The Threats They Didn’t See: A New Look Behind the Scenes of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Presidential Campaign

 So how did Hillary Clinton go from the consensus favorite to dropping out after a long, brutal primary campaign? Much has been written on the topic, and the media has offered no shortage of perspectives on what went wrong. For example, a Time magazine article cited Clinton’s decision to run as an establishment candidate at a time when the public was looking for an outsider as well as her campaign’s inability to effectively navigate the rules of the primary as some of the reasons for her failure.[1] There were also a variety of reports of internal disagreements and clashes within the Clinton campaign.[2] Of course, in Obama she also faced a formidable opponent widely considered a generational political talent.

            But archival data from George Washington University and the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research can provide new insights. The archive contains a collection of internal polling data and campaign memos from Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, and his consulting firm that reveal the thought process of Clinton’s strategist and the information Clinton and the rest of her campaign were receiving in real time. These documents are even more compelling due to the reports of mismanagement and internal discord within the campaign. Mark Penn was reported to be at the center of much of the strife, including disagreements with other staffers, conflicts of interest between his work for the campaign and his other clients,[3] and speculation that he didn’t understand the rules of delegate allocation.[4] In fact, Penn ended up resigning from his role as chief strategist in April 2008, although he continued working for the campaign in other capacities.[5] 

Below, I highlight some of the key insights from this unique archive of internal polls and strategy memos from throughout Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

February 2007 – January 2008: What the Polls Said

Hillary Clinton’s team conducted a large number of internal polls throughout the campaign, beginning in early 2007. The figure below charts the level of support for the three most prominent candidates—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards—in national polls conducted for the Clinton campaign and available in the Roper Center’s iPoll database. These polls span from February 2007 to January 2008. The last poll in the series was conducted on January 11th, 2008—just after the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire Primary. 

Figure 1. Hillary Clinton Internal Polling, National

Source: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research iPoll toplines from Mark Penn Digital Polling Data Collection and Oral History. Special Collections Research Center. George Washington Libraries and Academic Innovation. The George Washington University. https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/search?collection=LSM&experimental=NON&q=Mark%20Penn%20Digital%20Polling%20Data%20Collection&tab=STUDY 

These internal polls show consistently strong support for Clinton throughout this stage of the campaign, and they also establish Obama as her most competitive opponent. But Clinton leads Obama by double digits in almost every national poll conducted by her campaign, and this clear lead for Clinton is consistent with what public polls were showing at the time.[6]

            However, presidential primaries are not conducted at the national level. Instead, caucuses and primaries are held state-by state. Even so, in the fall of 2007, Clinton’s campaign felt confident that they had a path to a decisive victory in the primary. For example, the figure below shows a slide from a presentation Mark Penn and his strategists put together in August of 2007, revealing that state-by-state polling shows leads for Clinton throughout the country:

Figure 2. Evaluation of Primary Race in Presentation to Hillary’s Campaign, August 2007

Source: Mark Penn Digital Polling Data Collection and Oral History. Special Collections Research Center. George Washington Libraries and Academic Innovation. The George Washington University. P Binder 3, p.481.

And we see the same level of confidence in a September 2007 strategy memo:

We have come to dominate the national polls - and the polls themselves have evened out because we have widened out constituencies and we now win just about every group - ahead even with men and independents - albeit by much smaller margins than we win women, downscale voters and seniors. 

In the states we have a significant margin in NH, and a small but growing one in Iowa. 

We are on strategy. The other campaigns are not.[7]

But in presidential primaries, states vote sequentially, and the results in earlier primaries can shift the race and influence results in later contests. That gives Iowa, the first state to vote, outsized influence in the primary process. For that reason, Clinton’s campaign also conducted a large number of polls of Iowa voters, shown below in a chart taken from an internal campaign memo.

Figure 3. Hillary Clinton Internal Polling, Iowa

Source: Mark Penn Digital Polling Data Collection and Oral History. Special Collections Research Center. George Washington Libraries and Academic Innovation. The George Washington University. P Binder 3, p.671.

            The Clinton campaign’s Iowa polls, conducted throughout 2007 and into the first days of 2008 (although note that in the figure, most polls were conducted between November 2007 and early January 2008), show a closer and more dynamic race. In Iowa, Edwards started out with a strong lead over both Clinton and Obama, but by the final months leading up to the caucuses, the polls showed a tight race, with all three candidates within striking distance of each other. In the final few internal polls of the state, Clinton had a slight lead over Obama, and support for Edwards had dropped significantly, but it was Obama who would win a surprising victory in the first-in-the-nation contest and shift the narrative of the primary.

Revisiting the Fall of 2007: Did the Clinton Campaign See Obama’s Rise Coming?

In internal memos, there are some hints that Hillary Clinton’s team saw signs of the shifts happening beneath the surface of the primary, even when those changes weren’t showing up in the national polling. Later on in the September 29th, 2007 strategy memo in which Clinton’s team was writing about their dominance in the national polls, there was the following all-caps paragraph that would prove to an extremely prescient realization of the Obama campaign’s potential to recruit and organize massive numbers of volunteers and bring new voters into the primary process:

SO THE BIGGEST THREAT FROM OBAMA IS NOT WHAT WE SEE, BUT WHAT WE DON'T SEE - IF HE IS BUILDING A SIGNIFICANT NEW TYPE OF ORGANIZATION BASED ON NETWORKED COLLEGE STUDENTS.[8]

There are more signs of the campaign finding cracks in Clinton’s armor in an October 23rd memo. After venting about unfair characterizations of Clinton by the media and by Obama, the author of the memo admits to some of Clinton’s weaknesses:

But [Obama] is tapping into two real sentiments: People want to be brought together, they want to be unified, and we are seen as polarizing. People want authenticity, and we are seen as somewhat plastic. He has an argument.[9]

This memo also mentions the need for Clinton’s campaign to address its “caucus turnout issues,”[10] which would be on full display in Obama’s surprise victory in Iowa a few months later.

January 2008: Voting Begins, and It’s a New Primary

The first memo in the archive after voting began is a strategy memo from January 28th, 2008. This is after Obama’s pivotal victory in the Iowa Caucuses. The New Hampshire primary, Nevada Caucuses, and South Carolina primary had also taken place by this point. Clinton won the popular vote in New Hampshire and Nevada, but in a harbinger of Obama’s strong performance in caucuses and skillful navigating of the rules of the primary, he actually still gained more delegates in Nevada’s caucuses than Clinton, despite Clinton winning the vote count. Additionally, Obama’s nearly 30-point win in South Carolina was a sign of his strength in Southern states.

Recognizing the surprising turn the primary had taken, Clinton’s team began to focus more of its attention on diagnosing the problems the campaign was facing as they saw them, namely that Hillary Clinton was seen as being “racially divisive”[11] and that Bill Clinton had become a liability on the campaign trail:

I think we have a good sense that we had the upper hand just about a week ago, and that we need to recover it by the end of the week, and that it is within our reach to do so. We have the supporters, but when things go wrong, they get worried.

We essentially have the one-way mirror problem that has never been successfully solved. Attempts to land issues on Obama come back as veiled racism, are twisted around by columnists friendly to Obama or die.

Punches they throw at us get accepted as true, must be so. 

Bill Clinton has gone from being a strong positive factor on the campaign trail to net negative on the basis of stories that he is too combative, too negative, and tangled up with nonsensical charges that he is injecting race into the campaign.[12]

The memo goes on to outline what the campaign team sees as the solution to these issues:

But we have to address all this in some meaningful way in a speech, in a debate, in a TV interview. We need to capture where America is on race and gender in a way that reduces tensions and [lets] people see exactly where you have stood for so many years and that this campaign has not changed that or obscured it.[13]

There is also a note that “economic concerns have increased”, a recognition of an issue that would become more and more important as the Great Recession set in over the course of the 2008 presidential campaign.[14] 

March - April 2008: Reality Sets In, but the Primary Continues

By March 2008, Hillary Clinton was down in pledged delegates and was behind Obama in most public polls.[15] Although Clinton would stay in the primary race until June, by March, internal memos show an admission of a critical strategy misstep and the reality that it will be hard to beat Obama in the delegate race:

But while we continue to win big state after big state, we have had no effective campaign for the smaller red states who have few democrats but a lot of delegates. These are the states that have been a big problem for us. Generally few resources were put against them. The last minute rush into the states have been worth 5 points, but they have not been the game changing elements we needed.[16]

The inability to turn their votes into delegates in a more efficient way plagued Clinton’s 2008 campaign. When it was all said and done, Obama would only beat Clinton by one-tenth of a percentage point in the popular vote throughout the primary.[17] But Obama and his team were able to convert that razor-thin margin in votes into a pledged delegate lead of more than 120.[18] 

However, the campaign wasn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet. In wrapping up his memo, Mark Penn wrote:

All this effort will be wasted unless we can cross the finish line. We can win with reasonable assumptions.[19]

Then on April 22nd, 2008, Clinton won a decisive victory in the Pennsylvania primary, giving her campaign some semblance of renewed energy, even as the delegate math remained clearly in Obama’s favor. In her victory speech that night, Clinton proclaimed that “some people counted me out and said to drop out. But the American people... [w]ell, the American people don't quit, and they deserve a president who doesn't quit, either.”[20]

 In the final strategy memo in the archive, dated April 28th, Clinton’s campaign also exhibited this same determination:

It’s important that we keep up a dialogue with Obama in these closing days and keep him on the defensive and under pressure. Random hits on McCain don’t do much. We want to drive a message strategy of leadership on the economy, [Commander in Chief] vs. lack of leadership, and lack of understanding of people’s needs. 

Obama did not freeze foreclosures because he did not understand the needs of people facing foreclosure. He did not favor gas tax suspension because he did not understand the needs of people getting to work, taking their kids to school and driving a truck. We believe the president has to take action everyday to meet the needs of our people - not just be talking in theory about the future. That’s what we mean by solutions v. speeches.[21]

Conclusion

Even after the victory in Pennsylvania, it was not meant to be for Hillary Clinton in her 2008 bid for the Democratic nomination. “Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it,” Clinton said in her June 2008 concession speech, referring to how close she came to being the first woman nominated for president by a major party. “And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.”[22]

Five months later, her opponent, Barack Obama, would beat John McCain and become the first Black president in US History. While this story is universally known, these internal polls and documents give us new insight into Hillary Clinton’s 2008 bid for the presidency. They show that Clinton’s team began to see some signs of her campaign’s weaknesses before the national polls started to swing in Obama’s favor. And they reveal that her campaign did recognize their issue efficiently converting votes into delegates, although not in time to do enough about it. Back in the fall of 2007, Clinton’s team speculated that the Obama campaign might be a threat to Clinton winning the nomination in ways they couldn’t yet see.[23] That proved to be right, and although the Clinton campaign knew enough to be on the lookout for these threats, they wouldn’t be able to see them clearly and create a plan to overcome them until it was too late.

Hillary Clinton would later suffer a stunning loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, but in the primary that year, she would avoid repeating the mistakes of her first bid for the presidency. In the process, she completed an important part of the journey she began in 2008, becoming the first woman to win the nomination of a major political party, putting even more cracks in the glass ceiling she spoke of eight years before.

Aaron Childree
February 2024