promises about being on the side of working people. As Michael Bloomberg later said at the Democratic National Convention, “I’m a New Yorker, and I know a con when I see one.” Me too.

As I would often do in big moments over the course of the campaign, I closed the speech by talking about my mother, Dorothy, who had passed away in 2011. She lived to be ninety-two years old, and I often thought about all the progress she witnessed over the course of her long life—progress won because generations of Americans kept fighting for what they knew to be right. “I wish my mother could have been with us longer,” I said. “I wish she could have seen Chelsea become a mother herself. I wish she could have met Charlotte. I wish she could have seen the America we’re going to build together.” I looked out at the crowd and up at the New York skyline across the water, smiled, and said, “An America where a father can tell his daughter, yes, you can be anything you want to be—even President of the United States.”

A Day in the Life

A presidential campaign is a marathon run at the pace of a sprint. Every day, every hour, every moment counts. But there are so many days—nearly six hundred, in the case of the 2015–2016 campaign—that you have to be careful not to burn out before hitting the finish line.

President Obama drilled this point home when I was getting ready to run. He reminded me that when we faced off in 2008, we would often end up staying at the same hotel in Iowa or New Hampshire. He said his team would be finished with dinner and getting ready to call it a night when we finally got there, completely spent. By the time he woke up the next morning, we’d be long gone. In short, he thought we overdid it. “Hillary,” he said, “you’ve got to pace yourself this time. Work smart, not just hard.” Whenever we saw each other, he’d say it again, and he’d tell John and Huma to remind me.

I tried to follow his advice. After all, he won twice. My approach came down to two words: routine and joy. At the beginning, I put some routines in place to keep my traveling team and me as healthy and productive as possible through one of the hardest things any of us would ever do. And we all tried our best to savor every moment that came our way—to find joy and meaning in the daily grind of campaigning. Not a day went by when we didn’t.

Since the election, my life and routine have changed greatly. But I still treasure many moments from that long and sometimes strange trip. Many mental snapshots that I took along the way are in this chapter. So are a lot of details about a typical day on the trail: what I ate, who did my hair and makeup, what my mornings were like.

It may seem strange, but I get asked about these things constantly. Philippe Reines, my longtime advisor, who played Trump in our debate prep sessions, has my favorite explanation why. He calls it the “Panda Principle.” Pandas just live their lives. They eat bamboo. They play with their kids. But for some reason, people love watching pandas, hoping for something—anything—to happen. When that one baby panda sneezed, the video became a viral sensation.

Under Philippe’s theory, I’m like a panda. A lot of people just want to see how I live. And I do love spending time with my family and getting some sun, just like a panda—and while I’m not into bamboo, I like to eat.

I get it. We want to know our leaders, and part of that is hearing about Ronald Reagan’s jelly bean habit and Madeleine Albright’s pin collection.

In that spirit, if you’ve ever wondered what a day in the life of a presidential candidate is like—or if you’ve ever asked yourself, “Does Hillary Clinton just… eat lunch, like a normal person?”—this is for you.

Six A.M.: I wake up, sometimes hitting the snooze button to steal a few more minutes. Snoozing leaves you more tired—there are studies on this—but in that moment, it seems like such a great idea.

As often as we can, we arrange my schedule so I can sleep in my own bed in Chappaqua. Many nights, that isn’t possible, and I wake up in a hotel room somewhere. That’s okay; I can sleep anywhere. It’s not unusual for me to sleep through a bumpy plane landing. But waking up at home is the best.

Bill and I bought our home in 1999 because we loved the bedroom. It’s one and a half stories high with a vaulted ceiling and windows on three sides. When we first saw it as prospective home buyers, Bill said that we would always wake up happy here, with the light streaming in and the view of the garden around us. He was right.

There’s a colorful portrait of Chelsea in her late teens on one wall of our bedroom, and photos of family and friends scattered everywhere. We loved the wallpaper in our bedroom in the White House—yellow with pastel flowers—so I tracked it down for this bedroom too. There are stacks of books on our bedside tables that we are reading or hoping to read soon. For years, we’ve been keeping careful track of everything we read. Plus, Bill being Bill, he has a rating system. The best books get three stars.

After waking up, I check my email and read my morning devotional from Reverend Bill Shillady, which is usually waiting in my inbox. I spend a few minutes in contemplation, organizing my thoughts and setting my priorities for the day.

Then it’s time for breakfast. When I’m home, I head downstairs. On the road, I order room service. It’s hard to plan exactly what or when I’ll be eating over the course of the day, since we’re always on the go, so breakfast is key. Usually I opt for scrambled egg whites with vegetables. When they’re around, I add fresh jalapeños. Otherwise, it’s salsa and hot sauce. I’m a black coffee and strong black tea person, and I drink a huge glass of water in the morning and keep drinking water all day long, since I fly a lot, which can be dehydrating.

Over breakfast, I start reading the stack of press clips and briefing papers that have arrived overnight from my staff. If I’m home, Oscar Flores, a Navy veteran who had worked in the White House and is now our residence manager, prints it all out for me. I also take another look at the day’s schedule, which is a logistical masterpiece. My team—Lona Valmoro, my invaluable scheduler since my Senate days, who also worked with me at the State Department; Alex Hornbrook, director of scheduling, who previously did the same job for Vice President Biden; and Jason Chung, director of advance—are miracle workers. They juggle dates and places with grace and create flawless events out of thin air. It isn’t unusual to call them from the plane as we are landing at night to say, “We need to completely redo tomorrow’s schedule to add one more state and two more events.” Their answer is always “No problem.”

If Bill’s in town, he’s probably still asleep. He’s a night owl; I’m an early bird. But sometimes he’ll get up with me, and we’ll read the papers (we get four: the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and the Journal News, our local paper) and drink our coffee and talk about what we have going on that day. It’s probably a lot like what’s happening at that moment in our neighbors’ houses, except in our case, one of us is running for President and the other one used to be President.

I try to find time for yoga or a strength and cardio workout. At home, I work out in an old red barn out back that we’ve converted into a gym and an office for Bill, with space in the converted hayloft for the Secret Service. I’m no match for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, however, who pumps iron and does planks and push-ups two days a week. Her regimen is daunting; mine is more forgiving. But if she can find the time and energy to exercise regularly, so can I (and you!). When I’m on the road, I have a mini exercise routine I’ve now done in hotel rooms across America.

Then there’s hair and makeup. Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, having my hair and makeup done was a special treat every now and again. But having to do it every single day takes the fun out of it.

Luckily, I have a glam squad that makes it easy. Two hairdressers have taken great care of me in New York for years: John Barrett, whose full-service salon is in Manhattan, and Santa Nikkels, whose cozy salon is just a few minutes from my house in Chappaqua. They’re both terrific—though a lot of people were baffled to discover, after my emails were made public, that I had regular “appointments with Santa.”

When I’m in New York and need help with my makeup, I see Melissa Silver (recommended to me by Vogue’s Anna Wintour after she saw me at an event and knew I needed help).

On the campaign trail, I have a traveling team: Isabelle Goetz and Barbara Lacy. Isabelle is French and full of positivity; she doesn’t walk so much as bop. She’s been doing my hair on and off since the mid-1990s, which means we’ve been together through a lot of hairstyles. Barbara, like Isabelle, is perpetually cheerful. In addition to doing my makeup on the campaign, she does makeup for movies and TV shows such as Veep. I, of course, don’t want to be compared with Selina Meyer in any way, shape, or form, but there’s no denying, Julia Louis-Dreyfus looks fantastic.

While they get me ready, I’m usually on the phone or reading my briefings for the day. That hour is valuable, so I occasionally schedule calls with staff to discuss electoral strategy or a new policy. They usually don’t mind speaking over the blow dryer. Isabelle and Barbara do their best to work around me until they tell me they need me to be still, s’il vous plaît.

At the beginning of the campaign, Isabelle and Barbara got me ready for the day once a week or so, as well as for big events such as debates. I tried to take care of my own hair and makeup the rest of the time. But photos don’t lie, and since I looked better when they were with me, it became an everyday thing. When they travel with me, Isabelle and Barbara are always nearby, ready to touch me up before interviews or debates. Every time our plane lands, Isabelle rushes forward with hairspray, and Barbara spritzes my face with a vaporizer full of mineral water. “The air on planes is so dry!” she laments. Then she spritzes everyone else in the vicinity, including, at times, the Secret Service.

I appreciate their talents and like how they make me look. But I’ve never gotten used to how much effort it takes just to be a woman in the public eye. I once calculated how many hours I spent having my hair and makeup done during the campaign. It came to about six hundred hours, or twenty-five days! I was so shocked, I checked the math twice.

I’m not jealous of my male colleagues often, but I am when it comes to how they can just shower, shave, put on a suit, and be ready to go. The few times I’ve gone out in public without makeup, it’s made the news. So I sigh and keep getting back in that chair, and dream of a future in which women in the public eye don’t need to wear makeup if they don’t want to and no one cares either way.

After hair and makeup, it’s time to get dressed. When I ran for Senate in 2000 and President in 2008, I basically had a uniform: a simple pantsuit, often black, with a colorful shell underneath. I did this because I like pantsuits. They make me feel professional and ready to go. Plus, they helped me avoid the peril of being photographed up my skirt while sitting on a stage or climbing stairs, both of which happened to me as First Lady. (After that, I took a cue from one of my childhood heroes, Nancy Drew, who would often do her detective work in sensible trousers. “I’m glad I wore pants!” she said in The Clue of the Tapping Heels after hoisting herself up on the rafters of a building in pursuit of a rare cat.) I also thought it would be good to do what male politicians do and wear more or less the same thing every day. As a woman running for President, I liked the visual cue that I was different from the men but also familiar. A uniform was also an antidistraction technique: since there wasn’t much to say or report on what I wore, maybe people would focus on what I was saying instead.

In 2016, I wanted to dress the same as I did when I wasn’t running for President and not overthink it. I was lucky to have something few others do: relationships with American designers who helped me find outfits I could wear from place to place, in all climates. Ralph Lauren’s team made the white suit I wore to accept the nomination and the red, white, and blue suits I wore to debate Trump three times. More than a dozen American designers made T-shirts to support my campaign and even held an event during New York Fashion Week to show them off.

Some people like my clothes and some people don’t. It goes with the territory. You can’t please everybody, so you may as well wear what works for you. That’s my theory, anyway.

When I leave for several days on the road, I try to be superorganized, but inevitably I overpack. I throw in more outfits than I need, just in case the weather changes or something spills on me or an eager fan leaves makeup on my shoulder after an exuberant hug. Huma, someone who knows a thing or two about being stylish while working twenty-hour days, tries to advise me. She’s the one who will tell me I have on two different earrings, which happened a few times. I also overdo it on reading material; for a while, I filled an entire rolling suitcase with briefing memos and policy papers. Oscar helps me load everything into the cars. Sometimes Bill, marveling at all the stuff I’m bringing, asks, “Are you running away from home?”

When the cars are loaded, the husband is hugged, and the dogs are cuddled, we’re off.

We fly in and out of the Westchester County Airport, just a short drive from our house. I make a policy of trying not to be “wheels up” before 8:30 A.M. on the nights I sleep at home. Everyone on my team has at least an hour’s drive home after we land in Westchester, and we often land late. An 8:30 A.M. start time means everyone gets at least some sleep.

For the primaries and the beginning of the general election, my traveling team was small. It consisted of Huma; Nick Merrill; trip director Connolly Keigher; Sierra Kos, Julie Zuckerbrod, and Barbara Kinney, who videotaped and photographed life on the trail; and my Secret Service detail, which was usually two agents, sometimes three. A rotating cast of additional staff joined depending on what was happening that day: speechwriters, members of the policy team, state organizers. By the end of the campaign, the team was much bigger and so was the plane.

A note about the Secret Service. Bill and I have been under Secret Service protection since 1992, as soon as he secured the Democratic nomination for President. It took some getting used to, but after twenty-five years, it feels normal—and to their great credit, the agents bend over backward to be as unobtrusive as possible. They are somehow both low-key and ferociously vigilant. The agents are with us at our home all day every day. When I leave the house to do something casual around town—like go to the market or take a walk—agents come with me. They hang back and give me space to do whatever I’m doing. Sometimes I forget that they’re there, which is exactly what they want. I’m grateful for the relationships we’ve built with many of these dedicated men and women over the years. We’ve also gotten to spend time with their spouses and children at the holiday party Bill and I host for our agents and their families every year, and I’ve met some of their extended families out on the campaign trail, too.

When Bill and I travel, whether into Manhattan to see a play or all the way to Nevada for campaign events, the Secret Service kicks into higher gear. They coordinate ahead of time to make sure they know the details of every place we’ll visit: all the entrances and exits, the fastest traffic routes, and, just in case, backup routes and the nearest hospitals. They organize the motorcade, run background checks, and work with local police at every stop. It’s an enormous undertaking, and they do it seamlessly.

The only part of this I have a hard time with is the size of the motorcade. I understand why it’s necessary, but it drives me crazy to see people sitting in traffic that I’ve caused. This feels especially problematic when I’m campaigning—shutting down highways seemed like the quickest way to make people resent me, which was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do. So I always ask the lead agent to avoid using lights and sirens whenever possible. I’m also embarrassed to admit that I do a fair amount of backseat driving. That’s pretty rich coming from someone who hasn’t driven a car regularly in twenty-five years. Luckily, the agents are too polite to tell me to put a sock in it.

On a typical day on the trail, after leaving the house, our motorcade of two or three cars pulls up right to the plane on the tarmac. Door-to-door service is both a security must and an extremely nice perk. For the primaries and the beginning of the general, we flew in planes with nine or ten seats. The traveling press had a plane of their own, which took extra coordination. Eventually we chartered a Boeing 737 for the general election—big enough for all of us, with “Stronger Together” painted on the side and H logos on the tip of each wing.

The plane was our home away from home for months. For the most part, it served us well. Of course, there were occasional hiccups. One day we were in Little Rock and had to get to Dallas. The plane had a mechanical issue, so they sent another one. While we were waiting on the tarmac, my staff got off the plane to stretch their legs. I decided to close my eyes after a grueling few days. I woke up a few hours later and asked, “Are we there already?” In fact, we hadn’t moved. At a certain point in a long campaign, all sense of time and space disappears.

Over the course of the campaign, we were joined by a number of flight attendants. They were all excellent, but my favorite was Elizabeth Rivalsi. She’s a trained nutritionist and made fresh, delicious food for us in her kitchen in Queens, which she then packed into containers and brought on the plane: salmon salad, chicken tenders made with almond flour, poblano pepper soup. Her surprise smash hit was brownies made out of chickpea flour. She also had a big basket full of snacks that she regularly replenished with different items. It was a little adventure every time we boarded and checked out the stash. I have a weakness for Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers and was delighted to find out that 55 goldfish were only 150 calories—not bad! One time, Liz brought something I hadn’t tried before: Flavor Blasted Goldfish. We passed around the bag and discussed whether it was better than the original. Some of my staff thought yes, which was incorrect.

As you can tell, we took eating seriously. Someone once asked what we talked about on long flights. “Food!” we chorused. It’s funny how much you look forward to the next meal when you’re living out of a suitcase. In 2008, we often relied on junk food to see us through; I remember a lot of pizza with sliced jalapeños delivered right to the plane. This time I was determined that we would all be healthier. I asked friends for good on-the-go snack recommendations. A few days later, shipments of canned salmon, as well as Quest and Kind protein bars, arrived at my house, which we lugged onto the plane in canvas totes. When the Quest bars got cold, they were too hard to eat, so we sat on them for a few minutes to warm them up, with as much dignity as one can muster at such a moment.

I also splurge every now and again on burgers and fries and enjoy every bite.

Several of us put hot sauce on everything. I’ve been a fan since 1992, when I became convinced it boosted my immune system, as research now shows that it does. We were always on the lookout for new concoctions. One favorite is called Ninja Squirrel Sriracha. Julie the videographer came back from vacation in Belize with four little bottles of the best hot sauce any of us have ever had: Marie Sharp’s. We immediately loved the red habanero pepper flavor the most. Everyone quietly jockeyed for that bottle, then handed it over sheepishly when confronted. Eventually we realized we could just order more, and peace returned.

Then there was the food we eat all over the country. We had a few favorite spots: a Middle Eastern takeout place in Detroit; a Cuban restaurant by the airport in Miami; lattes made with honey and lavender from a bakery in Des Moines. At the Iowa State Fair, in the 100-degree August heat, I drank about a gallon of lemonade. Nick handed me a pork chop on a stick, which I devoured. When we got back to the plane, I told him, “I want you to know that I did not eat that pork chop on a stick because it is politically necessary. I ate that pork chop on a stick because it was delicious.” He nodded wordlessly and kept eating his own state fair discovery: red velvet funnel cake.

One hot night in Omaha, Nebraska, I was consumed with the desire for an ice cream bar—the simple kind, just vanilla ice cream with a chocolate shell. Connolly called an advance staffer, who kindly picked some up from the drugstore and met us at the plane on our way out of town. We said thank you and devoured them before they could melt.

One of my favorite places to eat and drink is the Hotel at Kirkwood Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It’s run by hospitality and culinary students from Kirkwood Community College, and they do a great job. On one of our first visits, I ordered a vodka martini with olives, as cold as they could make it. Cecile Richards, the indomitable leader of Planned Parenthood and a Texan, was with me, and she insisted I try it with Tito’s Handmade Vodka, the pride of Austin. It was a great drink. After that, whenever we stay at Kirkwood, the waiter sends over an ice-cold Tito’s martini with olives, without me even having to order it.

We take birthdays and holidays seriously on the road. We put up decorations on board for Halloween and Christmas, and there’s always a supply of birthday cakes on hand. We can’t light candles—no fire allowed on the plane—so we tell the birthday boy or girl to pretend that they’re lit and make a wish. We even found an iPhone app that simulates a lighter, to take the game further, which we also used to “light” the menorah we had on board during Hanukkah.

I am famously hard to surprise on my birthday, but for 2016, my team managed to sneak a cake into my hotel suite in Miami and gather silently in the living room while I was on the phone in the bedroom. When I walked out, they both startled and delighted me with an enthusiastic rendition of “Happy Birthday” and a chocolate cake with turquoise frosting. Since it was still early in the morning, we brought the cake with us on the plane to eat later. The night before, we had all celebrated together with an Adele concert. Perfect.

My team and I lived a lot of life together during our year and a half on the road. Families changed. Babies were born. Beloved friends and family passed away. Some people got engaged; some got separated. We raised a glass when Lorella Praeli, our director of Latino outreach, took the oath to become an American citizen. Several of us traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, a few weeks after the campaign began to hit the dance floor at Jake Sullivan’s wedding to Maggie Goodlander. We were often away from home, under the gun, pushing ourselves as hard as we could to win. As a result, we relied on one another. We came to know one another’s habits and preferences. We’d often gather in my room in the evenings to order room service and talk about that day’s news coverage or go over the next day’s schedule. We watched the Olympics together, and the Republican debates. Both inspired yelling, though of different kinds.

We could be impatient with one another—frustrated, exhausted, demoralized—but we also made one another laugh, broke hard news gently, kept our wits about us, and always stayed focused on the road ahead.

It was grueling. Sometimes it wasn’t fun at all. But it was also wonderful.

Every day on the trail was packed with events: rallies, roundtables, interviews, fund-raisers, OTRs (“off-the-records,” or unannounced visits to shops, parks, libraries, schools, hospitals—really anywhere).

When we landed in a city, we’d jump from event to event. Sometimes our “drive time” would stretch to an hour or more. To make the most of it, we would schedule radio interviews back to back. I’d also FaceTime with Charlotte, who was now old enough to kind of have a conversation with me. I’d cheer as she spun around in her tutu. We’d sing songs together. Then I’d blow kisses, hang up, and head off to another event.

Rallies are a whole other world. It’s thrilling to hear a crowd cheer for you. It’s thrilling to hear them cheer for your ideas. But I’ll admit that no matter how many times I’ve stood before large crowds, it’s always a little daunting. Our rallies were diverse, boisterous, and happy—the kind of place you could bring your hundred-year-old mother or your one-year-old son. I loved seeing all the homemade posters kids would wave while smiling ear to ear. One of the best things about our campaign logo (the H with the → arrow) was that anyone can draw it, even little kids. We wanted children to spread out poster boards on their kitchen tables, grab markers and glitter pens, and go to town. They sent a lot of homemade H art to our campaign headquarters. We covered the walls with it.

For the music at our rallies, we chose a lot of empowering women artists—Sara Bareilles, Andra Day, Jennifer Lopez, Katy Perry, and Rachel Platten—as well as songs from Marc Anthony, Stevie Wonder, Pharrell Williams, and John Legend and the Roots. We loved to see our crowds singing along to the music. To this day, I can’t hear “Fight Song,” “Roar,” or “Rise Up” without getting emotional.

Some people came to our rallies again and again. I got to know a few of them. A woman named Janelle came with her husband and daughter to a rally in Iowa headlined by Katy Perry, the first of many she did for me. Janelle had a homemade sign: “Thirteenth Chemo Yesterday. Three More. Hear Me Roar!” She was in the process of fighting breast cancer. I was with Bill, and we walked over to introduce ourselves. We had a nice long talk. Over the next eleven months, I saw her many times. She’d visit me on the trail, update me on her health, and her daughter would tell me how second grade was going. Janelle kept promising me that she’d see me at my inauguration. I kept telling her I’d hold her to it and she’d better be there. For my second debate against Trump in Saint Louis, I invited her to come as my guest.

My staff would bring groups of people backstage to meet me before I spoke, and those brief conversations were often very meaningful. I met a lot of women in their eighties and nineties who said how excited they were to finally vote for a woman for President. Many dressed up in pantsuits and pearls for the occasion. I imagined myself in thirty years, putting on nice clothes and going to hear my candidate speak. One, Ruline Steininger, even caucused for me in Iowa when she was 102 years old. She made it very clear that she was going to be around to vote for me on Election Day, and she was.

At an event at a large arena in New Hampshire, I stepped into a side room before going out to speak and met a group of public school employees. One of them, a man named Keith, who worked in a school library, told me his story. Keith was his mother’s caregiver. She had Alzheimer’s disease. He couldn’t afford adult day care or a home health aide, so he had to bring his mom with him to work every day. That stopped me in my tracks. He got a little choked up talking to me, and I got a little choked up hearing it. I thanked him for sharing his story. Later, I told my policy staff, who were already working on plans for Alzheimer’s research and elder care, to think even bigger.

On the rope lines at rallies, I encountered a feature of modern campaigning that has become far more prevalent since 2008: the selfie. There is no stopping the selfie. This is now how we mark a moment together. And to be clear, if you see me in the world and want a selfie and I’m not on the phone or racing to get somewhere, I’ll be glad to take one with you. But I think selfies come at a cost. Let’s talk instead! Do you have something to share? I want to hear it (provided it’s not deeply insulting—I have limits). I’d love to know your name and where you’re from and how things are going with you. That feels real to me. A selfie is so impersonal—although it does give your wrist a break from autographs, now obsolete.

Roundtable events were special. As I mentioned earlier, they gave me a chance to hear directly from people in a setting in which they felt comfortable. Sometimes those conversations were searing. I met a ten-year-old girl in Las Vegas who took a deep breath and described in a trembling voice how terrified she was of her parents being deported because they were undocumented. Everyone in that room wanted to give her a hug, but I was the lucky one. She came over and sat on my lap as I said what I’d say to Chelsea whenever she was anxious as a little girl: Don’t you worry. Let me do the worrying for you. And also, you are very brave.

We tried to make time for OTRs, seeing local sights and dropping by local businesses, whenever we could. If we were running late, these would be the first to fall off the schedule—all the more reason not to announce them, so no one would be disappointed if we couldn’t make it. My personal preference for an OTR was anywhere that sold kids’ toys, clothes, or books. I would load up on gear for my grandchildren and the new babies of friends and staffers. I also picked up little presents for Bill on the road: ties, shirts, cuff links, a watch. He loves nothing more than to get something neat from a craftsman somewhere in America. It’s just about his favorite thing.

For me, fund-raisers were a little more complicated than other campaign events. Even after all these years, it’s hard for me to ask for other people’s money. It’s hard to ask someone to host an event for you in their home or business. But until the day comes that campaign finance reform is signed into law and upheld by the Supreme Court, if you want to run a viable national campaign, there’s no way around it: you’re going to have to do some serious fund-raising, online, by phone, by mail, and in person. I reject the idea that it’s impossible to do it while maintaining your integrity and independence. Bernie Sanders attacked me for raising money from people who worked in finance. But I reminded him that President Obama had raised more money from Wall Street than anyone in history, and that didn’t stop him from imposing tough new rules to curb risk and prevent future financial crashes. I would have done the same, and my donors knew it.

I was grateful to everyone who gave money to our campaign or helped raise it. We tried hard to use every penny wisely. The campaign staff will attest that Robby Mook in particular was downright stingy about travel expenses and office supplies. Snack budget? Absolutely not. Buy your own chips. Your own hotel room? Not a chance. Find a roommate. And while you’re at it, take the bus instead of the train. We were all in this together: our fund-raising team working around the clock; our national campaign staff living and working on a tight budget; me, flying around the country going to fund-raisers; and our donors, opening their wallets to show their solidarity and support. Our campaign had more than three million donors. The average donation was under $100. And ours was the first campaign in history for which the majority of donors were women. That meant a lot to all of us.

Sometimes we just needed to have some fun. One beautiful summer evening, Jimmy and Jane Buffett hosted a concert for us at their home in the Hamptons on Long Island. I was the first presidential candidate Jimmy ever endorsed, and he wanted to do something special for me. So he, Jon Bon Jovi, and Paul McCartney played a set in a tent full of twinkly lights, and everyone danced on the lawn under the stars. It was magical.

But my favorite events were with kids. They’d sit cross-legged in front of me on the floor, or join me on a couch or drape themselves over chairs, and I’d answer their questions. “What’s your favorite part about running for President?” Meeting kids like you. “Who’s your favorite President?” With lots of love to Bill and President Obama, it’s Abraham Lincoln. “What are you going to do to protect the planet?” Reduce our carbon footprint, invest in clean energy, protect wildlife, and fight pollution. The children listened with great seriousness and asked follow-ups. They were my kind of crowd. They also sometimes told me what was worrying them: for instance, the death of a pet or a grandparent’s illness. Many kids asked what I would do about bullying, which made me want to become President even more. I had an initiative called Better Than Bullying ready to go.

I had a lot of respect for the press corps who traveled with us. For the most part, it was comprised of “embeds”—journalists permanently “embedded” with us from the beginning of the campaign till the end. That meant they got to know us and we got to know them. A lot of the embeds were journalists in their late twenties and early thirties, which made this assignment a big opportunity for them. They worked as long and hard as we did. Some veteran reporters also joined us for stretches. Network anchors and big-time columnists would parachute in for interviews and a taste of the road, but they never stayed long.

The traveling press corps asked tough questions. They were hungry. I had to admire that. With rare exceptions, they were also very professional. I can’t say we were completely comfortable with one another, though. As I write elsewhere in this book, I tend to treat journalists with caution, and I often feel like they focus too much on the wrong things. I understand that political coverage has to be about the horse race, but it’s become almost entirely about that and not about the issues that matter most to our country and to people’s lives. That’s something that has gotten increasingly worse over the years. That’s not entirely the press’s fault: the way we consume news has changed, which makes getting clicks all important, which in turn encourages sensationalism. Still, they’re responsible for their part.

Having said that, I respected them. Once in a while, we’d go out for drinks or dinner as a group and have a wide-ranging, off-the-record talk. I’d bring Halloween candy and birthday cake back to their cabin on the plane. They’d sometimes roll oranges with questions written in Sharpie up the aisle and try to reach my seat all the way in front. Sometimes on night flights, we’d put on music and open the wine and beer. When any of them were sick or dealing with family problems—that happens during a long campaign—I’d ask Nick to keep me updated. Some of the journalists also started dating one another—that also happens during a long campaign—and since nothing makes me happier than playing matchmaker, I was always eager for the scoop. I also was delighted that many of the journalists assigned to our campaign were women. During the 1972 presidential campaign, the reporters who traveled with the candidates were called the boys on the bus. By 2016, it was the girls on the plane.

A lot of days and nights on the trail can blur into one another. You’d be surprised how many times we had to ask each other, “Were we in Florida or North Carolina yesterday?” It wasn’t out of the ordinary for two people to answer at once, but with different states. But some days stood out, for better or worse.

One of the best days ever was November 2, 2016: game seven of the World Series, the night the Chicago Cubs made history. We were in Arizona for one of our final rallies. It was a big one: more than twenty-five thousand people came out. Before I went onstage, I asked for an update on the game. It was the top of the sixth inning. The Cubs led the Cleveland Indians 5–3. Gulp.

Like everyone in Cubs Nation, I had been following the playoffs and the series with all my fingers crossed. I started watching Cubs games with my dad when I was a little girl, sitting on his lap or on the floor near his chair in the den. We’d cheer and groan, and at the end of the season, we’d say, “Next year, we’ll win the Series!” (To assuage my disappointment, I also became a Yankees fan. It didn’t feel disloyal, because they were in the other league.)

Some people on my staff were fans, too—no one more than Connolly, who, like me, grew up outside Chicago. She carried a huge W flag with her on the road, and every time the Cubs won, putting them one step closer to their first world championship in 108 years, she draped it on the bulkhead of the plane or wore it like a cape. Whenever we could, we watched the games together, holding our breath.

That night in Arizona, when the rally was over, the first thing I asked was “Who won?” No one yet. The score was 6–6 in the ninth inning. We had a fifteen-minute drive back to the hotel. But that meant maybe missing the end of the game. We couldn’t risk it. Instead, Philippe, who was traveling with us for the final stretch, pulled it up on his iPad, and we all stood around him to watch, standing on a section of grass in the parking lot. Capricia Marshall, one of my close friends and the former Chief of Protocol at the State Department, was there too. She’s from Cleveland and is a big Indians fan, so she did some trash-talking.

Following an anxiety-inducing rain delay, the game went into extra innings. We stayed put in the parking lot. When Chicago recorded the final out in the bottom of the tenth to edge the Indians 8–7, Connolly was the happiest I’ve ever seen her. I reached for that W flag, and we stretched it out between us and took a million photos. Then we drove back to the hotel, ordered a bunch of food to my hotel suite, and watched the highlight reel—especially reliever Mike Montgomery’s game-winning save, which he pulled off with a giant smile on his face, like he had all the confidence in the world that he was about to make our dreams come true.

A much less fun day was September 11, 2016, the day I was sick at the National September 11 Memorial Museum. It means a lot to me to commemorate that solemn day, so missing this event wasn’t an option. But I felt awful. I’d been fighting a cough from what I thought was allergies for at least a month and saw my internist, Dr. Lisa Bardack, on September 9. She told me the cough was actually pneumonia, and I should take a few days off. I said I couldn’t. She gave me strong antibiotics, and I went on with my schedule, including filming Between Two Ferns with comic Zach Galifianakis that afternoon. The next day, I stuck to a scheduled debate prep session. On Sunday, when I got to the memorial, the sun was beaming down. My head ached. You know the rest.

In a funny twist, when I arrived, one of the first people I saw was Senator Chuck Schumer, my friend and former colleague. “Hillary!” he said. “How are you? I just had pneumonia!” At this point, the fact that I had pneumonia wasn’t public, so this was totally out of the blue. The difference between us was that Chuck didn’t have to go out in public as a candidate when he was under the weather. He told me he had followed his doctor’s orders and stayed home for a week. Looking back, I should have done the same. Instead, I ended up having to parade in front of the cameras after leaving my daughter’s apartment—where I had gone to rest—to reassure the world that I was fine.

Luckily, most of my memories of being in New York during the campaign were a lot better.

I raced all over the city for the New York primary, hitting all five boroughs. I played dominoes in Harlem, drank boba tea in Queens, spoke at historic Snug Harbor on Staten Island, ate cheesecake at Junior’s in Brooklyn, rode the subway in the Bronx (struggling with the MetroCard reader like a typical commuter), and had ice cream at a shop called Mikey Likes It on the Lower East Side. As I tucked into my ice cream, an English reporter who was part of the traveling press corps that day shouted, “How many calories are in that?” All of us, including the rest of the press, booed in response, me louder than anyone. In the end, we won the New York primary by 16 points.

I went on Saturday Night Live and taped that episode of Funny or Die’s Between Two Ferns, which was surely one of the more surreal experiences of my life. It’s an odd thing to be a politician on a comedy show. Your job isn’t to be funny—you’re not, especially compared with the actual comedians, so don’t even try. Your job is to be the straight guy. That’s pretty easy, especially for me, whose life is basically taking whatever’s thrown my way. The most important thing is to be game. Luckily, I’m game for a lot. SNL asked me to play a character named Val the Bartender, who would pour drinks for Kate McKinnon, who played me. “Would you sing ‘Lean On Me’ together?” they asked. I said yes, even though I have a terrible singing voice. (For a couple weeks after, people would shout, “Hey, Val!” at me on the trail.) On Between Two Ferns, when Zach Galifianakis asked me, “I’m going to sneak up on you in a gorilla mask, is that cool?” I said sure. Why not? You only live once.

I marched in the 2016 New York City Pride Parade. Back in the day, in 2000, I was the first First Lady in history to march in a Pride parade. This time we had a big contingent from Hillary for America marching together behind a “Love Trumps Hate” banner. The New York City crowds cheered for us with gusto.

Most importantly, Bill and I welcomed the arrival of our grandson, Aidan, on June 18, 2016, at Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was a sunny day with hardly a cloud in the sky—a prediction, perhaps, of his personality. He is the happiest little boy.

It’s hard to ask more of a city than that.

There’s one more group of days I want to describe, because they’re unlike any other: debate prep.

It’s the debate prep team’s job to put me through my paces so I’m not hearing anything for the first time during the actual debate. My team, led by Ron Klain, Karen Dunn, and Jake, helped me prepare for all twelve debates. Ron is a lawyer and veteran political strategist who served in the Clinton and Obama White Houses. Karen, also a lawyer, worked for me in the Senate and later for President Obama. And Jake, who knew every word of every one of our policies, was a champion debater in college and grad school. All three had helped prepare President Obama for his debates as well. They worked with two indefatigable campaign staffers, Sara Solow and Kristina Costa, to produce thick briefing binders for me, covering hundreds of topics. As a lifelong fan of school supplies, I fussed over the tabs and dividers and armed myself with a bouquet of highlighters in every color. I spent evenings studying in hotel rooms across America and at my kitchen table. By the end, I knew my opponents’ positions inside and out—in some cases, better than they did.

We held most of our debate prep sessions at the Doral Arrowwood, a hotel near my home in Westchester County. We were joined by more people from my team: campaign consultants Joel Benenson, Mandy Grunwald, and Jim Margolis; Tony Carrk, our head of research and an Obama debate-prep veteran; and Bob Barnett, who had helped prepare Democratic candidates for debates since Walter Mondale. We would gather at noon and work late into the evening. We’d practice specific exchanges, fine-tune answers, and try to plan out dramatic “moments” that would help shape the coverage of the debate, although often the most important clashes are the hardest to predict. The hotel would supply us with a smorgasbord that they’d replenish throughout the day—sandwiches, salads, fruit, bagels, and chicken soup. They also had a freezer full of Oreo ice cream bars that we kept emptying and they kept refilling. Anytime you looked around the room, you’d see someone holding one or the stick and wrapper on the table in front of them.

Debate prep helped me get ready emotionally for some of the most consequential moments of the campaign. A presidential debate is theater. It’s a boxing match. It’s high-stakes surgery. Pick your metaphor. One wrong move—one roll of the eyes or slip of the tongue—can spell defeat. In debate prep, I practiced keeping my cool while my staff fired hard questions at me. They’d misrepresent my record. They’d impugn my character. Sometimes I’d snap back and feel better for getting it off my chest. I’d think to myself, “Now that I’ve done that here, I don’t have to do it on live TV.” It worked.

I remember becoming frustrated with my team’s advice at one point. I couldn’t quite understand how they were recommending I handle a potentially contentious exchange with Bernie. Finally, I said to Jake, who had been peppering me with questions and grimacing at my answers, “Just show me! You do it!” So he became me, and I took on the role of attack dog against myself. It was a truly surreal experience. Finally, he mock-pleaded for mercy: “You’re right, you’re right, do it your way.”

Then there was Philippe-as-Trump. That was a sight to see. The first time I walked into the room for a prep session with him, he was already at the podium, staring at the distant wall and refusing to make eye contact with me. “Oh God, he’s ready to be obnoxious,” I said. None of us had any idea.

Philippe took his character study very seriously, including the physicality. Trump looms and lurks on a debate stage, so Philippe did too, always hanging out on the edge of my peripheral vision. He wore a suit like Trump’s (a little baggy), a tie like Trump’s (way too long), and actual Trump-brand cuff links and a Trump-brand watch he found on eBay. He wore three-and-a-half-inch shoe heighteners, flailed his arms like Trump, shrugged and mugged like Trump. I didn’t know whether to applaud or fire him.

The weeks that Philippe spent studying tapes of Trump in the Republican debates paid off. He knew how Trump’s mind worked: how a question about Social Security would take Trump on a twisted journey into government waste, undocumented immigrants, and terrorism, always terrorism. He would say the craziest things—which I know Philippe is capable of doing all on his own, but he made clear to us from that first day that 90 percent of what he’d say was straight from the horse’s mouth, with the remaining 10 percent being his best guess as to what Trump would say. I never knew which was which. In the end, Trump hardly said a thing in any of the three debates that I was hearing for the first time.

It quickly became evident that normal debate prep wouldn’t work this time. Trump wouldn’t answer any question directly. He was rarely linear in his thinking or speaking. He digressed into nonsense and then digressed even more. There was no point in refuting his arguments like it was a normal debate—it was almost impossible to identify what his arguments even were, especially since they changed minute to minute. Winning, we realized, would mean hitting hard (since he couldn’t bear it), staying cool (since he often resorted to viciousness when cornered), throwing his own words back at him (since he couldn’t stand hearing them), and making my own arguments with clarity and precision (since he couldn’t do the same for himself).

At our last practice before the first debate, I walked in to find Philippe-as-Trump and Ron-as-me practicing the opening handshake. They were half joking, but Philippe had raised the issue that, unlike two men debating who just meet in the middle and shake hands, there was a question of whether Trump would try to hug or—dare I say it—kiss me. Not out of affinity or chivalry, but rather to create a moment where he would tower over me, making it clear he was a guy and I was a girl. Fair enough, I said, let’s practice. Philippe came at me with his arms outstretched. I tried to stiff-arm him and get away. It ended with him literally chasing me across the room, putting me in a bear hug, and kissing the back of my head. What can I say? We were committed. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth pulling up on YouTube.

It stopped being funny when we saw the Access Hollywood tape. I was not going to shake that man’s hand. When we came onstage in the actual debate, I think my body language made it pretty clear he should stay away. And he did. But throughout that debate, which was town-hall style—meaning we weren’t confined to standing at podiums and could walk around the stage—Trump stalked and lurked. Philippe had done the same thing during prep.

Several times a session—and we had twenty-one of them in the general—just as he had warned, Philippe-as-Trump would say something so outlandish, none of us could quite believe it. Then he’d tell us it was almost verbatim from a Trump rally, interview, or primary debate. One day Philippe-as-Trump started complaining about how the “Mike guy” screwed up and the “Mike guy” shouldn’t get paid. We were totally confused but kept going. When the ninety-minute session was over, I asked, “Who is Mike?” It turns out he was saying “mic guy.” Philippe explained that, on two occasions, Trump had blamed the microphone for bad audio and said the contractor shouldn’t get paid. After his dismal performance in the first debate, Trump really did say it was because his mic had been sabotaged. Philippe had called it.

In the end, thanks to our practice sessions, I felt that deep sense of confidence that comes with rigorous preparation. Like accepting the nomination, these debates were a first for me. The pressure you feel when you’re about to walk onstage is almost unbearable—almost, but not quite. You bear it by working hard to get ready. You bear it by having good people by your side. You bear it by not just hoping but knowing you can handle a lot, because you already have.

At least, that’s what always worked for me.

No matter how I spent the day or where in the country I happened to be, I always called Bill before falling asleep. We’d catch each other up on the latest news about the election or what was happening with our family and friends. Sometimes we vented frustrations about how the campaign was going. Then we’d take a moment to figure out when we’d see each other next, and say good night. I’d fall asleep feeling calmer and wake up in the morning with new energy and a list of new ideas to pursue. Even on the hardest days, those conversations kept me grounded and at peace.