Went wrong???

How Iowa went wrong for Hillary Clinton 

Her vaunted field organization performed as expected. But she didn't. 

By Glenn Thrush and Annie Karni

Monday night was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign in miniature – it began with high hopes of a doubt-eradicating victory and ended with that same old anxiety, an inch beyond the jaws of an underdog.

Clinton’s frustrating second Iowa campaign started with a puckish, incognito cross-country trip in April in her “Scooby Van” meant to emphasize her softer side after eight years out of retail politics. It ended here with a full-throated Bernie Sanders–style vow to challenge “the status quo,” intended to make her palatable to progressives who demand a hard-edged approach to income inequality.

Iowa wasn’t just supposed to be a tentative first step in Clinton’s inevitable march to the Democratic nomination, it was meant to be the cornerstone of a rebuilt political persona – and her national team was built from Iowa outward, with a foundational goal of winning here, and winning big.

But nothing is ever easy with Hillary Clinton – especially not here - and her inability to ride a first-class ground organization to a decisive triumph underscores the candidate’s weakness and the lack of a message that resonates with primary voters. For months, the Republican side of the aisle has been filled with drama and uncertainty – yet in the end it was a 74-year-old, wild-haired democratic socialist who has muddied a contest that was supposed to be predictable.

"You're going to see a bounce in Bernie's step tomorrow, the first evidence that their message may have taken hold,” said Mo Elleithee, a communications adviser to Clinton’s 2008 campaign. “There's going to be a new sense of urgency [in the primary] - there is nothing more dangerous than Hillary Clinton as a candidate with her back against the wall. You're going to see two energized campaigns."

In her speech Monday at Drake University, Clinton – as she has done at appearances all over the state – rattled off a laundry list of programs she’d enact as president. But Sanders scored big with younger voters – 70 percent of those under 30 backed him – on the strength of his simple message of change. One Sanders precinct captain summed up the difference while rallying the troops: "Vote your heart, not your mind."

How Clinton squandered such a commanding advantage in Iowa is an all-too familiar tale with echoes of 2008, of grit and a top-dollar organization undercut by the candidate’s flaws, the stubborn ambivalence of a state that has now delivered two embarrassments – but above all her inability to capture the zeitgeist of her own party.

Monday began with Clinton’s internal polling pointing to a tight but comfy five-point lead and ended with an essentially deadlocked result that her team chose to call victory.

“A win is a win,” her ally former Sen. Tom Harkin said from the stage here – but it was meager enough (if it existed at all) to allow a democratic socialist who trailed her by 50 points six months ago to declare, with some justification, a kind of co-victory.

Aboard a charter plane to New Hampshire, her top communications aides reinforced the message. “We believe strongly that we won tonight,” said spokesman Brian Fallon. "Sen. Sanders has been saying for several weeks that if this caucus was a high turnout affair, that he would win. He was wrong.” Fallon said turnout was about 180,000 – the second highest turnout on the Democratic side in caucus history, after 2008.

"I always thought she would lose here. Plenty of people on the campaign thought they were going to lose Iowa,” said one Clinton donor, reflecting the abrupt pox-on-Iowa mood of the team. "I think they were very worried about losing Iowa - if we can call it a tie or a win, I think we will be pretty happy about it. There was much more anxiety here than people articulated.”

In 2008, Clinton’s ambivalence about Iowa resulted in a muddled strategy and a flawed field operation. This time she had the best operation money could buy and experience could muster: The 100-plus staffer operation was built by Clinton’s 35-year-old campaign manager Robby Mook, Clinton’s best field organizer eight years ago, and he devoted the bulk of the candidate’s time and the campaign’s resources to the first four voting states, with an extreme focus on Iowa over other states where the campaign’s presence was bare-bones.

But Clinton suffered from the same structural disadvantage here that hurt her in 2008. Her appeal was limited, mostly, to older, frequent caucus-goers – with a goal of maximizing turnout and pulling from a poll of about 20,000 Democratic voters who never participate in the labor-intensive caucus process. Sanders, who attracted big crowds on college campuses and high schools, had a much larger reservoir of young people to draw from – and he apparently did just that on caucus night, according to initial estimates.

Clinton didn’t struggle for lack of trying. It was to Iowa where Clinton pointed her van for the first road trip of the campaign back in April, when she kicked off her campaign with a roundtable discussion with six community college students. And it was to Iowa that the famously penny-pinching campaign dispatched 30 paid staffers on the ground right out of the gate. Even at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters, the conference rooms were named after the first four early-voting states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. The biggest room is “Iowa.”

It was Iowa where Bill Clinton made his first appearance on the campaign trail for his wife in October, and it was Iowa where Clinton held her biggest rally to date, a bleacher-rattling 2,600-person rally on Sunday night.

Mook, insiders said, recognized the appeal of Bernie Sanders from the beginning. He was conducting a meeting in his office in Brooklyn when Sanders announced his bid back in April, and immediately turned to his colleague and mused that Sanders would pose a bigger threat than Martin O’Malley and that people would underestimate his populist appeal, according to a source in the room.

In Iowa, the campaign used the perceived “enthusiasm gap” – especially among younger voters who overwhelmingly backed Sanders on Monday - to motivate its troops. At a field office on the south side of Des Moines, a quote from Sanders was posted all over the walls: “What this campaign is about, and I see it every day, is an excitement and energy that does not exist and will not exist in the Clinton campaign.” Volunteers were motivated to prove him wrong.

Mook has even been operating, insiders said, as de facto Iowa state director - he placed his protégé Michael Halle in Iowa and in recent weeks has been speaking with him multiple times a day. But the campaign – as in 2008 – was hampered by the candidate’s own shortcomings and her inability to frame a compelling message rooted in Sanders’ seductive argument that the party’s establishment – including Clinton – had rigged the economic game against the “everyday Americans” Clinton was promising to serve.

But Clinton isn’t an Iowa kind of candidate, and never has been – not in a state where roughly four in 10 Democrats self-identify as socialists.

“Since 2008, Clinton’s people have been pretty smart about putting together a really first-rate organization,” says Jeff Link, a Des Moines-based consultant with close ties to Harkin, long the state’s dominant Democrat, told POLITICO last month. “In the last eight years she gained all this experience at the State Department, which is great. But experience is not something voters are dying for right now.”

The importance of winning in Iowa was twofold - back in the spring, the Clinton campaign hoped to defeat its primary challengers as quickly as possible and avoid a 50-state primary that would ding up the candidate with attacks before she entered a general election battle. And psychologically for Clinton, a victory here would free her from her stinging third-place finish eight years ago.

Clinton has kept up a slow and steady schedule here - even in the final three-day push, she has kept to her schedule of no more than three events a day, compared to Sanders' five or six. The ground organization has done much of the heavy lifting for the candidate - staffers and volunteers have penned handwritten notes to supporters and kept in touch almost daily with their networks since April. Volunteers like precinct captain Julie Mason have been working full-time since April hosting neighborhood parties, button-making parties, traveling halfway across the state to attend events, and hosting "commitment" gatherings - all to make sure people know the details of their caucus locations.

Allies on the ground in Iowa noticed the campaign’s attention to the small details this time. For instance, the campaign printed caucus locations in all 1,636 precincts on the “walk packets” that volunteers distributed when door-knocking. “You need a massive organization to get all the packets across the state and they’ve been doing it for weeks,” said Brad Anderson, who worked as Obama’s Iowa state director in 2012.

Some Democrats watching the race said it didn’t end with a better result for Clinton because of a problem with the candidate herself and the delivery of her message.

But onboard the campaign plane, communications director Jennifer Palmieri had a different take: “She brought this back herself. She won this herself.”