What Happened

Some people are blessed with a strong immune system. Others aren’t as lucky. Their defenses have been worn down by disease or injury, so they’re susceptible to all kinds of infections that a healthy person would easily fight off. When that happens to someone you love, it’s terrible to watch.

The “body politic” works in much the same way. Our democracy has built-in defenses that keep us strong and healthy, including the checks and balances written into our Constitution. Our Founding Fathers believed that one of the most important defenses would be an informed citizenry that could make sound judgments based on facts and reason. Losing that is like losing an immune system, leaving a democracy vulnerable to all manner of attack. And a democracy, like a body, cannot stay strong through repeated injuries.

In 2016 our democracy was assaulted by a foreign adversary determined to mislead our people, enflame our divisions, and throw an election to its preferred candidate. That attack succeeded because our immune system had been slowly eroded over years. Many Americans had lost faith in the institutions that previous generations relied on for objective information, including government, academia, and the press, leaving them vulnerable to a sophisticated misinformation campaign. There are many reasons why this happened, but one is that a small group of right-wing billionaires—people like the Mercer family and Charles and David Koch—recognized long ago that, as Stephen Colbert once joked, “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” More generally, the right spent a lot of time and money building an alternative reality. Think of a partisan petri dish where science is denied, lies masquerade as truth, and paranoia flourishes. Their efforts were amplified in 2016 by a presidential candidate who trafficked in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet; a candidate who deflected any criticism by attacking others with made-up facts and an uncanny gift for humiliating zingers. He helped to further blur news and entertainment, reality TV and reality.

As a result, by the time Vladimir Putin came along, our democracy was already far sicker than we realized.

Now that the Russians have infected us and seen how weak our defenses are, they’ll keep at it. Maybe other foreign powers will join them. They’ll also continue targeting our friends and allies. Their ultimate goal is to undermine—perhaps even destroy—Western democracy itself. As the former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, told Congress, “If there has ever been a clarion call for vigilance and action against a threat to the very foundation of our democratic political system, this episode is it.”

This should concern all Americans—Republicans, Democrats, Independents, everyone. We need to get to the bottom of it. The 2016 election may be over, but we have new elections coming up soon. I’m going to lay out what is known in as much detail as I can, so we can try to understand what happened and what we can do to prevent it from happening again. There’s a lot we still don’t know, investigations are ongoing, and the story changes daily with breaking news. Trump, his allies, and others have vigorously denied accusations of wrongdoing. You can look at the facts and decide for yourself. But what should be beyond doubt is that foreign interference in our elections is wrong, period. And the threat we face, from without and within, is bigger than one campaign, one party, or one election. The only way to heal our democracy and protect it for the future is to understand the threat and defeat it.

V for Vendetta (and Vladimir)

President Obama once compared Vladimir Putin to a “bored kid at the back of the classroom.” “He’s got that kind of slouch,” Obama said. When I sat with Putin in meetings, he looked more like one of those guys on the subway who imperiously spread their legs wide, encroaching on everyone else’s space, as if to say, “I take what I want,” and “I have so little respect for you that I’m going to act as if I’m lounging at home in my bathrobe.” They call it “manspreading.” That was Putin.

I’ve dealt with a lot of male leaders in my life, but Putin is in a class by himself. A former KGB spy with a taste for over-the-top macho theatrics and baroque violence (a public inquiry in the United Kingdom concluded that he probably approved the killing of one of his enemies in London by poisoning his tea with polonium-210, a rare radioactive isotope), Putin has emerged in the popular imagination as an arch-villain straight out of a James Bond movie. Yet he’s also perennially misunderstood and underestimated. George W. Bush famously said that after looking Putin in the eye, he found him “very straightforward and trustworthy,” and was “able to get a sense of his soul.” My somewhat tongue-in-cheek response was: “He was a KGB agent—by definition, he doesn’t have a soul.” I don’t think Vladimir appreciated that one.

Our relationship has been sour for a long time. Putin doesn’t respect women and despises anyone who stands up to him, so I’m a double problem. After I criticized one of his policies, he told the press, “It’s better not to argue with women,” but went on to call me weak. “Maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman,” he joked. Hilarious.

Putin still smolders over what he views as the humiliations of the 1990s, when Russia lost its old Soviet dominions, and the Clinton administration presided over NATO’s expansion. And things got a lot worse between us during my time as Secretary of State.

When President Obama and I came into office in 2009, Putin and his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, had swapped jobs as a way of thwarting constitutionally required term limits. Surprisingly, Medvedev showed some independence and a willingness to pursue better relations with the United States. We knew Putin was still the real power in Russia but decided to see if we could find some areas of shared interest where progress might be possible. That was the origin of the much-maligned “reset.” It led to several concrete successes, including a new nuclear arms control treaty, new sanctions on Iran and North Korea, a much-needed supply route to equip our troops in Afghanistan, increased trade and investment, and expanded counterterrorism cooperation. In the spring of 2011, President Medvedev agreed to abstain on the UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to protect civilians in Libya from the dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, a decision that angered Putin.

President Obama and I agreed that seeking pragmatic cooperation with Russia on certain issues was not inconsistent with also standing up for our values and showing support for the democratic aspirations of the Russian people. I felt a responsibility to speak out against the Kremlin’s repression of human rights in Russia, especially the intimidation and murder of journalists and political opponents. In October 2009, I was in Moscow and did an interview with one of the last remaining independent radio stations in the country. I expressed support for human rights and civil society, and I said that I thought a lot of Russians wanted the thugs who attacked journalists brought to justice. I knew Putin wouldn’t be happy with me saying these things on his own turf, but I felt that if the United States accepted a gag order on these issues, that decision would reverberate, not just in Russia but also around the world.

The KGB taught Putin to be suspicious of everyone. Russia’s troubles in the 1990s and the “color revolutions” of the 2000s—the string of popular revolts that toppled authoritarian regimes in several former Soviet bloc countries—took him from suspicious to paranoid. He came to view popular dissent as an existential threat. When he heard me and other Western leaders voice support for civil society in Russia, he saw it as a plot to undermine him.

For Putin, a pivotal moment came in 2011. In September he announced he would run for President again. In December there were widespread reports of fraud in parliamentary elections, which sparked domestic protests and international condemnation. At a conference in Lithuania focused on promoting democracy and human rights in Europe, I expressed America’s concerns. “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted,” I said, “and that means they deserve fair, free, transparent elections and leaders who are accountable to them.” Tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets amid chants of “Putin is a thief,” an unprecedented popular challenge to his iron grip on the country. Putin, more paranoid than ever, thought it was a conspiracy orchestrated from Washington. He blamed me in particular, saying I “gave them a signal.”

Putin quashed the protests and once again became President, but he was now running scared and seething with anger. In the fall of 2011, Putin had published an essay promising to regain Russia’s regional and global influence. I read it as a plan to “re-Sovietize” the lost empire and said so publicly. Once back in office, Putin moved to put his vision into action. He consolidated power and cracked down on any remaining domestic dissent. He also took a more combative tone toward the West and nursed his personal grudge against me. By the way, that’s not just how I saw it; grudge is also the word the U.S. government used in its official assessment.

In a series of memos, I warned President Obama that things were changing in Russia, and America would have to take a harder line with Putin. Our relationship was likely to get worse before it got better, I told the President, and we needed to make it clear to Putin that aggressive actions would have consequences.

There’s a Bear in the Woods

During Obama’s second term, when I was out of office, things did indeed go from bad to worse. When popular protests in Ukraine forced the country’s corrupt, pro-Moscow leader to flee, Putin swung into action. He launched an operation to subvert and seize Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, a vacation destination for wealthy Russians. That was followed by further efforts to destabilize eastern Ukraine, home to many ethnic Russians, eventually leading to a protracted civil war.

Watching from the sidelines, I was struck by the sophistication of the operation. It was much more effective than Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. Nationalist propaganda on television, radio, and social media radicalized ethnic Russians, while cyberattacks muzzled opposing voices. Undercover Russian paramilitary special forces swept into Crimea to organize protests, seize buildings, and intimidate or co-opt Ukrainian officials. Meanwhile, the Kremlin denied it all, despite the fact that the whole world could see photos of Russian soldiers carrying Russian weapons, driving Russian vehicles, and speaking with Russian accents. Putin called them indigenous “self-defense groups.” Ukrainians called them “little green men.” Once the occupation was a fait accompli, the Russians staged a rigged referendum to give themselves a patina of popular sovereignty and then annexed the peninsula, formally making it part of Russia.

The Russians did one other thing, which didn’t get enough attention at the time but in retrospect was a sign of things to come. In early 2014, they released on Twitter and YouTube what they claimed was an audio recording of a private conversation between two veteran American diplomats, our Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoff Pyatt, and my friend and former advisor Toria Nuland, who was then the top State Department official for Europe. On the Russian tape, Toria used colorful language to express her exasperation about European foot-dragging over Ukraine. Moscow clearly hoped her words would drive a wedge between America and our allies. The incident didn’t have lasting diplomatic repercussions, but it did show that the Russians were not just stealing information for intelligence purposes, as all countries do; they were now using social media and strategic leaks to “weaponize” that information.

In the wake of Russia’s Ukraine operations, I expressed my concerns to some of my former national security colleagues. Moscow had clearly developed new capabilities in psychological and information warfare and was willing to use them. I was worried the United States and our allies weren’t prepared to keep up or respond. I knew that in 2013, one of Russia’s top military officers, Valery Gerasimov, had written an article laying out a new strategy for hybrid warfare. In previous generations, the Soviet military had planned to fight large-scale conflicts with massive conventional and nuclear forces. In the twenty-first century, Gerasimov said, the line between war and peace would blur, and Russia should prepare for under-the-radar conflicts waged through propaganda, cyberattacks, paramilitary operations, financial and energy manipulation, and covert subversion. The operations in Crimea and eastern Ukraine (and, I would argue, the harboring of NSA leaker Edward Snowden) proved that Putin was putting Gerasimov’s theory into practice.

Sometimes these tactics are called “active measures.” Thomas Rid, a professor of security studies at King’s College London, offered a good primer in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 2017. “Active measures are semicovert or covert intelligence operations to shape an adversary’s political decisions,” he explained. “The tried and tested way of active measures is to use an adversary’s weaknesses against himself,” and the rise of the internet and social media has created many new opportunities. As Senator Sheldon Whitehouse put it, “The Russians have been at this for a long time,” and now “they’ve adapted old methods to new technologies—making use of social media, malware, and complex financial transactions.”

I was also alarmed to see Russian money, propaganda, or other support aiding right-wing nationalist parties across Europe, including Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, Alternative for Germany (AfD), and Austria’s Freedom Party. According to the Washington Post, the Kremlin has also cultivated leaders of right-wing American organizations such as the NRA, the National Organization for Marriage, and individuals like the evangelist Franklin Graham. Putin has positioned himself as the leader of an authoritarian, xenophobic international movement that wants to expel immigrants, break up the European Union, weaken the Atlantic Alliance, and roll back much of the progress achieved since World War II. People laugh when Putin has himself photographed riding horses shirtless, winning judo matches, and driving race cars. But the macho stunts are part of a strategy. He has made himself an icon to traditionalists everywhere who resent their increasingly open, diverse, and liberal societies. That’s why he formed a close alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, passed vicious antigay laws, and decriminalized domestic violence. It’s all about projecting an image of traditional masculinity, Christian morality, and white nationalist purity and power.

During the campaign, I asked my team to start working on a more aggressive strategic approach toward Russia. I didn’t want to be dragged into a new Cold War, but the best way to avoid conflict and keep the door open for future cooperation would be to send Putin a message of strength and resolve on Day One. It’s been said that he subscribes to Vladimir Lenin’s old adage: “Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.” I wanted to be sure that when Putin looked to America, he saw steel, not mush.

I wanted to go further than the Obama administration, which resisted providing defensive arms to the Ukrainian government or establishing a no-fly zone in Syria, where Putin had launched a military intervention to prop up the murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad. I also intended to increase our investment in cybersecurity and pursue an all-hands-on-deck effort to secure cooperation between the government and the private sector on protecting vital national and commercial infrastructure from attacks, including nuclear power plants, electrical grids, dams, and the financial system.

All of this is to say that I had my eyes open. I knew Putin was a growing threat. I knew he had a personal vendetta against me and deep resentment toward the United States.

Yet I never imagined that he would have the audacity to launch a massive covert attack against our own democracy, right under our noses—and that he’d get away with it.

Since the election, we’ve learned a lot about the scope and sophistication of the Russian plot, and more information comes to light every day. But even during the campaign, we knew enough to realize that we were facing, in the words of Senator Harry Reid, “one of the gravest threats to our democracy since the Cold War.” And it just got worse from there. I won’t try to provide you a definitive account of every twist and turn of this saga—there are plenty of other sources for that—but I will try to share what I experienced, how it felt, and what I think we need to do as a nation to protect ourselves for the future.

The Budding Bromance

It was strange from the start. Why did Donald Trump keep blowing kisses to Vladimir Putin? He said he would give Putin an A for leadership, and described the Russian President as “highly respected within his country and beyond.” Trump reveled in reports that Putin had called him “brilliant,” even though the more accurate translation was “colorful.” In a particularly telling exchange on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Trump defended Putin’s alleged murder of journalists. “At least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” Trump said. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he added, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.” No previous American presidential candidate would ever have dreamt of trashing our country like that or suggesting moral equivalency between American democracy and Russian autocracy. No wonder Putin liked Trump.

What was going on here? I was genuinely puzzled. This was far outside the bounds of normal American politics, especially for a Republican. How was the Party of Reagan letting itself become the Party of Putin?

I thought there were three plausible explanations for the budding Trump-Putin “bromance.”

First, Trump has a bizarre fascination with dictators and strongmen. He praised Kim Jong-un, the murderous young ruler of North Korea, for his skill at consolidating power and eliminating dissent—“You’ve gotta give him credit,” Trump said. He also talked admiringly about the 1989 Chinese massacre of unarmed student protesters at Tiananmen Square; he said it showed strength. Strength is what it’s all about. Trump doesn’t think in terms of morality or human rights, he thinks only in terms of power and dominance. Might makes right. Putin thinks the same way, albeit much more strategically. And Trump appears to have fallen hard for Putin’s macho “bare-chested autocrat” act. He doesn’t just like Putin—he seems to want to be like Putin, a white authoritarian leader who could put down dissenters, repress minorities, disenfranchise voters, weaken the press, and amass untold billions for himself. He dreams of Moscow on the Potomac.

Second, despite his utter lack of interest in or knowledge of most foreign policy issues, Trump has a long-standing worldview that aligns well with Putin’s agenda. He is suspicious of American allies, doesn’t think values should play a role in foreign policy, and doesn’t seem to believe the United States should continue carrying the mantle of global leadership. Way back in 1987, Trump spent nearly $100,000 on full-page ads in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe criticizing Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy and urging America to stop defending allies who should be taking care of themselves. Trump said the world was taking advantage of the United States and laughing at us. Nearly thirty years later, he was saying the same things. He referred to America’s alliances as if they were protection rackets, where we could extort weaker countries to pay tribute in exchange for safety. He threatened to abandon NATO and bad-mouthed the European Union. He insulted the leaders of countries such as Britain and Germany. He even got into a Twitter fight with Pope Francis! Given all this, it’s no surprise that, once he became President, Trump bickered with our allies and refused to commit to the bedrock principle of mutual defense at a NATO summit. America’s lost prestige and newfound isolation were embodied in the sad image of the other leaders of Western democracies strolling together down a lovely Italian street while Trump followed in a golf cart, all by himself.

All this was music to Putin’s ears. The Kremlin’s top strategic goal is to weaken the Atlantic Alliance and reduce America’s influence in Europe, leaving the continent ripe for Russian domination. Putin couldn’t ask for a better friend than Donald Trump.

The third explanation was that Trump seems to have extensive financial ties to Russia. In 2008, Trump’s son Don Jr. told investors in Moscow, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets” and “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,” according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant. In 2013, Trump himself said in an interview with David Letterman that he did “a lot of business with the Russians.” A respected golf journalist named James Dodson reported that Trump’s other son, Eric, told him, “We don’t rely on American banks” to fund Trump golf projects, “we have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Without seeing Trump’s tax returns, it’s impossible to determine the full extent of these financial ties. Based on what’s already known, there is good reason to believe that despite repeated bankruptcies and even though most American banks refused to lend to him, Trump, his companies, or partners, according to USA Today, “turned to wealthy Russians and oligarchs from former Soviet republics—several allegedly connected to organized crime.” This was based on a review of court cases and other legal documents. Additionally, in 2008, Trump raised eyebrows by selling a mansion in Palm Beach to a Russian oligarch at an inflated price—$54 million more than he paid for it just four years earlier. In 2013, his Miss Universe pageant in Moscow was partly financed by a billionaire ally of Putin. To build Trump SoHo New York hotel, he partnered with a company called the Bayrock Group and a Russian immigrant named Felix Sater, formerly linked to the mafia, who was previously convicted of money laundering. (USA Today has done great reporting on all of this, if you want to learn more.)

Trump’s advisors also had financial ties to Russia. Paul Manafort, whom Trump hired in March 2016 and promoted to campaign chairman two months later, was a Republican lobbyist who had spent years serving autocrats overseas, most recently making millions working for pro-Putin forces in Ukraine. Then there was Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who had been fired for good cause by President Obama in 2014. Then Flynn accepted money from Putin’s Western-facing propaganda network, Russia Today (RT), and in December 2015 attended RT’s tenth-anniversary gala in Moscow, where he sat at Putin’s table (along with Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein). There was also Carter Page, a former advisor to the Russian gas giant Gazprom, who traveled back and forth to Moscow frequently—including in July 2016, in the middle of the campaign. He seemed to be reading from the Kremlin’s anti-American talking points.

Learning all this over the course of 2015 and 2016 was surreal. It felt like we were peeling an onion, and there was always another layer.

If you add together all these factors—Trump’s affection for tyrants and hostility toward allies, sympathy for Russia’s strategic aims, and alleged financial ties to shady Russian actors—his pro-Putin rhetoric starts to make sense. And this was all out in the open and well known throughout the campaign. It came to a head in late April 2016, when Trump called for improved relations with Russia in a major foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. The Russian Ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, applauded from the front row. (He later attended the Republican National Convention, but avoided ours.)

Republican national security experts were appalled by Trump’s embrace of Putin. So was I. At every opportunity, I warned that allowing Trump to be Commander in Chief would be profoundly dangerous and play directly into Russia’s hands. “It’ll be like Christmas in the Kremlin,” I predicted.

Breach

Then things got stranger.

In late March 2016, FBI agents met with my campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, and other senior staffers at our Brooklyn headquarters to warn us that foreign hackers could be targeting our campaign with phishing emails that tried to trick people into clicking links or entering passwords that would open up access to our network. We were already aware of the threat, because scores if not hundreds of these phishing emails were pouring in. Most were easy to spot, and we had no reason at the time to believe any were successful.

Then, in early June, Marc got a disturbing message from the Democratic National Committee. The DNC’s computer network had been penetrated by hackers thought to be working for the Russian government. According to the New York Times, the FBI had apparently discovered the breach months earlier, in September 2015, and had informed a tech support contractor at the DNC, but never visited the office or did much to follow up. As a former head of the FBI Cyber Division told the Times later, that was a bewildering oversight. “We are not talking about an office that is in the middle of the woods of Montana,” he said. The offices were just a mile and a half apart. After the election, FBI Director Comey admitted, “I might have walked over there myself, knowing what I know now.”

Word didn’t reach the DNC’s leadership until April. They then brought in a respected cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike to figure out what was going on, kick out the hackers, and protect the network from further penetration. The CrowdStrike experts determined that the hackers had likely come from Russia and that they had gained access to a large trove of emails and documents. All of this would become public when the Washington Post broke the story on June 14.

The news was unsettling but not shocking. The Russian government had been attempting to hack sensitive American networks for years, as had other countries, such as China, Iran, and North Korea. In 2014, Russians had breached the State Department’s unclassified system and then moved on to the White House and the Pentagon. They also hacked think tanks, journalists, and politicians.

The general view was that all of these hacks and attempted hacks were fairly run-of-the-mill intelligence gathering, albeit with twenty-first-century techniques. That turned out to be wrong. Something far more insidious was happening. On June 15, one day after the DNC attack became public, a hacker named Guccifer 2.0—thought to be a front for Russian intelligence—claimed credit for the breach and posted a cache of stolen documents. He said he had given thousands more to WikiLeaks, the organization supposedly devoted to radical transparency. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, promised to release “emails related to Hillary Clinton,” although it wasn’t at all clear what that meant.

The publication of stolen files from the DNC was a dramatic turn of events for several reasons. For starters, it showed that Russia was interested in doing more than collecting intelligence on the American political scene—it was actively trying to influence the election. Just as it had done a year earlier with the audio recording of Toria Nuland, Russia was “weaponizing” stolen information. It did not occur to me at the time that anyone associated with Donald Trump might be coordinating with the Russians, but it seemed likely that Putin was trying to help his preferred candidate. After all, he disliked and feared me, and had an ally in Trump. This was underscored when the Trump campaign removed language from the Republican Party platform calling for the United States to provide Ukraine with “lethal defensive weapons”—a gift to Putin that might as well have come with a ribbon and a bow.

Careful analysis of the documents from Guccifer also revealed an alarming prospect: at least one of the files seemed like it could have come from our campaign, not the DNC. Further research suggested that the file might have been stolen from the personal Gmail account of John Podesta, my campaign chairman. We couldn’t be sure, but we feared that more trouble was coming.

Shouting into the Wind

On July 22, WikiLeaks published about twenty thousand stolen DNC emails. It highlighted a handful of messages that included offensive comments about Bernie Sanders, which predictably set off a firestorm among Bernie’s supporters, many of whom were still angry about having lost the primaries. But nothing in the stolen emails remotely backed up the charge that the primaries had been rigged. Nearly all of the offending messages were written in May, months after I had amassed an insurmountable vote and delegate lead.

More important, though, was the fact that the Russians or their proxies had the sophistication to find and exploit those handful of provocative stolen emails in order to drive a wedge between Democrats. That suggests a deep knowledge and familiarity of our political scene and its players. Also, imagine how many inflammatory and embarrassing things they would have found if they’d hacked Republican targets. (Spoiler alert: they did, but never released anything.)

The timing of the WikiLeaks release was terrible—and it didn’t seem like a coincidence. I had defeated Bernie and locked up the nomination in early June, but he hadn’t endorsed me until July 12, and now we were working hard to bring the party together before the Democratic National Convention started in Philadelphia on July 25. Plus, the news hit on the same day I was introducing Tim Kaine as my running mate, turning what should have been one of the best days of our campaign into a circus.

The document dump seemed designed to cause us maximum damage at a critical moment. It worked. DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned two days later, and the opening of the convention was marred by loud boos and catcalls from Sanders supporters. I was sick about the whole thing. After so many long, hard months of campaigning, I wanted the convention to be perfect. It was my best chance until the debates to present my vision for the country directly to the voters. I remembered what a boost Bill received from his convention in Madison Square Garden in 1992, and I hoped to gain similar momentum. Instead, we were now dealing with a divided party and distracted press corps. Democratic leaders, especially Congresswoman Marcia Fudge of Ohio, Reverend Leah Daughtry, and Donna Brazile, helped bring order to the chaos. And Michelle Obama’s masterful, moving speech brought the hall together and quieted the dissenters. Then Bernie spoke, endorsed me again, and helped cement the détente.

On July 27, the day before I formally accepted the Democratic nomination, Trump held one of his wild, stream-of-consciousness press conferences. He said that as President he might accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea, deflected blame from the Kremlin for the DNC hack, and then, remarkably, urged the Russians to try to hack my email account. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing,” he said, referring to the personal, non-work-related emails that were deleted from my account after everything else had been provided to the State Department. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” As the New York Times described it, Trump was “urging a power often hostile to the United States to violate American law by breaking into a private computer network.”

Katy Tur of NBC News followed up to see if this was a joke or he really meant it. She asked if Trump had “any qualms” about asking a foreign government to break into Americans’ emails. Instead of backing off, he doubled down. “If Russia or China or any other country has those emails, I mean, to be honest with you, I’d love to see them,” he said. He also refused to tell Putin not to try to interfere in the election: “I’m not going to tell Putin what to do; why should I tell Putin what to do?” This was no joke.

Despite Trump’s attempts to cover for Putin, cybersecurity experts and U.S. intelligence officials were confident that the Russians were behind the hack. There still wasn’t official consensus about whether their goal was to undermine public confidence in America’s democratic institutions or if Putin was actively trying to derail my candidacy and help elect Trump. But I didn’t have any doubt. And the timing of the public disclosure, as well as the specific nature of the material (did Russian intelligence really understand the ins and outs of DNC politics and the decisions of Debbie Wasserman Schultz?), raised the strong possibility that the Russians had gotten help from someone with experience in American politics—a truly alarming prospect.

We were doing a million things at once that week. The convention was all-consuming. So it was hard to stop and focus on the gravity of what was happening. But I realized we had crossed a line. This wasn’t the normal rough-and-tumble of politics. This was—there’s no other word for it—war. I told my team I thought we were at a “break glass” moment. “We’re under attack,” I said. It was time to take a much more aggressive public posture. Robby Mook did a round of interviews in which he pointed the finger squarely at Russia. He said they weren’t trying just to create chaos, they were actively trying to help Trump. That shouldn’t have been particularly controversial, but Robby was treated like a kook. Jennifer Palmieri and Jake Sullivan held a series of background briefings for news networks to explain in more detail. After the election, Jennifer wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post titled “The Clinton Campaign Warned You About Russia. But Nobody Listened to Us.” She recalled how journalists were generally more interested in the gossipy content of the stolen emails rather than the prospect that a foreign power was trying to manipulate our election. The press treated our warnings about Russia like it was spin we’d cooked up to distract from embarrassing revelations—a view actively encouraged by the Trump campaign. The media was accustomed to Trump peddling crazy conspiracy theories—like that Ted Cruz’s dad helped kill John F. Kennedy—and it acted as if the Russian hacking was “our” conspiracy theory, a tidy false equivalency that let reporters and pundits sleep well at night. As Matt Yglesias of the news site Vox described it later, most journalists thought the argument that Moscow was trying to help Trump was “outlandish and borderline absurd,” and our attempt to raise the alarm “was just too aggressive, self-serving, and a little far-fetched.”

Maybe the press wouldn’t listen to us, but I figured they would listen to respected intelligence officials. On August 5, Mike Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, wrote a highly unusual op-ed in the New York Times. Despite being a strictly nonpartisan career professional, he said that he had decided to endorse me for President because of my strong record on national security, including my role in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. By contrast, he said Trump was “not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.” Coming from America’s former top spy, that was a shocking statement. But it paled compared with what Morell said next. Putin, he noted, was a career intelligence officer “trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them.” And here’s the shocking part: “In the intelligence business,” Morell said, “we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

Morell’s argument was not that Trump or his campaign was conspiring illegally with the Russians to rig the election—although he certainly didn’t rule it out. It was that Putin was manipulating Trump into taking policy positions that would help Russia and hurt America, including “endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States.” That’s an important point to keep in mind, because it often gets lost amid the intense focus on potential criminal acts. Even without a secret conspiracy, there was plenty of troubling pro-Putin behavior right out in the open.

Morell’s op-ed was the equivalent of pulling the fire alarm in a crowded building. And yet, somehow, most in the media—and many voters—continued to ignore the danger staring us in the face.

Snakes!

I was not shocked to see the connection between WikiLeaks and the Russian intelligence services. At least that helped further discredit its odious leader, Julian Assange. In my view, Assange is a hypocrite who deserves to be held accountable for his actions. He claims to be a champion of transparency, but for many years, he’s been helpful to Putin, one of the most repressive and least transparent autocrats in the world. It’s not just that WikiLeaks avoids publishing anything Putin won’t like and instead targets Russia’s adversaries—Assange actually hosted a television show on RT, Putin’s propaganda network, and receives adoring coverage there. And if hypocrisy isn’t bad enough, Assange was charged with rape in Sweden. To avoid facing those charges, he jumped bail and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London. After years of waiting, Sweden eventually said it would no longer try to extradite him, but promised that if Assange came back to the country, the investigation could be reopened.

Assange, like Putin, has held a grudge against me for a long time. The bad blood goes back to 2010, when WikiLeaks published more than 250,000 stolen State Department cables, including many sensitive observations from our diplomats in the field. As Secretary of State, I was responsible for the safety of our officers around the world, and I knew that releasing those confidential reports put not only them in danger but also their foreign contacts—including human rights activists and dissidents who could face reprisals from their own governments. We had to move fast to evacuate vulnerable people, and, thankfully, we don’t believe anyone was killed or jailed as a result. I thought Assange was reckless and wrong, and said so publicly.

The fact that these two old adversaries from my time as Secretary of State—Assange and Putin—seemed to be working together to damage my campaign was maddening. It was bad enough to have to go up against a billionaire opponent and the entire Republican Party; now I also had to take on these nefarious outside forces. The journalist Rebecca Traister observed once that there was “an Indiana Jones–style, ‘It had to be snakes’ inevitability” about me facing Trump. “Of course Hillary Clinton is going to have to run against a man who seems both to embody and have attracted the support of everything male, white, and angry about the ascension of women and black people in America,” she wrote. I was up for the challenge. And I might add: Of course I had to face not just one America-bashing misogynist but three. Of course I’d have to get by Putin and Assange as well.

By midsummer 2016, the whole world knew that Trump and his team were cheering on the Russian attack on our democracy, and doing everything they could to exploit it. Trump never even tried to hide the fact that he was making common cause with Putin. But what if they were doing more than that? What if they were actually conspiring with Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks? There wasn’t any evidence of that yet, but the coincidences were piling up.

Then, on August 8, Trump’s longtime consigliere Roger Stone, who cut his teeth as one of Richard Nixon’s “dirty tricksters,” bragged to a group of Florida Republicans that he was in communication with Assange and predicted that an “October surprise” was coming. This was a shocking admission, made in public, from Trump’s longest-serving political advisor. Stone made similar statements on August 12, 14, 15, and 18. On August 21, he tweeted, “Trust me, it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary”. This was particularly notable because, as I mentioned earlier, we had determined there was a good chance that John’s email might have been hacked, but didn’t know for sure. Stone kept at it over the next few weeks, even calling Assange his “hero.”

I wasn’t the only one who noticed. At the end of August, Harry Reid, one of the congressional “gang of eight” who are briefed on the most sensitive intelligence matters, wrote a letter to FBI Director Comey that cited Stone’s claims and asked for a full and thorough investigation. “The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount,” Reid wrote. He also raised the prospect that there might be an attempt to falsify official election results. This was a reference to public reports that Russian hackers had penetrated voter registration databases in both Arizona and Illinois, prompting the FBI to warn state election officials across the country to upgrade their security. Like Morell’s op-ed, Reid’s letter was an attempt to shake the country out of its complacency and get the press, the administration, and all Americans focused on an urgent threat. It didn’t work.

Drip, Drip, Drip

As we headed into the fall, troubling reports and rumors continued to swirl. Paul Manafort resigned on August 19 amid growing questions about his financial ties to Russia. On September 5, the Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence agencies now believed there was “a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions.” That meant it was much bigger than the DNC hack.

We heard there was a federal interagency task force digging into the Trump team’s financial ties, but no reporters could get it confirmed on the record. There was also talk that the FBI was looking into strange computer traffic between Trump Tower and a Russian bank. Reporters were chasing that one, too, and Slate’s Franklin Foer eventually broke the story on October 31. Then there were the whispers going around Washington that the Russians had compromising information on Trump, possibly a salacious videotape from a Moscow hotel. But nobody had any proof.

At my first debate with Trump, on September 26, I went after him hard on Russia, and he continued to defend Putin and contradict the conclusions of our intelligence agencies, which they had shared with him personally. “I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC,” Trump insisted. “I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds, okay?” What was he talking about? A four-hundred-pound guy in his basement? Was he thinking of a character out of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? I wondered who told Trump to say that.

Meanwhile, Roger Stone continued to tweet warnings that WikiLeaks was preparing to drop another bomb on us, one that would destroy my campaign and land me in prison. He was such a bizarre character it was hard to know how seriously to take anything he said. But given what had happened already, who knew what other dirty tricks were coming our way.

Then came October 7, one of the most significant days of the entire campaign. I was in a prep session for the upcoming second debate, trying hard to stay focused on the task at hand.

The first thing that happened was that Jim Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, and Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, issued a brief statement that for the first time formally accused “Russia’s senior-most officials” of ordering the hacking of the DNC. We already knew this, but the formal statement gave it the full weight of the U.S. government. Strikingly, the FBI did not join in the statement, and we later learned that Comey refused to do so, claiming it was inappropriate so close to the election. (Hmm.)

Then, at 4:00 P.M., the Washington Post broke the news of Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women. It was a catastrophe for Trump’s campaign. Less than one hour later, WikiLeaks announced it had obtained fifty thousand of John Podesta’s emails and published a first batch of about two thousand. It looked like an orchestrated attempt to change the subject and distract voters—and provided further reason to believe that WikiLeaks and its Russian patrons were very much in sync with the Trump campaign.

It turns out, Russian hackers had gained access to John’s personal email account back in March, thanks to a successful phishing attack. WikiLeaks continued to release stolen emails almost every single day for the rest of the campaign. For a while, it seemed like the WikiLeaks gambit was failing. The Access Hollywood story dominated the headlines, put Trump on the defensive, and sent his Republican backers scurrying for cover. The press eagerly covered every stolen email that emerged—even reprinting John’s favorite risotto recipe—but none of the stories monopolized the news cycle like the Trump tape.

I commiserated with John about the outrageous invasion of privacy—I was one of the few who knew what it felt like—but he took it in stride. He felt bad about some of the language he used. He felt even worse for the friends and colleagues who had sent him private messages and now had to see their words printed for all to see. And WikiLeaks hadn’t bothered to redact personal information such as phone numbers and Social Security numbers, which victimized good people who deserved better.

In the end, though, most of John’s emails were… boring. They revealed the nuts and bolts of a campaign at work, with staffers debating policies, editing speeches, and kibitzing about the daily ups and downs of the election. In fact, Tom Friedman of the New York Times wrote a column about how well the behind-the-scenes correspondence reflected on me and my team. “When I read WikiHillary, I hear a smart, pragmatic, center-left politician,” he wrote, and “I am more convinced than ever she can be the President America needs today.”

What was harder to see at the time was that the steady stream of stories guaranteed that “Clinton” and “emails” remained in the headlines up until Election Day. None of this had anything at all to do with my use of personal email at the State Department—nothing at all—but for many voters, it would all blend together. And that was before Jim Comey sent his misguided letter to Congress, which made it all much worse. As a result, we faced a perfect storm. And Trump did his best to amplify our problems, citing WikiLeaks more than 160 times in the final month of the campaign. He could barely contain his excitement whenever a new batch of stolen emails appeared.

Comparing the effects of WikiLeaks and Access Hollywood may prove the old Washington cliché about how the “drip, drip” of scandal can be even more damaging over time than a single really bad story. Trump’s tape was like a bomb going off, and the damage was immediate and severe. But no other tapes emerged, so there was nowhere else for the story to go. Eventually the press and the public moved on. It’s amazing how quickly the media metabolism works these days. By contrast, the WikiLeaks email dumps kept coming and coming. It was like Chinese water torture. No single day was that bad, but it added up, and we could never get past it. WikiLeaks played into people’s fascination with “pulling back the curtain.” Anything said behind closed doors is automatically considered more interesting, important, and honest than things said in public. It’s even better if you have to do a little legwork and google around for the information. We sometimes joked that if we wanted the press to pay attention to our jobs plan, which I talked about endlessly to little avail, we should leak a private email about it. Only then would it be news worth covering.

WikiLeaks also helped accelerate the phenomenon that eventually came to be known as fake news. False story lines started appearing on Facebook, Reddit, Breitbart, Drudge Report, and other sites often claiming to be based on stolen emails. For example, WikiLeaks tweeted on November 6 that the Clinton Foundation paid for Chelsea’s wedding, a totally false accusation, as the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler later verified in his Fact Checker column. Kessler, who’s never been shy about criticizing me, heard from readers who said this lie helped convince them to vote for Trump. After the election, he investigated and found it to be “a claim lacking any evidence,” and he urged readers “to be more careful consumers of the news.” The lack of evidence didn’t stop the New York Post and Fox News from repeating the lie and giving it mass circulation. That really got under my skin. Bill and I were proud to pay for Chelsea and Marc’s wedding and we treasure every memory of it. Lies about me and Bill are one thing, but I can’t stand to see lies about Chelsea. She doesn’t deserve that.

Russia’s propaganda networks, RT and Sputnik, were eager purveyors of fake news. For example, U.S. intelligence agencies later pointed to an August 2016 video produced by RT titled “How 100% of the Clintons’ ‘Charity’ Went to… Themselves.” It was another lie. Since Bill and I have released our tax returns going back decades, it’s public record that since 2001 we’ve donated more than $23 million to charities such as the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, educational institutions, hospitals, churches, the Children’s Defense Fund, and the Clinton Foundation. And none of us—not Bill, not Chelsea, not me—has ever taken any money from the foundation.

At the time, I was barely aware that such silly Russian smears were circulating on American social media. And yet, according to a U.S. Intelligence assessment, that one RT video alone was viewed more than nine million times, mostly on Facebook.

Even if I had known that, it would have been hard to believe that many voters would take any of it seriously. Still, reporting from BuzzFeed and others was finding that the reach of fake news on Facebook and other outlets was far wider than anyone expected, and that much of it was being generated in faraway countries such as Macedonia. The whole thing was bizarre. And Trump did all he could to help fake news spread and take root, repeating fake headlines from Russian propaganda outlets like Sputnik at his rallies and retweeting extremist memes.

The day before the election, President Obama was campaigning for me in Michigan (yes, we campaigned in Michigan!), and expressed the frustration we all felt: “As long as it’s on Facebook and people can see it, as long as it’s on social media, people start believing it,” he said, “and it creates this dust cloud of nonsense.” Nonsense was right.

On October 30, Harry Reid wrote another letter to Jim Comey, trying one last time to focus the nation’s attention back on the unprecedented foreign intervention in our election. The former boxer from Searchlight, Nevada, knew we were in the fight of our lives, and he couldn’t believe no one was paying attention. Harry had been briefed by intelligence officials and was frustrated they weren’t informing the American people about what was really going on. “It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government,” he wrote to Comey. “The public has a right to know this information.” And yet Comey—who was only too eager to speak publicly about the investigation into my emails—continued to refuse to say a word about Trump and Russia.

I was worried that we’d see even more direct tampering on Election Day. But what more could we do? My campaign and I had spent months shouting into the wind. All that was left was to make our strongest case to voters and hope for the best.

Dragnet

After the election, I tried to unplug, avoid the news, and not think too much about all this. But the universe didn’t cooperate.

Just four days after the election, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister bragged in an interview that his government had “contacts” with Trump’s “immediate entourage” during the campaign. Both the Kremlin and Trump’s people tried to walk back this remarkable admission, but the bell couldn’t be unrung. A few days after that, President Obama ordered the Intelligence Community—the collection of the government’s seventeen different intelligence agencies—to conduct a full review into Russian interference into the election.

Then, in early December, a twenty-eight-year-old man from North Carolina drove to Washington, D.C., with a Colt AR-15 assault rifle, a .38-caliber Colt revolver, and a knife. He had read on the internet that a popular local Washington pizzeria was secretly hosting a child sex abuse ring run by John Podesta and me. This particularly disgusting fake news got its start with an innocuous email released by WikiLeaks about John going out for pizza. It was quickly refracted through the dark corners of the internet and emerged as a blood-curdling conspiracy theory. Alex Jones, the right-wing talk show host effusively praised by Trump who claims that 9/11 was an inside job and the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, recorded a YouTube video about “all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped.” Soon that young man from North Carolina was in his car on his way to Washington. When he got to the pizzeria, he searched everywhere for the children supposedly being held captive. There weren’t any. He fired off one shot before being apprehended by police and eventually sentenced to four years in prison. Thankfully, no one was harmed. I was horrified. I immediately contacted a friend of mine who runs a bookstore on the same street. She told me that her employees also had been harassed and threatened by conspiracy nuts.

In early January, the Intelligence Community reported back to President Obama and published an unclassified version of its findings for the public. The headline was that Putin himself had ordered a covert operation with the goal of denigrating and defeating me, electing Trump, and undermining the American people’s faith in the democratic process. That was no surprise to me or anyone else who had been paying attention, although it was notable that it was now the official view of the U.S. government. The real news, however, was that the Russian intervention had gone far beyond hacking email accounts and releasing files. Moscow had waged sophisticated information warfare on a massive scale, manipulating social media and flooding it with propaganda and fake news.

Soon it felt like every day there was a new revelation about the scope of the Russian operation, secret contacts with the Trump campaign, and an ongoing federal investigation digging into all of it. Congressional hearings began. The New York Times and the Washington Post competed to break scoop after scoop. I know I give the press a lot of grief, especially the Times, but this really was journalism at its finest.

I wasn’t just a former candidate trying to figure out why she lost. I was also a former Secretary of State worried about our nation’s national security. I couldn’t resist following every twist and turn of the story as closely as possible. I read everything I could get my hands on. I called friends in Washington and Silicon Valley and consulted with national security experts and seasoned Russia hands. I learned more than I ever imagined about algorithms, “content farms,” and search engine optimization. The voluminous file of clippings on my desk grew thicker and thicker. To keep it all straight, I started making lists of everything we knew about the unfolding scandal. At times, I felt like CIA agent Carrie Mathison on the TV show Homeland, desperately trying to get her arms around a sinister conspiracy and appearing more than a little frantic in the process.

That’s not a good look for anyone, let alone a former Secretary of State. So instead, let me channel a TV show that I grew up watching as a kid in Park Ridge: Dragnet. “Just the facts, ma’am.”

We’ve learned a lot about what the Russians did, what the Trump campaign did, and how the U.S. government responded. Let’s go through it step-by-step.

What the Feds Did

First, we’ve learned that the federal investigation started much earlier than was publicly known.

In late 2015, European intelligence agencies picked up contacts between Trump associates and Russian intelligence operatives. Communications intercepts by U.S. and allied intelligence seem to have continued throughout 2016. We know now that by July 2016, the FBI’s elite National Security Division in Washington had started investigating whether the Trump campaign and the Russians were coordinating to influence the election. They have also been looking into Paul Manafort’s financial ties to pro-Putin oligarchs.

In the summer of 2016, according to the Washington Post, the FBI convinced a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there was probable cause to believe that Trump advisor Carter Page was acting as a Russian agent, and they received a warrant to monitor his communications. The FBI also began investigating a dossier prepared by a well-respected former British spy that contained explosive and salacious allegations about compromising information the Russians had on Trump. The Intelligence Community took the dossier seriously enough that it briefed both President Obama and President Elect Trump on its contents before the inauguration. By the spring of 2017, a federal grand jury was issuing subpoenas to business associates of Michael Flynn, who resigned as Trump’s national security advisor after lying about his Russian contacts.

We’ve also learned a lot about how various parts of the U.S. government reacted differently to the intelligence coming in over the course of 2016 about ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The CIA seems to have been most alarmed and was also convinced that the Russian goal was to help Trump and hurt me. As early as August 2016, CIA Director John Brennan called his counterpart in Moscow and warned him to stop interfering in the election. Brennan also individually briefed the “gang of eight” congressional leaders and shared his concerns. This explains why Harry Reid sought to galvanize public attention on the threat in his August letter.

We’ve learned that the FBI took a different approach. They launched an investigation in July 2016, but Director Comey didn’t inform congressional leaders, was slower than Brennan to come to the conclusion that Russia’s goal was electing Trump, and refused to join other intelligence agencies in issuing a joint statement on October 7 because he didn’t want to interfere close to an election—something that certainly didn’t stop him when it came to trumpeting news about the investigation into my emails. Sources within the FBI also convinced the New York Times to run a story saying they saw “no clear link to Russia,” countering Franklin Foer’s scoop in Slate about unusual computer traffic between Trump Tower and a Russian bank. This is one of the stories the Times’s ombudsman later criticized.

It wasn’t until after the election that the FBI finally came around and joined the rest of the Intelligence Community in putting out the January 2017 assessment that Russia had, in fact, been actively helping Trump. And in March 2017, Comey finally confirmed the existence of a federal investigation into possible coordination. Tyrone Gayle, one of my former communications aides, summed up how most of us felt hearing that news: “That sound you just heard was every ex-Clinton staffer banging their heads on the wall from California to D.C.” Part of the frustration was knowing that the FBI’s silence had helped Putin succeed and that more exposure could have given the American people the information they needed.

While Brennan and Reid had their hair on fire and Comey was dragging his feet, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was actively playing defense for Trump and the Russians. We know now that even after he was fully briefed by the CIA, McConnell rejected the intelligence and warned the Obama administration that if it made any attempt to inform the public, he would attack it for playing politics. I can’t think of a more shameful example of a national leader so blatantly putting partisanship over national security. McConnell knew better, but he did it anyway.

I know some former Obama administration officials have regrets about how this all unfolded. Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told the House Intelligence Committee in June 2017 that the administration didn’t take a more aggressive public stance because it was concerned about reinforcing Trump’s complaints that the election was “rigged” and being “perceived as taking sides in the election.” Former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, whom I’d come to trust and value when we worked together in President Obama’s first term, told the Washington Post that the Obama administration was focused on a traditional cyber threat, while “the Russians were playing this much bigger game” of multifaceted information warfare. “We weren’t able to put all of those pieces together in real time,” Ben said.

Mike McFaul, Obama’s former Ambassador to Russia, summed it up in a concise tweet:

I understand the predicament the Obama administration faced, with McConnell threatening them and everyone assuming I was going to win regardless. Richard Clarke, President George W. Bush’s top counterterrorism advisor on 9/11, has written about how hard it can be to heed warnings about threats that have never been seen before, and certainly it was hard to imagine the Russians would dare to conduct such a massive and unprecedented covert operation. And President Obama did privately warn Putin directly to back off.

I do wonder sometimes about what would have happened if President Obama had made a televised address to the nation in the fall of 2016 warning that our democracy was under attack. Maybe more Americans would have woken up to the threat in time. We’ll never know. But what we do know for sure is that McConnell and other Republican leaders did everything they could to leave Americans in the dark and vulnerable to attack.

What the Trump Team Did

Let’s look at what we’ve learned since the election about the actions of the Trump team.

We know now there were many contacts during the campaign and the transition between Trump associates and Russians—in person, on the phone, and via text and email. Many of these interactions were with Ambassador Kislyak, who was thought to help oversee Russian intelligence operations in the United States, but they included other Russian officials and agents as well.

For example, Roger Stone, the longtime Trump political advisor who claimed that he was in touch with Julian Assange, suggested in August 2016 that information about John Podesta was going to come out. In October, Stone hinted Assange and WikiLeaks were going to release material that would be damaging to my campaign, and later admitted to also exchanging direct messages over Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the front for Russian intelligence, after some of those messages were published by the website The Smoking Gun.

We also know now that in December 2016, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Kremlin-controlled bank that is under U.S. sanctions and tied closely to Russian intelligence. The Washington Post caused a sensation with its report that Russian officials were discussing a proposal by Kushner to use Russian diplomatic facilities in America to communicate secretly with Moscow.

The New York Times reported that Russian intelligence attempted to recruit Carter Page, the Trump foreign policy advisor, as a spy back in 2013 (according to the report, the FBI believed Page did not know that the man who approached him was a spy). And according to Yahoo News, U.S. officials received intelligence reports that Carter Page met with a top Putin aide involved with intelligence.

Some Trump advisors failed to disclose or lied about their contacts with the Russians, including on applications for security clearances, which could be a federal crime. Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to Congress about his contacts and later recused himself from the investigation. Michael Flynn lied about being in contact with Kislyak and then changed his story about whether they discussed dropping U.S. sanctions.

Reporting since the election has made clear that Trump and his top advisors have little or no interest in learning about the Russian covert operation against American democracy. Trump himself repeatedly called the whole thing a hoax—and at the same time, blamed Obama for not doing anything about it. As recently as July 2017, he continued to denigrate the Intelligence Community and claimed that countries other than Russia might be responsible for the DNC hack. Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates tweeted in response that Trump’s “inexplicable refusal to confirm Russian election interference insults career intel pros & hinders our ability to prevent in future.”

But there is one area where Trump’s team seems to have been intently interested: rolling back U.S. sanctions against Russia. That’s what Flynn was discussing with the Russian Ambassador. The Reuters news service reported that Senate investigators want to know whether Kushner discussed it in his meetings as well, including whether Russian banks would offer financial support to Trump associates and organizations in return. And as soon as the Trump team took control of the State Department, it started working on a plan to lift sanctions and return to Russia two compounds in Maryland and New York that the Obama administration had confiscated because they were bases for espionage. Career diplomats at State were so concerned that they alerted Congress. As of this writing, the Trump administration is exploring returning the compounds without any preconditions. All of this is significant because it makes it a lot easier to see how a quid pro quo with Russia might have worked.

We’ll surely continue to learn more. But based on what’s already in the public domain, we know that Trump and his team publicly cheered on the Russian operation and took maximum advantage of it. In so doing, they not only encouraged but actually helped along this attack on our democracy by a hostile foreign power.

What the Russians Did

That brings us to what we’ve learned since the election about what the Russians did. We know already about the hacking and release of stolen messages via WikiLeaks, but that’s just one part of a much larger effort. It turns out they also hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and fed damaging information to local bloggers and reporters in various congressional districts across the country, which required sophistication. And that’s just the beginning.

The official Intelligence Community report explained that the Russian propaganda strategy “blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users, or ‘trolls.’ ” Let’s try to break down what it all means.

The simplest part is traditional state-run media; in this case, Russian networks such as RT and Sputnik. They use their global reach to push Kremlin talking points over the airwaves and social media, including malicious headlines like “Clinton and ISIS Funded by Same Money.” Sputnik frequently used the same Twitter hashtag as Trump: #CrookedHillary. It’s hard to know exactly how wide of a reach RT has. A Daily Beast article reported on claims that it had exaggerated its stats. It’s probably more than you’d think (maybe hundreds of thousands) but not enough that it would have a big impact on an election by itself. But when RT propaganda gets picked up and repeated by American media outlets such as Fox News, Breitbart, and Alex Jones’s Infowars, and posted on Facebook, its reach expands dramatically. That happened frequently during the campaign. Trump and his team also helped amplify Russian stories, giving them an even bigger megaphone.

The Russians also generated propaganda in less traditional ways, including thousands of fake news sites and individual internet “trolls” who posted attacks on Facebook and Twitter. As the Intelligence Community reported, “Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton… some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President Elect Trump as early as December 2015.” Some of the stories created by trolls were blatantly false, like the one about the pope endorsing Trump, but others were simply misleading attacks on me or puff pieces about Trump. Much of this content was then fed into the same amplification process, pushed along by RT and then picked up by American outlets such as Fox.

The Russians wanted to be sure that impressionable voters in key swing states actually saw their propaganda. So they set out to game the internet.

Much of what we see online is governed by a series of algorithms that determine what content appears in our Facebook and Twitter feeds, Google search results, and so on. One factor for these algorithms is popularity. If lots of users share the same post or click on the same link—and if key “influencers” with large personal networks do as well—then it’s more likely to pop up on your screen. To manipulate this process, the Russians “flooded the zone” with a vast network of fake Twitter and Facebook accounts, some carefully designed to appear like American swing voters. Some of these accounts were run by trolls (real live people), and others were automated, but the goal was the same: to artificially boost the volume and popularity of Russian and right-wing propaganda. The automated accounts are called “bots,” short for robots. The Russians were not the only ones using them, but they took it to a whole other level. Researchers at the University of Southern California have found that nearly 20 percent of all political tweets sent between September 16 and October 21, 2016, were generated by bots. Many of them probably were Russian. These tactics, according to Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, could “overwhelm” search engines so that the voters’ newsfeeds started showing headlines like “Hillary Clinton’s Sick” or “Hillary Clinton’s Stealing Money from the State Department.”

According to Facebook, another key tactic is the creation of fake affinity groups or community pages that could drive conversations online and draw in unwitting users. Imagine, for example, a fake Black Lives Matter group created to push malicious attacks linking Democrats to the KKK and slavery, with the goal of driving down African American turnout. The Russians did things like that. The similarity of their attacks to organic right-wing memes helped. For example, a prominent Trump supporter and evangelical bishop, Aubrey Shines, produced an online video attacking me because Democrats “gave this country slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws.” This charge was hugely amplified by the conservative media company Sinclair Broadcast Group, which distributed it to all of its 173 local television stations across the country, along with other right-wing propaganda. Sinclair is now poised to grow to 223 stations. It would reach an estimated 72 percent of American households.

When I learned about these fake groups spreading across Facebook and poisoning our country’s political dialogue, I couldn’t help but think about the millions of my supporters who felt so bullied and harassed on the internet that they made sure their online communities, such as Pantsuit Nation, were private. They deserved better, and so did our country.

Put all this together, and you’ve got multifaceted information warfare. Senator Mark Warner summed it up well: “The Russians employed thousands of paid internet trolls and botnets to push out disinformation and fake news at a high volume, focusing this material onto your Twitter and Facebook feeds and flooding our social media with misinformation,” he said. “This fake news and disinformation was then hyped by the American media echo chamber and our own social media networks to reach and potentially influence millions of Americans.”

It gets worse. According to Time magazine, the Russians targeted propaganda to undecided voters and to “soft” Clinton supporters who might be persuaded to stay home or support a third-party candidate—including by purchasing ads on Facebook. It’s against the law to use foreign money to support a candidate, as well as for campaigns to coordinate with foreign entities, so a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission has called for a full investigation of this charge.

We know that swing voters were inundated. According to Senator Warner, “Women and African Americans were targeted in places like Wisconsin and Michigan.” One study found that in Michigan alone, nearly half of all political news on Twitter in the final days before the election was false or misleading propaganda. Senator Warner has rightly asked: “How did they know to go to that level of detail in those kinds of jurisdictions?”

Interestingly, the Russians made a particular effort to target voters who had supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries, including by planting fake news on pro-Sanders message boards and Facebook groups and amplifying attacks by so-called Bernie Bros. Russian trolls posted stories about how I was a murderer, money launderer, and secretly had Parkinson’s disease. I don’t know why anyone would believe such things, even if you read it on Facebook—although it’s often hard to tell on there what’s a legitimate news article and what’s not—but maybe if you’re angry enough, you’ll accept anything that reinforces your point of view. As the former head of the NSA, retired General Keith Alexander, explained to Congress, the Russian goal was clear: “What they were trying to do is drive a wedge within the Democratic Party between the Clinton group and the Sanders group and then within our nation between Republicans and Democrats.” Perhaps this is one reason why third-party candidates received more than five million more votes in 2016 than they had in 2012. That was an aim of both the Russians and the Republicans, and it worked.

According to CNN, Time, and McClatchy, the Justice Department and Congress are examining whether the Trump campaign data analytics operation—led by Kushner—coordinated with the Russians to pull all this off. Congressman Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has said he wants to know whether they “coordinated in any way in terms of targeting or in terms of timing or in terms of any other measure.” If they did, that also would be illegal.

Think this is bad? There’s more. We knew during the campaign that Russian hackers had breached election systems in two states. Now we know that this effort was far more extensive than previously thought. In June 2017, officials from the Department of Homeland Security testified before Congress that election systems in as many as twenty-one states were targeted. Bloomberg News reported that the number could be as high as thirty-nine. According to a leaked NSA report, the accounts of more than a hundred local election officials across the country were also penetrated. In addition, hackers gained access to the software used by poll workers on Election Day. The goal of these intrusions seems to have been accessing voter registration information. Hackers attempted to delete or alter records of particular voters. They could also have used the data to better target their propaganda efforts. According to Time, investigators want to find out if any stolen voter information ended up with the Trump campaign.

I know that the slow unfolding of this news has inured many people to how shocking all this is. It feels a little like the frog in the pot that doesn’t realize it’s boiling because it happens so gradually. But step back and think about it: the Russians hacked our election systems. They got inside. They tried to delete or alter voter information. This should send a shiver down the spine of every American.

And why stop there? According to the Washington Post, the Russians used old-fashioned forgery to influence the election as well. The Post says Moscow surreptitiously got a fake document to the FBI that described a fabricated discussion between the chair of the Democratic National Committee and an aide to financier and liberal donor George Soros about how Attorney General Lynch had promised to go easy on me in the email investigation. It was a bizarre fantasy straight out of the fever swamp. Jim Comey may well have known the document was a forgery, but the Post says he was concerned that if it became public, it would still cause an outcry. Its existence, however fraudulent, provided him with a new justification to disregard long-standing protocol and hold his infamous July press conference disparaging me. I don’t know what Comey was thinking, but the idea that the Russians could have manipulated him into such a damaging misstep is mind-boggling.

Finally, to add one more bit of cloak-and-dagger mystery to this whole story, a lot of Russian officials seem to have had unfortunate accidents since the election. On Election Day itself, an officer in the New York consulate was found dead. The first explanation was that he fell off a roof. Then the Russians said he had a heart attack. On December 26, a former KGB agent thought to have helped compile the salacious Trump dossier was found dead in his car in Moscow. On February 20, the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations died suddenly, also from a heart attack. Russian authorities have also arrested a cybersecurity expert and two intelligence officials who worked on cyber operations and accused them of spying for the United States. All I can say is that working for Putin must be a stressful job.

If all this sounds unbelievable, I know how you feel. It’s like something out of one of the spy novels my husband stays up all night reading. Even knowing what the Russians did in Ukraine, I was still shocked that they would wage large-scale covert warfare against the United States. But the evidence is overwhelming, and the Intelligence Community assessment is definitive.

What’s more, we know now that the Russians have mounted similar operations in other Western democracies. After the U.S. election, Facebook found and removed tens of thousands of fake accounts in France and the United Kingdom. In Germany, members of Parliament have been hacked. Denmark and Norway say the Russians breached key ministries. The Netherlands turned off election computers and decided to count every vote by hand. And most notably, in France, Emmanuel Macron’s campaign was hit by a massive cyberattack just before the presidential election that sparked immediately comparisons with the operation against me. But because the French had watched what happened in America, they were better prepared. Macron’s team responded to Russian phishing attacks with false passwords, and they seeded fake documents in with their other files, all in an attempt to confuse and slow down the hackers. When a trove of stolen Macron emails did appear online, the French media refused to provide the kind of sensationalized coverage we saw here, in part because of a law in France that guards against that happening close to an election. French voters also seem to have learned from our mistakes, and they soundly rejected Le Pen, the right-wing pro-Moscow candidate. I take some comfort knowing that our misfortune helped protect France and other democracies. That’s something, at least.

The War on Truth

As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, one reason the Russian misinformation campaign was successful was that our country’s natural defenses had been worn down over several years by powerful interests that sought to make it harder for Americans to distinguish between truth and lies. If you feel like it’s gotten tougher to separate out fringe voices from credible journalists, especially online, or you find yourself arguing more and more with people over what should be knowable facts, you’re not going crazy. There has been a concerted effort to discredit mainstream sources of information, create an echo chamber to amplify fringe conspiracy theories, and undermine Americans’ grasp of objective truth. The McClatchy news service says federal investigators are looking into whether there were direct links between the Russian propaganda war and right-wing organizations such as Breitbart and InfoWars. But even if no direct ties ever come to light, we need to understand how the right-wing war on truth opened the door to the Russian attack.

After the election, a former conservative talk radio host in Wisconsin named Charlie Sykes came forward to explain how this worked. For years, he said, right-wing media and politicians conditioned their supporters to distrust anything they heard from the mainstream media, while pushing paranoid conspiracy theories from people such as Alex Jones and Trump himself—the chief promoter of the racist “birther” lie. “The price turned out to be far higher than I imagined,” Sykes said. “The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize” the mainstream media and “essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information.” This was useful for Trump when he became a candidate, because it helped him both deflect negative stories from mainstream sources and find a receptive audience for false attacks against me. It did the same for the Russians. And Trump has kept at it in the White House. “All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself,” Sykes said. He quoted Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess grandmaster and Putin opponent who said, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

Rupert Murdoch and the late Roger Ailes probably did more than anyone else to make all this possible. For years, Fox News has been the most powerful and prominent platform for the right-wing war on truth. Ailes, a former advisor to Richard Nixon, built Fox by demonizing and delegitimizing mainstream media that tried to adhere to traditional standards of objectivity and accuracy. Fox gave a giant megaphone to voices claiming climate change was fake science, the falling unemployment rate was phony math, and you couldn’t trust Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Ailes and Fox were so successful in polarizing the audience that by 2016, most liberals and conservatives got their news from distinctly different sources and no longer shared a common set of facts.

During the Obama years, the Breitbart News Network, backed by Robert and Rebekah Mercer and led by their advisor Steve Bannon, who is now Trump’s top strategist, emerged to give Fox a run for its money. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Breitbart embraces “ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right.” To give you a flavor, here are a few memorable Breitbart headlines:

This would be funny if it wasn’t so scary. This kind of garbage “conditioned” Americans, to use Charlie Sykes’s word, to accept the Russian propaganda that flooded our country in 2016.

Robert Mercer is a key figure to understand. A computer scientist, Mercer made billions of dollars by applying complex algorithms and data analysis to the financial markets. The hedge fund he helps run, Renaissance Technologies, is wildly successful. By all accounts, Mercer is an extreme antigovernment right-winger. A profile in the New Yorker quoted one former Renaissance colleague as saying Mercer is “happy if people don’t trust the government. And if the President’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it to all fall down.” The New Yorker also reported that another former high-level Renaissance Technologies employee said Mercer hates Bill and me and once accused us of being part of a secret CIA drug-running scheme and of murdering our opponents. If you think these accusations sound batty, you’re right. And this man is now one of the most powerful people in America.

Breitbart is only one of the organizations Mercer and his family control. Another is Cambridge Analytica, which has gained notoriety for using Facebook data to target voters for clients such as Trump. It’s hard to separate reality from hype when it comes to Cambridge Analytica’s track record, but it seems like a mistake to underestimate Mercer. As the New Yorker put it, “Having revolutionized the use of data on Wall Street,” he “was eager to accomplish the same feat in the political realm.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with using big data and microtargeting—every campaign does it, including mine. The problem would come if the data were obtained or used improperly. After reports were published raising questions about whether Cambridge Analytica played a role in Brexit, British authorities are now investigating the company’s alleged role with Leave.eu and whether Cambridge’s techniques violated British and European privacy laws (which Cambridge denies).

Mercer is not alone. The Koch brothers, who run the second-largest privately held company in America, with extensive oil and gas holdings, have also invested huge sums of money, which has eroded the public’s grasp on reality and advanced their ideological agenda. For example, they’ve spent tens of millions of dollars to fund a network of think tanks, foundations, and advocacy organizations to promote the false science of climate change denial and their agenda. We can expect more of that as the Kochs prepare to spend whatever it takes to consolidate their hold on state governments and expand their power in Washington.

And let’s not forget Donald Trump himself. It took a little while for Mercer, the Kochs, and Fox News to realize that Trump could help take their war on truth to the next level, but their eventual support for his candidacy was invaluable. In many ways, Trump is the embodiment of everything they had been working toward, and the perfect Trojan horse for Putin. The journalist Masha Gessen, who covers Putin extensively, has observed: “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”

What Now?

In a Senate hearing in June 2017, Senator Angus King of Maine asked Jim Comey, “Was the Russian activity in the 2016 election a one-off proposition? Or is this part of a long-term strategy? Will they be back?”

“They’ll be back,” Comey replied emphatically. “It’s not a Republican thing or Democratic thing. It really is an American thing.”

He returned to the point a few minutes later. “We’re talking about a foreign government that, using technical intrusion, lots of other methods, tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act. That is a big deal. And people need to recognize it,” Comey said. “It’s not about Republicans or Democrats. They’re coming after America.”

Comey is absolutely right about this. The January 2017 Intelligence Community report called the Russian influence campaign a “new normal,” and predicted Moscow would continue attacking the United States and our allies. Given the success Putin has had, we should expect interference in future elections and even more aggressive cyber and propaganda efforts. Sure enough, since the election, there are new reports that Russia has launched cyberattacks against the U.S. military, including targeting the social media accounts of thousands of American soldiers; that hackers have penetrated companies that run American nuclear power plants; and that Russia is expanding its spy networks inside the United States.

We should also expect the right-wing war on truth to continue. As Trump faces growing political and legal challenges, he and his allies will likely intensify their efforts to delegitimize the mainstream press, the judiciary, and anyone else who threatens his preferred version of reality.

Can anything be done to meet these twin threats and protect our democracy? The answer is yes, if we take this seriously. In 1940, a time of much greater danger for our country, the writer John Buchan wrote, “We have been shaken out of our smugness and warned of a great peril, and in that warning lies our salvation. The dictators have done us a marvelous service to remind us of the true values of life.” Americans today need to be similarly alert and determined.

Here are four steps that would help.

First, we need to get to the bottom of what really happened in 2016. Investigators and the press should keep digging. Based on how things are going, it’s possible that, as often happens in Washington scandals, the alleged cover-up will become the most serious legal and political problem facing Trump. But no matter what happens, the American people will still need to know the truth about what the Russians did. Therefore, I believe the Special Counsel investigation should be complemented by an independent commission with subpoena power, like the one that investigated 9/11. It should provide a full public accounting of the attack against our country and make recommendations to improve security going forward. It’s hard to understand how Republicans, so eager to set up a special committee to go after me over Benghazi, could block such a step.

Second, we need to get serious about cyber warfare. Government and the private sector need to work together more closely to improve our defenses. It will require significant investments to protect our networks and national infrastructure, and Corporate America needs to see this as an urgent imperative, because government can’t do it alone. At the same time, our military and intelligence agencies should accelerate development of our own offensive cyber and information warfare capabilities, so that we are prepared to respond to aggression in kind, if need be.

Right now we do not have an effective deterrent to prevent cyber and information warfare the way we do with conventional and nuclear conflicts. Russia, China, and others believe they can operate in a so-called gray zone between peace and war, stealing our secrets, disrupting our elections, manipulating our politics, and harassing our citizens and businesses without facing serious repercussions. To change that calculus, I believe the United States should declare a new doctrine that states that a cyberattack on our vital national infrastructure will be treated as an act of war and met with a proportionate response.

Third, we need to get tough with Putin. He responds only to strength, so that’s what we must demonstrate. It was gratifying to see Emmanuel Macron, the new French President, condemn Russian interference and propaganda while standing next to Putin at a press conference in Paris. If the French can do it, surely our own leaders can. Congress recently passed legislation over Trump’s objections to ratchet up sanctions on Russia, and he reluctantly signed it. We should keep doing everything we can to isolate Putin. As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in May, “I’m appalled by what the Russians did, and we ought to find a way, ultimately, to punish it.” The Obama administration proved with crippling sanctions against Iran that this kind of pressure can force our adversaries to change course. Russia is a much bigger and more powerful nation, but we have a lot of tools at our disposal, and even Putin is vulnerable to pressure. We also should strengthen NATO; help our allies reduce their dependence on Russian energy supplies, a key source of leverage for Putin; and arm the Ukrainian government so it can resist Moscow’s aggression.

Fourth, we need to beat back the assault on truth and reason here at home and rebuild trust in our institutions. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has called for “a massive campaign” against fake news. “All of us technology companies need to create some tools that help diminish the volume of fake news,” he said.

Companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google have already begun taking steps—adjusting algorithms, deactivating bot networks, and partnering with fact-checkers—but they must do more. Facebook is now the largest news platform in the world. With that awesome power comes great responsibility, which it must accept.

The mainstream media also has a responsibility to do more to debunk the lies infecting our public life and more directly hold the liars accountable. American journalists who eagerly and uncritically repeated whatever WikiLeaks dished out during the campaign could learn from the more responsible way the French press handled the hack of Macron. It will also be important to remain vigilant against misinformation like the fake leak that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow exposed in July 2017. “One way to stab in the heart aggressive American reporting on that subject is to lay traps for American journalists,” she warned. And while there has been a lot of terrific reporting on the Russia scandal, we need to see the same rigor brought to the blizzard of deception from the administration and Republicans in Congress on everything from the budget to health care to climate change. (I love it when CNN does real-time fact-checking in its on-screen chyron. More of that, please.)

Speaking of Republicans, ultimately it’s on them to stop enabling Trump and genuflecting to billionaires such as the Mercers and the Kochs. Aggressive campaign finance reform and a reinvigorated Federal Election Commission would help a lot. But unless principled Republicans step up, our democracy will continue to pay the price.

We all have to do our part if we’re going to rebuild trust in one another and our government. As Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, put it in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee: “Until we get a firm basis on fact and fiction in our own country… we’re going to have a big problem.” It’s up to each one of us to stay informed and make good decisions with rigorous reasoning and real deliberation. This is especially important when it comes to voting. Choose wisely and don’t fall for scams. The same way you try to be careful about where you put your money or the car you buy, be careful and informed with your vote. And we all have the ability to break out of our echo chambers and engage with people who don’t agree with us politically. We can keep an open mind and be willing to change our minds from time to time. Even if our outreach is rebuffed, it’s worth it to keep trying. We’re all going to share our American future together—better to do so with open hearts and outstretched hands than closed minds and clenched fists.

Worse Than Watergate

As this story continues to unfold, there’s a moment from the campaign that I keep replaying in my head over and over again. It was my third debate against Trump. He had just attacked me by quoting out of context a line from an email stolen by the Russians and released by WikiLeaks. The moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News, was piling on as well. I thought the American people deserved to know what was really going on.

“The most important question of this evening, Chris, is finally, will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this, and make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in this election,” I said. Trump retreated to his usual pro-Putin talking points: “He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be good.” Then, turning to me, he added, “Putin, from everything I see, has no respect for this person.”

“Well,” I fired back, “that’s because he would rather have a puppet as President of the United States.” Trump seemed befuddled. “No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet,” he stammered.

I think about that line every time I see him on TV now. When he’s yucking it up in the Oval Office with the Russian foreign minister and divulging classified information. When he’s giving the cold shoulder to the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and other European allies. When he’s lying through his teeth about Russia or anything else. “No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet.” This man is President of the United States. And no one is happier than Vladimir Putin.

In mid-July 2017, as I was putting the finishing touches on this book, Trump met with Putin in Germany. He not only didn’t challenge him publicly on interfering in our election—he actually floated the idea of a joint cybersecurity unit, which is a classic example of asking the fox to guard the henhouse. Then, the news broke that Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin who promised to provide damaging information about me and wanted to discuss easing the sanctions on Russia included in the Magnitsky Act. Donald Trump Jr. admitted all this! He was disappointed the dirt didn’t pan out the way he’d hoped. You can’t make this stuff up. I’m sure there’s more to come, so stay tuned.

I know some will dismiss everything in this chapter as me trying to shift blame for my loss in 2016. That’s wrong. This is about the future. In the nineteenth century, nations fought two kinds of wars: on land and at sea. In the twentieth century, that expanded to the skies. In the twenty-first century, wars will increasingly be fought in cyberspace. Yet our President is too proud, too weak, or too shortsighted to face this threat head-on. No foreign power in modern history has attacked us with so few consequences, and that puts us all at risk.

I’m not saying this as a Democrat or as a former candidate. I’m saying this as someone who loves our country and will always be grateful for the blessings America has given to me and to the world. I’m worried. I’m worried about our democracy at home, with lies and corruption threatening our bedrock values, institutions, and the rule of law. And I’m worried about the future of democracy around the world. Generations of farsighted leaders on both sides of the Atlantic came together to build a new liberal order out of the ashes of World War II. They defended universal human rights, defied totalitarianism, and delivered unprecedented peace, prosperity, and freedom. As Americans, that is our inheritance. We should be proud of it and we should protect it. But now, between Trump and Putin, all that is at risk.

In June 2017, Jim Clapper was asked how the Russia scandal compared with Watergate. “I lived through Watergate. I was on active duty then in the Air Force. I was a young officer. It was a scary time,” he replied. “I have to say, though, I think when you compare the two, Watergate pales, really, in my view, compared to what we’re confronting now.”

I also lived through Watergate. I was a young attorney working for the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry into Richard Nixon. I listened to the tapes. I dug into all the evidence of Nixon’s crimes. And I agree with Jim Clapper. What we are facing now—an attack on our democracy by our principal foreign adversary, potentially aided and abetted by the President’s own team—is much more serious.

I’ve spent part of nearly every day since November 8, 2016, wrestling with a single question: Why did I lose? Sometimes it’s hard to focus on anything else.

I go back over my own shortcomings and the mistakes we made. I take responsibility for all of them. You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want—but I was the candidate. It was my campaign. Those were my decisions.

I also think about the strong headwinds we faced, including the rise of tribal politics in America and across the globe, the restlessness of a country looking for change, excessive coverage of my emails, the unprecedented late intervention by the director of the FBI, the sophisticated misinformation campaign directed from the Kremlin, and the avalanche of fake news. Those aren’t excuses—they’re things that happened, whether we like it or not.

I think about all that, and about our deeply divided country and our ability to live, work, and reason together.

And that’s all before I finish my morning cup of coffee. Then it starts over again.

In the spring of 2017, I was asked by thoughtful journalists such as Nicholas Kristof, Christiane Amanpour, Rebecca Traister, and Kara Swisher to reflect on what happened in 2016 and what lessons all Americans—and Democrats in particular—can learn from my defeat.

This is an important discussion to have. It’s not only about the past—not by a long shot. After successfully interfering in one presidential election, Russia will certainly try to do it again. And Democrats are engaged in a vital debate right now about the future of our party, which turns in no small part on the question of what went wrong in 2016 and how to fix it.

Here’s an example of the sort of questions I was getting:

“Could the campaign have been better?” Christiane Amanpour asked me. “Where was your message? Do you take any personal responsibility?”

“I take absolute personal responsibility,” I replied. “I was the candidate. I was the person who was on the ballot.” Then I explained that while we didn’t run a perfect campaign, Nate Silver, the widely respected statistician who correctly predicted the winner in 49 states in 2008 and all 50 in 2012, has said that we were on our way to winning until Jim Comey’s October 28 letter derailed us. You can agree or disagree with that analysis, but it’s what Silver’s data said.

The reaction to my interviews was negative, to put it mildly.

“Dear Hillary Clinton, please stop talking about 2016,” wrote one columnist in USA Today. CNN, still stuck in false equivalency mode, declared, “Clinton, Trump can’t stop airing their 2016 grievances.” And one New York Daily News columnist decided the appropriate response was: “Hey, Hillary Clinton, shut the f— up and go away already.” Seriously, they printed that in the newspaper.

I understand why some people don’t want to hear anything that sounds remotely like “relitigating” the election. People are tired. Some are traumatized. Others are focused on keeping the discussion about Russia in the national security realm and away from politics. I get all that. But it’s important that we understand what really happened. Because that’s the only way we can stop it from happening again.

I also understand why there’s an insatiable demand in many quarters for me to take all the blame for losing the election on my own shoulders and quit talking about Comey, the Russians, fake news, sexism, or anything else. Many in the political media don’t want to hear about how these things tipped the election in the final days. They say their beef is that I’m not taking responsibility for my mistakes—but I have, and I do again throughout this book. Their real problem is they can’t bear to face their own role in helping elect Trump, from providing him free airtime to giving my emails three times more coverage than all the issues affecting people’s lives combined.

Other candidates who have lost the presidency have been allowed—even encouraged—to discuss what went wrong and why. After John Kerry lost the election in 2004, he quite reasonably said that the release of a tape from Osama bin Laden a day before the election had a significant effect on the outcome of the race. The press was interested in what he had to say. They want me to stop talking.

If it’s all my fault, then the media doesn’t need to do any soul searching. Republicans can say Putin’s meddling had no consequences. Democrats don’t need to question their own assumptions and prescriptions. Everyone can just move on.

I wish it were that easy. But it’s not. So I’m going to try to explain how I understand what happened, both the unexpected interventions that swung the race at the end, and the structural challenges that made it close to begin with. You don’t have to agree with my take. But counter with evidence, with a real argument. Because we have to get this right.

Here goes.

Common Critiques

The election was decided by 77,744 votes out of a total 136 million cast. If just 40,000 people across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had changed their minds, I would have won. With a margin like that, everyone can have a pet theory about why I lost. It’s difficult to rule anything out. But every theory needs to be tested against the evidence that I was winning until October 28, when Jim Comey injected emails back into the election.

For example, some critics have said that everything hinged on me not campaigning enough in the Midwest. And I suppose it is possible that a few more trips to Saginaw or a few more ads on the air in Waukesha could have tipped a couple thousand votes here and there.

But let’s set the record straight. We always knew that the industrial Midwest was crucial to our success, just as it had been for Democrats for decades, and contrary to the popular narrative, we didn’t ignore those states. In Pennsylvania, where public and private polls showed a competitive race similar to 2012, we had nearly 500 staff on the ground, 120 more than the Obama campaign deployed four years before. We spent 211 percent more on television ads in the state. And I held more than twenty-five campaign events there during the general election. We also blanketed Pennsylvania with high-profile surrogates like President Obama and Vice President Biden. In Michigan, where the polls showed us ahead but not by as much as we’d like, we had nearly 140 more staff on the ground than Obama did in 2012, and spent 166 percent more on television. I visited seven times during the general election. We lost both states, but no one can say we weren’t doing everything possible to compete and win.

If there’s one place where we were caught by surprise, it was Wisconsin. Polls showed us comfortably ahead, right up until the end. They also looked good for the Democrat running for Senate, Russ Feingold. We had 133 staff on the ground and spent nearly $3 million on TV, but if our data (or anyone else’s) had shown we were in danger, of course we would have invested even more. I would have torn up my schedule, which was designed based on the best information we had, and camped out there. As it is, while I didn’t visit Wisconsin in the fall, Tim Kaine, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and other high-profile surrogates did. So what went wrong? We’ll get to that. But bear in mind that Trump received roughly the same number of votes in Wisconsin that Mitt Romney did. There was no surge in Republican turnout. Instead, enough voters switched, stayed home, or went for third parties in the final days to cost me the state.

Here’s the bottom line: I campaigned heavily across Pennsylvania, had an aggressive ground game and lots of advertising, and still lost by 44,000 votes, more than the margin in Wisconsin and Michigan combined. So it’s just not credible that the best explanation for the outcome in those states—and therefore the election—was where I held rallies.

Another easy explanation that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny is that I lost because I didn’t have an economic message. Joe Biden said the Democratic Party in 2016 “did not talk about what it always stood for—and that was how to maintain a burgeoning middle class.” He said, “You didn’t hear a single solitary sentence in the last campaign about that guy working on the assembly line making sixty thousand bucks a year and a wife making $32,000 as a hostess in a restaurant.” I find this fairly remarkable, considering that Joe himself campaigned for me all over the Midwest and talked plenty about the middle class.

Also, it’s just not true. Not even close. Vox did an analysis of all my campaign events and found that I talked about jobs, workers, and the economy far more than anything else. As the Atlantic put it in a piece titled, “The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class,” I ran on “the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history” and talked more about jobs in my convention speech than Trump did in his, as well as in our first debate, which was watched by eighty-four million people.

Throughout the campaign we always tried to have a positive track of advertising on the air, laying out what I was for and where we needed to go economically. We did that even when we were also running spots highlighting Trump’s unfitness for office. We actually filmed one ad outside the Milwaukee offices of a company called Johnson Controls, which was trying to get out of paying taxes in America by moving its headquarters overseas—what’s known as a “corporate inversion.” It was so cold that day I could barely feel my feet, but I insisted on doing it because I was furious about the shell game the company was playing at the expense of its workers and the American people. I talked about Johnson Controls’ tax scheme virtually every day on the trail for months. So we can debate whether my economic message was effective, but you can’t claim I didn’t have one.

Here’s one story that helps explain why this is so frustrating. The day after I accepted the nomination in Philadelphia, Bill and I hit the road with Tim Kaine and his wife, Anne, for a bus tour through factory towns across Pennsylvania and Ohio. It reminded me of our exhilarating bus trip in 1992 with Al and Tipper Gore. That was one of my favorite weeks of the entire ’92 campaign. We met hardworking people, saw gorgeous country, and everywhere we went we felt the energy of a country ready for change. Twenty-four years later, I wanted to recapture that. We loaded onto our big blue bus, with “Stronger Together” emblazoned on the sides, and set out on a 635-mile journey. At every stop, Tim and I talked about plans to create jobs, raise wages, and support working families. In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in rural Cambria County, we shared our ideas with steelworkers in a factory manufacturing wire for heavy industry. Afterward, one of the workers, a crane operator, told a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer that he didn’t usually vote in presidential elections but might turn out this time because he liked what he heard. “I liked the idea of trying to get better wages for working-class people,” he said. “We need them.” It was music to my ears.

But you probably don’t remember hearing anything about this bus tour. In fact, you may well have heard that I didn’t campaign like this at all; that I ignored the Rust Belt, didn’t have an economic message, and couldn’t connect with working-class voters. Why the disconnect? The very same week that Tim and I were driving around Pennsylvania and Ohio, Donald Trump was picking a high-profile fight with the Khans, the grieving Gold Star parents of a fallen Muslim American war hero. That sucked up all the oxygen in the media. It was a short-term disaster for Trump, and his poll numbers tumbled. But it was also part of a pattern that over the long-term ensured that my economic message never got out and let Trump control the tempo of the race.

Was I Doomed from the Start?

Some pundits have also said my campaign was doomed from the start, either because of my weaknesses as a candidate or because America was caught up in a historic wave of angry, tribal populism sweeping the world. Maybe. But don’t forget that I won the popular vote by nearly three million, roughly the same margin by which George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in 2004. It’s hard to see how that happens if I’m hopelessly out of step with the American people.

Still, as I’ve discussed throughout this book, I do think it’s fair to say there was a fundamental mismatch between how I approach politics and what a lot of the country wanted to hear in 2016. I’ve learned that even the best plans and proposals can land on deaf ears when people are disillusioned by a broken political system and disgusted with politicians. When people are angry and looking for someone to blame, they don’t want to hear your ten-point plan to create jobs and raise wages. They want you to be angry, too.

You can see the same dynamic in a lot of personal relationships. I have friends who often get frustrated with their spouses who, instead of listening to them vent about a problem and commiserating, jump straight into trying to solve it. That was my problem with many voters: I skipped the venting and went straight to the solving.

Moreover, I have come to terms with the fact that a lot of people—millions and millions of people—decided they just didn’t like me. Imagine what that feels like. It hurts. And it’s a hard thing to accept. But there’s no getting around it.

Whenever I do a job, such as Senator or Secretary of State, people give me high ratings. But when I compete for a job—by running for office—everything changes. People remember years of partisan attacks that have painted me as dishonest and untrustworthy. Even when they’re disproven, those attacks leave a residue. I’ve always tried to keep my head down and do good work and hope to be judged by the results. That’s usually worked, but not this time.

It seems as if many Trump voters were actually voting against me, more than they were voting for him (53 percent to 44 percent, in a September Pew Research Center poll). In exit polls, a significant number of people said they thought Trump was unqualified or lacked the temperament to be President… yet voted for him anyway. Of the 61 percent of all voters who said he was unqualified, 17 percent still voted for him. Of the 63 percent who said he didn’t have the right temperament, 19 percent voted for him. The exit polls found that 18 percent of all voters viewed both me and Trump negatively, but they went for him 47 percent to 30 percent. Their antipathy toward me must have been even stronger than their concerns about his qualifications and temperament.

I’m not surprised by these findings. Gallup compiled a word cloud depicting everything Americans read, saw, or heard about me during several months of the campaign. It was dominated by a single giant word: email. Much smaller, but also visible were the words lie and scandal. Interestingly, in Trump’s word cloud, immigration and Mexico stand out much more than jobs or trade. More on that shortly.

I don’t believe all the negative feelings about me were inevitable. After all, I had high approval ratings when I left the State Department. This was the result of a relentless barrage of political attacks and negative coverage. But I also know that it was my job to try to break through all that noise and convince the American people to vote for me. I wasn’t able to do it.

So yes, I had my shortcomings as a candidate. And yes, there was indeed a global populist wave and an anti–third term tradition in America. But—and this is important for determining what tilted the outcome of the election—those structural factors didn’t pop up as a big surprise at the end. They were in play throughout the campaign. They probably kept the race closer than was justified based on our contrasting policy proposals and conduct, my record in public office, and the achievements of the Obama administration. If these factors were decisive, however, I should have been behind the whole way. And yet, despite consistent headwinds, nearly every public and private poll over two years showed me ahead, often way ahead.

By the homestretch, after two conventions and three debates watched by record numbers of Americans, I had emerged with clear momentum and a solid lead. Vox’s Ezra Klein called it “the most effective series of debate performances in modern political history.” I was in a stronger position than President Obama had been four years before. So either all those surveys over all those months were wrong, or something changed in the final days of the race to shift enough voters in key states to make a difference.

Were all the polls wrong? We know now that some surveys were off, especially in Wisconsin, especially at the end. It’s likely that some Trump voters refused to participate in surveys and so their feedback was missed, and that some people weren’t truthful about their preferences. But overall, national polls in 2016 were slightly more accurate than they were in 2012. That year, the final polling average understated President Obama’s actual victory by 3.1 points. In 2016, according to the website RealClearPolitics, the final average was off by just 1.2 points. In a race this close, that’s not nothing. But it’s hardly a massive error.

So no, all the polls weren’t wrong. It’s possible that my lead throughout the race was slightly overstated—but not significantly. It’s reasonable to conclude, therefore, that something important and ultimately decisive happened at the very end.

The Bottom Falls Out

The evidence backs up the idea that there was a late shift away from me and toward Trump and third-party candidates. My support was strong in early voting across the country, and early-vote turnout roughly matched what our models predicted. But things collapsed in the final days and on Election Day itself.

In real time, it was hard to appreciate how fragile our position was. As I mentioned earlier, Joel Benenson’s polling showed a solid lead in the final week. Our data analytics team was also surveying thousands of people each night. “We have seen our margins tighten across the battleground states,” Elan Kriegel reported on November 3. But, he continued, “our national toplines have been +3 each of the last four nights.” We were up by the same 3-point margin in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, he said. Democratic Senate campaigns and party committees were seeing similar numbers, and some were even more optimistic.

Exit polls would later find that voters who were still making up their minds in those final days broke strongly for Trump. In Pennsylvania, a state with no early voting allowed at all, the margin among late-deciders was 54 to 37. In Wisconsin, where 72 percent of people voted on Election Day, it was 59 to 30. In Michigan, where 73 percent of people voted on Election Day, it was 50 to 39. And the pattern extended beyond the Midwest. In Florida, late-deciders went for Trump 55 to 38. That late surge was enough to put all these states in Trump’s column.

Normally, campaigns have a decent sense of how undecided voters are likely to break, based on their past vote history and demographics. And history shows that most people who tell pollsters they’re considering a third-party candidate will “come home” in the end. In the final days of the 2016 campaign, the voters you would expect to return to the Republican Party did so. But that didn’t happen on our side. Many Democratic-leaning voters flirting with third-party candidates ended up actually pulling the lever for them. And some undecided voters we expected to ultimately choose us went to Trump instead or stayed home.

That included suburban moderates who might have voted for Republicans in the past but didn’t like Trump and had been looking for an acceptable alternative right up until the end. On Election Day, a lot of them held their noses and voted for him anyway. It’s revealing to compare the results in the suburbs of Denver and Las Vegas, where the vast majority vote early and I did well enough to carry both Colorado and Nevada, with the results in the Philadelphia suburbs, where nearly everyone voted on Election Day. The final Franklin & Marshall Poll in Pennsylvania, based on interviews nearly all conducted before October 28, found I had a 36-point margin over Trump in the four counties of the Philadelphia suburbs, leading 64 percent to 28 percent. By Election Day, I only beat Trump there by about 13 points. That loss of suburban support in the final week meant I couldn’t match Trump’s strength in rural areas and ended up narrowly losing the state.

Working-class white women also moved en masse in the final days. Trump led among this group nearly the whole campaign, but according to the NBC–Wall Street Journal poll, I had closed to within just 4 points during the October debates. Then, in the final week, Trump’s margin grew to 24 points.

The Comey Effect

What happened in the homestretch that caused so many voters to turn away from me?

First, and most importantly, there was the unprecedented intervention by then FBI Director Jim Comey.

His October 28 letter about the investigation into my emails led to a week of wall-to-wall negative coverage. A look at five of the nation’s top newspapers found that together they published 100 stories mentioning the email controversy in the days after Comey’s letter, nearly half of them on the front page. In six out of seven mornings from October 29 to November 4, it was the lead story in the nation’s news cycle. Trump understood that Comey’s apparent imprimatur gave his “Crooked Hillary” attacks new credibility, and Republicans dumped at least $17 million in Comey-related ads into the battleground states. It worked.

On November 1 and 2, my campaign conducted focus groups with independent, swing voters in Philadelphia and Tampa, Florida. The undecideds weren’t ready to jump to Trump yet, but in retrospect, the warning signs were blinking red. “I have concerns about this whole Weiner thing. I find it unsettling. I had been leaning toward Hillary, but now I just don’t know,” said one Florida voter. “I was never a fan of either one, but this email thing with Clinton has me concerned the past few days. Will they elect her and then impeach her? Was she giving away secret information?” said another.

Outside focus groups were hearing similar things. Researchers who track what consumers are talking about, essentially a word-of-mouth index, found “a sudden change,” with a 17-point drop in net sentiment for me, and an 11-point rise for Trump. According to Brad Fay of Engagement Labs, which applies well-established consumer research techniques to study elections, “The change in word-of-mouth favorability metric was stunning, and much greater than the traditional opinion polling revealed.”

Those concerns we heard in the focus groups help explain why Comey’s letter was so devastating. From the beginning of the general election, we had understood the race to be a contest between voters’ fear of risk and desire for change. Convincing Americans that electing Trump was just too big a risk was our best shot at overpowering the widespread desire for a change after eight years of Democratic control. In demographic terms, our strategy depended on compensating for expected weakness with working-class white voters (a trend that had been getting worse for Democrats for a long time) by doing better among college-educated suburban moderates—precisely the people most likely to be concerned about risk.

Before October 28, there was every reason to believe this strategy would work. Voters thought Trump was unqualified and temperamentally unfit. They worried he might blunder into a war. And they thought I was steady, qualified, and safe. Comey’s letter turned that picture upside down. Now voters were worried my presidency would be dogged by more investigations, maybe even impeachment. It was “unsettling,” as that Florida voter put it. When both candidates seemed risky, then the desire for change reasserted itself and undecideds shifted to Trump or a third party.

In the week that followed Comey’s letter, Nate Silver found that my lead in national polling dropped by about 3 points, and my chances of winning the election shrunk from 81 percent to 65 percent. In the average battleground state, my lead was down to just 1.7 points—and the fact that there were few if any polls still in the field that late in the game in places such as Wisconsin meant that the damage could easily have been worse.

Then, on the Sunday afternoon before Election Day, Comey sent another letter explaining that, in fact, there was no new evidence to change his conclusion from July. By then it was too late. If anything, that second letter may have energized Trump supporters even more and made them more likely to turn out and vote against me. It also guaranteed that undecided voters saw two more days of headlines about emails and investigations.

Hours after Comey’s second letter hit the news, Trump whipped up the outrage in a rally in Michigan: “Hillary Clinton is guilty. She knows it. The FBI knows it. The people know it,” he said. “Now it’s up to the American people to deliver justice at the ballot box on November 8.” The crowd responded with loud chants of “Lock her up!”

Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, credited Comey’s letter with reversing his candidate’s fortunes. “With eleven days to go in this election cycle something amazing happened,” he said. In his new book, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, Bloomberg News reporter Joshua Green reveals that the Trump campaign’s data scientists thought the effect of Comey’s letter was “pivotal.” In an internal memo written five days before Election Day, they reported seeing “declining support for Clinton, shifting in favor of Mr. Trump” and predicted, “This may have a fundamental impact on the results.” Sadly, they were right.

Silver, whose model had been more conservative than most throughout the race, concluded, “Clinton would almost certainly be President-Elect if the election had been held on Oct. 27 (the day before the Comey letter).” Professor Sam Wang, who runs the Princeton Election Consortium, called Comey’s letter “a critical factor in the home stretch” and found a 4-point swing.

Here’s a particularly stark way of understanding the impact: Even if Comey caused just 0.6 percent of Election Day voters to change their votes, and even if that swing only occurred in the Rust Belt, it would have been enough to shift the Electoral College from me to Trump.

This is why Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times columnist, has started ironically tweeting “Thanks, Comey,” every time he sees some new outrage from the Trump White House. Comey made a choice to excoriate me in public in July and then dramatically reopen the investigation on October 28, all while refusing to say a word about Trump and Russia. If not for those decisions, everything would have been different. Comey himself later said that he was “mildly nauseous” at the idea that he influenced the outcome of the election. Hearing that made me sick.

From Russia with No Love

The second big factor that caused the bottom to fall out at the end of the race was the Russian plot to sabotage my campaign and help elect Trump. Michael Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, has described it as “the political equivalent of 9/11.”

The emails Russia stole from John Podesta and provided to WikiLeaks ensured that the words Clinton and emails were in the headlines even before Comey’s letter. The subterranean torrent of fake news added to the problem. For voters, the stories merged to create an overpowering fog of scandal and mistrust. Even if there was no fire, there was enough smoke to choke our campaign.

Because no evidence has emerged yet of direct vote tampering, some critics insist that Russian interference had no impact on the outcome at all. This is absurd. The Kremlin’s information warfare was roughly equivalent to a hostile super PAC unleashing a major ad campaign, if not worse. Of course it had an impact. (And for those obsessed with actual tampering, since we keep learning more about Russian intrusions into our election systems, maybe this is what the administration and Secretaries of State across the country should be investigating instead of a nonexistent epidemic of voter fraud.)

Nate Silver’s website FiveThirtyEight.com looked at Google searches as a measure of how much the WikiLeaks story broke through with actual voters. He found that—except for immediately after Comey sent his letter on October 28—there were more searches about WikiLeaks than the FBI during the final weeks of the race. That did make some sense. The mainstream media provided blanket coverage of Comey, so there was no need to search for more information about that. The WikiLeaks stories, however, could send searchers down deep internet rabbit holes.

Google searches about WikiLeaks were particularly high in swing areas with large numbers of undecided voters, like Cambria County in Pennsylvania and Appleton, Wisconsin. In other words, a lot of people were online trying to get to the bottom of these crazy claims and conspiracy theories before casting their votes. Too often, what they found was more misinformation and Russian-directed propaganda.

Together, the effects of Comey’s letter and the Russian attack formed a devastating combination. Silver concluded after the election that if it hadn’t been for these two late-breaking factors, I likely would have won Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by about 2 points. Instead, I lost all four by less than 1 point on average, and Michigan by just two-tenths of a point.

What Explains Trump’s Support?

All of this is depressing, infuriating, and ultimately unsatisfying. Outside interference may help explain why enough votes shifted in the final days to give the Electoral College to Trump. But it doesn’t explain why the race was close to begin with, close enough that late movement in a few states could make the difference. It doesn’t really explain how sixty-two million people—many of whom agreed Trump was unfit for the job—could vote for a man so manifestly unqualified to be President. This may be the more important question for understanding what’s going on in our country right now.

Start with the 13.3 million Republicans who voted for Trump in the primaries. It’s safe to say these are mostly hard-core supporters—the ones Trump was talking about when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Thirteen million is a lot of people to strongly support someone most Americans think is unqualified and unfit, but they account for less than half of all Republican primary voters and less than 10 percent of all general election voters. It’s a mistake to give those base voters more political weight than they deserve. More interesting and important is how Trump consolidated support among the much larger pool of voters beyond his base.

Besides antipathy toward me, probably the biggest factor pushing Trump skeptics into his camp was pure partisanship. There’s an old saying that “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.” That was proven true once again in 2016. I won 89 percent of Democratic voters. Despite the example of a few courageous “Never Trumpers,” Trump won 90 percent of Republican voters. Many of them preferred a different candidate in the primaries. Many were surely disgusted by his outrageous behavior, including his treatment of women. Yet when it came down to it, the R next to his name was more important than anything else. Maybe this was about the Supreme Court, or the assumption that he would end up rubber-stamping the congressional GOP’s agenda, especially big tax cuts for the rich. Maybe it reflects a deeper partisan element in our politics.

Either way, it stands in stark contrast to what happened in the French election in 2017, when conservatives and socialists alike crossed party lines and rallied behind centrist Emmanuel Macron to stop the extremist Marine Le Pen. In France, patriotism trumped partisanship. Some analysts say French voters watched what happened here and acted to stop it there. So did the Dutch in their election, defeating the right-wing nationalist Geert Wilders. Of course, it helps when the candidate who gets the most votes wins the election. What an idea! If our voters had known more about what Putin was doing on Trump’s behalf, would it have made a difference? All I can say is that I believe Americans are just as patriotic as the French and the Dutch.

Partisanship is powerful, but it was far from the only factor fueling Trump’s support. As I noted earlier, a desire for change was also important. Exit polls tell us that 39 percent of voters said the ability to bring change was the most important quality in a candidate, and 82 percent of them supported Trump. By comparison, 22 percent of voters said having the “right experience” was most important, and they went for me 90 to 7. The 20 percent who said “good judgment” was most important supported me 65 to 25. And the 15 percent who wanted a candidate who “cares about me” went 57 to 34 for me. In other words, “change” voters provided the bulk of Trump’s support.

Change can mean different things to different people. But as I’ve noted, this was a challenge I grappled with from the very beginning. History shows how hard it is for a party to hold on to the White House for three terms, even after successful presidencies. I castigated Republican obstruction in Congress and offered lots of solutions to make the economy fairer and politics cleaner, but I never escaped being pigeonholed as the candidate of continuity rather than change. Certainly, if voters wanted to “shake things up” or “burn it all down,” they were more likely to choose Donald Trump over me. They weren’t in any mood to remember that great old Texas saying from Sam Rayburn, the former Speaker of the House: “Any jackass can kick down a barn. It takes a good carpenter to build one.”

In polls throughout the campaign, we asked voters what they thought of President Obama and if they wanted to continue in the same direction or go in a fundamentally different direction. You might expect the answers to be linked. And yet, while voters consistently gave the President high marks—in fact, Obama’s popularity continued to rise throughout 2016, as did economic forecasts—they just as consistently said they were ready for a new direction. That may show the power of the impulse for change, but it also shows how complicated this is. One might also ask: Why were the vast majority of members of Congress reelected? Incumbents have advantages and gerrymandering has given many of them safe seats, but if there was a real “throw the bums out” wave in this election, we would have seen it down ballot as well.

So, yes, a desire for change was an important factor, but to understand what this was really about we have to look deeper.

Economic Anxiety or Bigotry

Most postgame analysis has weighed two competing theories: either it was economic anxiety or it was bigotry. A lot of data point toward the latter, but ultimately this is a false choice that misses the complexity of the situation.

Let’s start with this: the idea that the 2016 election was purely about economic anxiety just isn’t supported by the evidence. There’s a perception that Trump was the tribune of the working class while I was the candidate of the elites. And it’s true that there was a big divide in this election between voters with a college degree and those without. But this doesn’t line up neatly with income levels. There are a lot of middle- and upper-class people without a college degree. As the Washington Post explained in a piece titled, “It’s Time to Bust the Myth: Most Trump Voters Were Not Working Class,” nearly 60 percent of Trump supporters without a college degree were in the top half of the income distribution. The average income of a Trump voter during the primaries was $72,000, which is higher than for most Americans. And in the general election, voters with incomes below $50,000 preferred me by 12 points.

It’s surely true that many blue-collar white voters in Rust Belt communities did like what Trump had to say on the economy. Exit polls found that voters who thought the national economy was in poor shape strongly supported Trump. But that wasn’t necessarily their most compelling concern. The same exit polls found that voters who thought the economy was the most important issue in the election (52 percent nationwide) preferred me by a margin of 11 points. This was also true in the key battlegrounds. In Michigan, voters who cared most about the economy went for me 51 to 43. In Wisconsin, it was 53 to 42. In Pennsylvania, 50 to 46. To be fair, there are other ways to look at the numbers. Many Trump supporters who told pollsters they cared most passionately about other issues—especially terrorism and immigration—almost certainly preferred Trump on the economy as well. Nonetheless, the story on the economy is a lot more nuanced than the postelection narrative would have you believe.

Some supporters of Bernie Sanders have argued that if I had veered further left and run a more populist campaign we would have done better in the Rust Belt. I don’t believe it. Russ Feingold ran a passionately populist campaign for Senate in Wisconsin and lost by much more than I did, while a champion of free trade, Senator Rob Portman, outperformed Trump in Ohio. Scott Walker, the right-wing Governor of Wisconsin, has won elections there by busting unions and catering to the resentments of conservative rural voters, not by denouncing trade deals and corporations. Sanders himself had a chance to test out his appeal during the primaries, and he ended up losing to me by nearly four million votes—including in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And that was without any pummeling by the Republican attack machine that would have savaged him in a general election.

That said, a small but still significant number of left-wing voters may well have thrown the election to Trump. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, called me and my policies “much scarier than Donald Trump” and praised his pro-Russia stance. This isn’t surprising, considering that Stein sat with Putin and Michael Flynn at the infamous Moscow dinner in 2015 celebrating the Kremlin’s propaganda network RT, and later said she and Putin agreed “on many issues.” Stein wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except for the fact that she won thirty-one thousand votes in Wisconsin, where Trump’s margin was smaller than twenty-three thousand. In Michigan, she won fifty-one thousand votes, while Trump’s margin was just over ten thousand. In Pennsylvania, she won nearly fifty thousand votes, and Trump’s margin was roughly forty-four thousand. So in each state, there were more than enough Stein voters to swing the result, just like Ralph Nader did in Florida and New Hampshire in 2000. Maybe, like actress Susan Sarandon, Stein thinks electing Trump will hasten “the revolution.” Who knows? By contrast, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, a Republican who ran for Vice President on the Libertarian ticket topped by Gary Johnson, told his supporters toward the end that if they lived in swing states they should vote for me. If more third-party voters had listened to Bill Weld, Trump would not be President.

So, if arguments about the power of Trump’s economic appeal are overstated, what about his exploitation of racial and cultural anxiety?

Since the election, study after study has suggested that these factors are essential to understanding what happened in the election.

In June 2017, the Voter Study Group, a consortium of academic researchers, published a major new survey that tracked the same eight thousand voters from 2012 to 2016. “What stands out most,” concluded George Washington University professor John Sides, are “attitudes about immigration, feelings toward black people, and feelings toward Muslims.” Data from the gold standard American National Election Studies also showed that resentment toward these groups was a better predictor of Trump support than economic concerns. And as I previously mentioned, exit polls found that Trump’s victory depended on voters whose top concerns were immigration and terrorism, despite his lack of any national security experience and my long record. That’s a polite way of saying many of these voters were worried about people of color—especially blacks, Mexicans, and Muslims—threatening their way of life. They believed that the political, economic, and cultural elites cared more about these “others” than about them.

I’m not saying that all Trump voters are racist or xenophobic. There are plenty of good-hearted people who are uncomfortable about perceived antipolice rhetoric, undocumented immigrants, and fast-changing norms around gender and sexual orientation. But you had to be deaf to miss the coded language and racially charged resentment powering Trump’s campaign.

When I said, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” I was talking about well-documented reality. For example, the General Social Survey conducted by the University of Chicago found that in 2016, 55 percent of white Republicans believed that blacks are generally poorer than whites “because most just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty.” In the same survey, 42 percent of white Republicans described blacks as lazier than whites and 26 percent said they were less intelligent. In all cases, the number of white Democrats who said the same thing was much lower (although still way too high).

Generalizing about a broad group of people is almost always unwise. And I regret handing Trump a political gift with my “deplorables” comment. I know that a lot of well-intentioned people were insulted because they misunderstood me to be criticizing all Trump voters. I’m sorry about that.

But too many of Trump’s core supporters do hold views that I find—there’s no other word for it—deplorable. And while I’m sure a lot of Trump supporters had fair and legitimate reasons for their choice, it is an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact that everyone who voted for Donald Trump—all 62,984,825 of them—made the decision to elect a man who bragged about sexual assault, attacked a federal judge for being Mexican and grieving Gold Star parents who were Muslim, and has a long and well-documented history of racial discrimination in his businesses. That doesn’t mean every Trump voter approved of those things, but at a minimum they accepted or overlooked them. And they did it without demanding the basics that Americans used to expect from all presidential candidates, from releasing tax returns to offering substantive policy proposals to upholding common standards of decency.

“Wait a minute,” some critics will say, “President Obama won twice. How could race be a real factor here?”

The important thing to remember is that racial attitudes aren’t static and they don’t exist in a vacuum. As Christopher Parker, a political science professor at the University of Washington, has explained, the Obama years produced a backlash among white voters: “Every period of racial progress in this country is followed by a period of retrenchment. That’s what the 2016 election was about.” It’s like in physics—every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Cornell Belcher, a respected Democratic pollster, has studied changing racial attitudes in America extensively and documented this backlash in his book A Black Man in the White House. He described Obama’s election as setting off anxiety among many white Americans that built over time. “After a significantly brief honeymoon in November 2008, racial aversion among Republicans climbed precipitously,” Belcher wrote, “and stayed at that level until October 2014 when it again spiked—to an all-time high.” It’s not surprising that those spikes occurred around the two midterm elections, when Republican candidates were working double-time to demonize Obama and he wasn’t on the ballot and fully engaged in fighting back.

Other academic researchers have studied a phenomenon they call “racial priming.” Their findings show that when white voters are encouraged to view the world through a racial lens and to be more conscious of their own racial identity, they act and vote more conservatively. That’s exactly what happened in 2016. John McCain and Mitt Romney made principled decisions not to make their campaigns about race. McCain famously stood up to one of his own voters at a town hall in October 2008 and assured the crowd that rumors about Obama being foreign were false. By contrast, Donald Trump rose to prominence by spreading the racist “birther” lie that President Obama was not born in the United States. Trump launched his campaign for President by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. And he continued to make racially charged attacks right up until Election Day. All this happened against the backdrop of police shootings and Black Lives Matter protests. It makes sense that by Election Day, more white voters may have been thinking about race and identity than in 2012, when those issues were rarely talked about on either side.

To be fair, I likely contributed to a heightened racial consciousness as well. I called out Trump’s bigotry and his appeal to white supremacists and the so-called Alt-Right. In a speech in Reno, Nevada, in August 2016, I laid out a detailed case documenting Trump’s history of racial discrimination in his business career and how he used a campaign based on prejudice and paranoia to take hate groups mainstream and help a radical fringe take over the Republican Party. I denounced his decision to hire Stephen Bannon, the head of Breitbart, as campaign CEO. I also spoke positively throughout the campaign about racial justice, immigration, and Muslims.

As a result, some white voters may have decided I wasn’t on their side. For example, my meeting with Black Lives Matter activists and support for the Mothers of the Movement was seen by some white police officers as presuming their guilt, in spite of my long-standing support for more police on the street, community policing, and 9/11 first responders. I always said we needed to both reform policing and support police officers. It didn’t seem to matter. But this is one issue on which I don’t second-guess myself. No parent should fear for the life of an unarmed, law-abiding child when he walks out of the house. That’s not “identity politics.” It’s simple justice.

But back to the question at hand. I find the data on all this to be compelling. Yet I believe that, in the end, the debate between “economic anxiety” and racism or “cultural anxiety” is a false choice. If you listen to many Trump voters talk, you start to see that all these different strands of anxiety and resentment are related: the decline of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest that had allowed white men without a college degree to provide their families with middle-class lives, the breakdown of traditional gender roles, anger at immigrants and other minorities for “cutting in line” and getting more than their “fair share,” discomfort with a more diverse and cosmopolitan culture, worries about Muslims and terrorism, and a general sense that things aren’t going the way they should and that life was better and easier for previous generations. In people’s lives and worldviews, concerns about economics, race, gender, class, and culture all blend together.

The academics see this, too. According to the director of the Voter Study Group, which followed thousands of voters from 2012 to 2016, “Voters who experienced increased or continued economic stress were inclined to have become more negative about immigration and terrorism, demonstrating how economic pressures coincided with cultural concerns.”

This isn’t new. Back in 1984, Ronald Reagan won by a landslide by flipping formerly Democratic blue-collar whites. The term “Reagan Democrats” came out of a series of famous focus groups conducted in Macomb County, Michigan, by Stan Greenberg, who went on to become Bill’s pollster in 1992. Stan found that many working-class white voters “interpreted Democratic calls for economic fairness as code for transfer payments to African-Americans,” and blamed blacks “for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives.” After the 2016 election, Stan went back to Macomb County to talk to “Trump Democrats.” He found pretty much all the sentiments you would expect—frustration with elites and a rigged political system, and a desire for fundamental change, but also anger at immigrants who compete with them for jobs and don’t speak English, fear of Muslims, and resentment of minorities who are seen as collecting more than their fair share of government benefits. Some of the comments sounded like they were ripped straight from the 1984 focus groups.

Stan largely blames President Obama for turning working-class voters away from the Democratic Party by embracing free trade and “heralding economic progress and the bailout of the irresponsible elites, while ordinary people’s incomes crashed and they continued to struggle financially.” That’s another reminder that, despite the heroic work President Obama did to get our economy back on the right track after the financial crisis, many Americans didn’t feel the recovery in their own lives and didn’t give Democrats credit. Stan also thought my campaign was too upbeat on the economy, too liberal on immigration, and not vocal enough about trade. Still, he notes that coming out of the third debate, I was poised to overperform with white working-class women compared with Obama in 2012 and perhaps achieve “historic numbers,” until those voters broke away in the final week and went to Trump.

Stan thinks this happened because I “went silent on the economy and change.” But that’s baloney. I went back to look at what I said in my final rallies across the battlegrounds. The day before the election, I told a crowd in Grand Rapids, Michigan, “We’ve got to get the economy working for everybody, not just those at the top. If you believe, as I do, that America thrives when the middle class thrives, then you have to vote tomorrow!” I went on to pledge “the biggest investment in good paying jobs since World War Two,” with an emphasis on infrastructure jobs that can’t be outsourced, advanced manufacturing that pays high wages, stronger unions, a higher minimum wage, and equal pay for women. I also hit Trump for buying cheap Chinese steel and aluminum for his buildings and for wanting to cut taxes for millionaires, billionaires, and corporations. I spoke directly to “people in our country who feel like they’ve been knocked down, and nobody cares.” I said, “If you give me the honor of being your President, I am going to do everything I can to get this country and everybody in it back up on our feet.” I wouldn’t call that going “silent on the economy and change.”

That said, I do sometimes lie awake at night thinking about how we closed the campaign and if there was anything different we could have done that would have made a difference. It’s true that before Comey’s letter, I had planned to close with aggressive advertising reminding working families of my plans to change our country and their lives for the better. But after Comey’s letter sent my numbers sliding, the consensus on my team was that our best strategy was to hit Trump hard and remind voters why he was an unacceptable choice. Was that a mistake? Maybe. But we were competing against wall-to-wall negative coverage of emails, plus the slime of fake news.

It’s easy to second-guess. It’s also easy to listen to the ugliest comments in Stan’s focus groups and just get furious. But I try to hold on to my empathy. I still believe what I said immediately after my ill-fated comment about the “basket of deplorables,” although this part didn’t get much attention: many Trump supporters “are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change… Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.” Those were people I intended to help.

Voter Suppression

All of this played out against a landscape shaped by structural factors that didn’t get enough scrutiny during the campaign. Most notable is the impact of voter suppression, through restrictive laws as well as efforts to discourage and depress turnout.

An unnamed senior Trump campaign official boasted to the press in late October 2016 that “we have three major voter suppression operations underway,” aimed at white liberals, young women, and African Americans. It’s worth pausing on this for a moment and reflecting on the fact that they weren’t even trying to hide that they were suppressing the vote. Most campaigns try to win by attracting more support. Trump actively tried to discourage people from voting at all. They used some of the same tactics as the Russians, including trafficking in fake news and under-the-radar Facebook attacks. Despicable stuff. After the election, Trump even thanked African Americans for not voting.

But whatever Trump was up to was just the latest in a long-term Republican strategy to discourage and disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters.

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts opened the floodgates by gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013. When I was in the Senate, we voted to reauthorize the law 98 to 0 and President George W. Bush signed it. But Justice Roberts essentially argued that racism was a thing of the past, and therefore the country no longer needed key protections of the Voting Rights Act. It was one of the worst decisions the court has ever made. By 2016, fourteen states had new restrictions on voting, including burdensome ID requirements aimed at weeding out students, poor people, the elderly, and people of color. Republicans in many states also limited the number and hours of polling places, curtailed early voting and same-day registration, scrapped language assistance for non-English speakers, and purged large numbers of voters from the rolls, sometimes erroneously. Ohio alone has removed up to two million voters since 2011. Much of this national effort was coordinated by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who runs a suppression initiative called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program.

Kobach is the nation’s leading voter suppression advocate and was recently fined for misleading a federal court. He is also the vice chairman of the new commission Trump has created to deal with the phantom epidemic of voting fraud. Studies have found that out of the more than a billion votes cast in the United States between 2000 and 2014, there were just 31 credible cases of voter impersonation. Yet Trump has claimed that millions of people voted illegally in 2016. A review by the Washington Post found only 4 documented instances of voter fraud out of 136 million votes cast in 2016—including an Iowa woman who voted twice for Trump. As Trump’s own lawyers asserted in a Michigan court: “All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.” Nonetheless, Kobach and Republicans across the country continue to use false claims about fraud to justify curtailing voting rights.

Since the election, studies have documented how big an impact all this suppression had on the outcome. States with harsh new voting laws, such as Wisconsin, saw turnout dip 1.7 points, compared with a 1.3-point increase in states where the law didn’t change. And the drop was particularly acute among black voters. Turnout was down 5 points in heavily African American counties in states with strict new ID laws, but down just 2.2 points in similar counties in states without the new laws.

In Wisconsin, where I lost by just 22,748 votes, a study from Priorities USA estimated that the new voter ID law helped reduce turnout by 200,000 votes, primarily from low-income and minority areas. We know for sure that turnout in the city of Milwaukee fell by 13 percent. By contrast, in neighboring Minnesota, which has similar demographics but did not impose arduous new restrictions on voting, turnout in heavily African American counties declined much less and overall turnout was essentially flat. In Illinois, where the state put in place new measures to make it easier to vote, not harder, turnout was up more than 5 percent overall. Among African Americans, turnout was 14 points higher in Illinois than in Wisconsin. The experience living under a deeply unpopular Trumpian governor there may also have motivated people to show up and reject the even worse national version. In short, voting laws matter. A lot. Before the election, one Republican state representative in Wisconsin predicted the new law would help Trump pull off an upset in the state. It turns out he was right.

The Associated Press profiled several Wisconsinites who were turned away or did not have their votes counted because they did not have the required identification, including a Navy veteran with an out-of-state driver’s license, a recent college graduate whose student ID was disqualified because it lacked an expiration date, and a sixty-six-year old woman with chronic lung disease who lost her driver’s license just before Election Day. She provided Social Security and Medicare cards and a government-issued bus pass with a photo, but her vote was still not counted. The AP reported that these disenfranchised citizens were “not hard to find.”

Reading these stories is both eye-opening and infuriating. The right to vote is the foundation of our free society, and protecting that right is the single most important thing we can do to strengthen our democracy. Yet in state after state, Republicans are still at it. President Trump’s obsession to root out nonexistent voter fraud is just cover for further suppression. Already in 2017, more states have imposed new restrictions on voting than in 2015 and 2016 combined. Nearly a hundred bills have been introduced in thirty-one states. This is a problem that will grow only more pervasive and urgent in future elections.

Where Do Democrats Go from Here?

Republicans have another advantage: a powerful, permanent political infrastructure, particularly online. After Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, and widespread praise for the Obama campaign’s technology, Republicans vowed to catch up. Between 2013 and 2016, the Republican National Committee invested more than $100 million in data operations. Outside groups such as the Mercers and the Koch brothers also spent heavily.

By contrast, the Democratic National Committee was badly outgunned. Tom Perez, the new DNC chair, has said, “We’ve got to up our game on technology.” He’s right. Perez pledged to “do a better job of building the data analytics platform that will enable us not only to succeed in elections today but to be the state of the art for decades to come.” That’s crucial.

If we want to win in the future, Democrats need to catch up and leapfrog ahead. And this isn’t just about data. We need an “always-on” content distribution network that can match what the right-wing has built. That means an array of loosely connected Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, Twitter feeds, Snapchat stories, and Reddit communities churning out memes, graphics, and videos. More sophisticated data collection and analysis can support and feed this network. I’m no expert in these matters, but I know enough to understand that most people get their news from screens, so we have to be there 24/7.

There are other lessons I hope Democrats learn from 2016. Since the election, the party has been debating how best to set ourselves up to win in the future, starting with the midterms in 2018. I think most of the perceived drama between the center-left and the left-left on this question is overblown. We’re far closer together than any of us are to Trump and the Republicans, who just keep getting more extreme. Bernie Sanders and I wrote the 2016 platform together, and he called it the most progressive one in history. We share many of the same values and most of our differences over policy are relatively minor compared to the stark divide between the two parties.

You’d also be hard pressed to find any Democrat who doesn’t agree that we need to continue sharpening our economic pitch and that we should make a sustained effort to win back voters who switched from Obama to Trump. We’ll have to convince them that Democrats respect them, care about them, and have a plan to make life better, not just in big cities but also in small towns and rural areas. That might become easier as voters watch Trump break his populist promises and embrace a congressional Republican agenda that tilts the playing field even more toward the wealthy and powerful at the expense of working families. So far, their health care debate is about whether they’re going to take it away from 22 million Americans to fund tax cuts for the wealthy!

So yes, we need to compete everywhere, and we can’t afford to write off any voter or any state. But it’s not all kumbaya in the Democratic Party. We’re hearing a lot of misguided rhetoric and analysis that could lead us in the wrong direction.

One argument is about whether pursuing the Russia investigation is distracting from making the case to voters about health care and the economy. This is another false choice. It makes all the sense in the world for congressional candidates to focus on pocketbook issues, and the disastrous Republican health care legislation should be front and center. But that doesn’t mean Democrats already in Congress should stop doing their jobs. They should continue providing rigorous oversight and hold the Trump administration accountable. I have confidence that Democrats can walk and chew gum at the same time. Plus, the ever-growing Russia scandal is showing Americans that Trump is a liar, and that will help us convince them that he’s lying about health care and jobs, too. And don’t underestimate how, if left unchecked, Russia’s covert operations can easily be used again in the future to defeat other Democrats. That torrent of misinformation helped drown out my message and steal my voice. It gave Trump cover to escape his own problems. This can all happen again if we don’t stop it. Oh, and for any Democratic members of Congress feeling squeamish about pushing too hard, just ask yourselves what Republicans would be doing if the situation were reversed.

Here’s another misguided argument. Some of the same people who say that the reason I lost was because I didn’t have an economic message now insist that all Democrats need to do to win in the future is talk more about jobs, and then—poof!—all those Trump voters will come home. Both the premise and conclusion are false. Yes, we need to talk as much as we possibly can about creating more jobs, raising wages, and making health care and college more affordable and accessible. But that’s exactly what I did throughout 2016. So it’s not a silver bullet and it can’t be the only thing we talk about.

Democrats have to continue championing civil rights, human rights, and other issues that are part of our march toward a more perfect union. We shouldn’t sacrifice our principles to pursue a shrinking pool of voters who look more to the past than the future.

My loss doesn’t change the fact that the Democrats’ future is tied to America’s in a fast-changing world where our ability to make progress depends an increasingly diverse, educated, young electorate. Even when the headlines are bad, there’s reason to be optimistic about the trend lines. I was the first Democrat since FDR to win Orange County, California. I made historic gains in the suburbs of Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Charlotte, as well as in other traditionally Republican areas across the Sun Belt. Latino turnout jumped nearly 5 percent in Florida and rose in other key areas as well.

It wasn’t enough this time, but these trends hold the key to our future. That’s why the Republicans have worked so hard to keep young people and people of color away from the polls, and to gerrymander districts that protect incumbents. Democrats will have to work even harder to fight for voting rights, fair redistricting, and high turnout not just in presidential elections, but also in local, state, and federal midterm elections where the people who make the voting laws and draw congressional districts are selected.

I know we can do it. There are enough vulnerable Republican congressional seats in districts I won for Democrats to be well on their way to retaking the House in 2018, many of them in Sun Belt suburbs. And if we can flip some Midwestern blue-collar districts that went for Trump but are now disillusioned by his performance in office, all the better. We need a strategy that puts us in a position to catch a wave if it forms, and compete and win all over the country.

I do believe it’s possible to appeal to all parts of our big, diverse nation. We need to get better at explaining to all Americans why a more inclusive society with broadly shared growth will be better and more prosperous for everyone. Democrats must make the case that expanding economic opportunity and expanding the rights and dignity of all people can never be either/or, but always go hand in hand. I tried to do this in 2016. That was the whole point of “Stronger Together.” And it’s why I emphasized my commitment to help create jobs in every zip code, in neglected urban neighborhoods and in small Appalachian towns. That vision did win the popular vote by nearly three million (yes, I’m going to keep mentioning that). Unfortunately, zero-sum resentment proved more powerful than positive-sum aspiration in the places where it mattered most. But that doesn’t mean we give up. It means we have to keep making the case, backed up by bold new policy ideas and renewed commitment to our core values.

As for me, I’m sure I’ll keep replaying in my head for a long time what went wrong in this election. As I said in my concession speech, it’s going to be painful for quite a while. None of the factors I’ve discussed here lessen the responsibility I feel or the aching sense that I let everyone down. But I’m not going to sulk or disappear. I’m going to do everything I can to support strong Democratic candidates everywhere. If you’re reading this book, I hope you’ll do your part, too.