Contrary to what former Secretary of State Clinton told her donors, her stunning loss to Donald Trump was not the result of FBI Director James Comey's last-minute revelations about e-mails found on "Carlos Danger's" laptop. While Clinton trumped Trump in the popular vote count, she still fell several million votes short of Barack Obama's 2012 vote count.
Why the upset and the shortfall?
Explanations will be debated for years, but I suggest four reasons for her unexpected loss: secrecy, sincerity, scripts, and sex. These four factors relate directly to candidate Clinton's personal characteristics and explain why she will not be leading a third Obama term.
Secrecy -- The ongoing e-mail server controversy seriously damaged her candidacy from the start, reinforced a decades-long media theme of secrecy and equivocation, and energized the youthful primary supporters of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, many of whom rejected another status-quo, establishment candidate. Given the e-mail leaks about the Democratic National Committee's internal efforts to undermine the Sanders campaign, there is little doubt that part of the turnout shortfall was due to young progressives and other Obama-coalition voters staying home on election day. Moreover, Secretary Clinton's explanations as to why she used a private server in the first place (and what was on it) changed over time. She was increasingly not believable.
The relentless, daily release of campaign chairman John Podesta's e-mails by Wikileaks, plus the DNC anti-Sanders disclosures, confirmed the rumors of an anti-Sanders bias and reinforced Trump's message that elite Washington was a "rigged" game for "insiders."
Sincerity - Accepting $275,000 per speech from Goldman Sachs (on multiple occasions) undercut Clinton's ability to espouse a credible, sincere progressive message. Expensive five-figure Armani jackets didn't help either. Moreover, with median family income barely above $56,000 annually, middle class Americans cannot fathom pocketing $275,000 for 30 minutes of work. This factor helped explain why Donald Trump energized Rust Belt voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin - states that all went for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Trump, in effect, recreated a new alliance of middle- and working-class voters similar to the "Reagan Democrats" of 1980.
Scripts - Unlike her husband, Hillary Clinton is not a natural politician. Her words and physical gestures were often out of sync with each other and conveyed the impression that someone else was programming her. Donald Trump, by contrast, was unpredictable and unprogrammable on the campaign trail. Only at the end of the campaign did his handlers succeed in stopping his endless "Tweets." She needed to be less scripted; he needed more.
Sex - Her husband's former (and reportedly ongoing) amorous activities neutralized any sexual bad behavior attributed to Trump - and even acknowledged by Trump in the now infamous "Access Hollywood" recording. This point may be somewhat controversial, but how else does one explain Bill Clinton's sustained popularity with women (long after his White House Lewinsky disgrace) and the significant number of (mostly white) women who voted for Trump?
The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote about "defining deviancy down," and Bill Clinton's behavior still registered in ways that enabled people to look the other way when it came to Trump. The cliché that "boys will be boys" may be dated, but Bill Clinton and Donald Trump had much in common in this regard.
The point here is not to justify Trump's behavior but rather to explain why the allegations against him did not cost him the election. In modern political parlance, Bill Clinton gave Donald Trump cover. Trump and his campaign team certainly knew this and played on this phenomenon for all it was worth, most pointedly when Trump invited several women from Bill Clinton's past to attend a news conference just before the second presidential debate.
These four words help explain why Hillary Clinton suffered the most surprising political upset since Harry Truman beat Thomas Dewey in 1948. While Barack Obama's personal approval rating was well above 50 percent by election day, throughout the entire presidential campaign, "right track/wrong track" polling consistently showed that more than 60 percent of the American public thought the country was headed in the wrong direction.
What was brewing across the country (but not on the coasts) was another Reagan-type wave of discontented middle- and working-class voters who felt left behind economically and culturally. While Donald Trump was playing the Reagan-era theme song "God Bless the USA" by singer Lee Greenwood at rallies, Hillary Clinton was dubbing Trump supporters "deplorables" at a chic New York City Cipriani fundraiser and on November 5 in Cleveland took the stage with Beyonce and Jay-Z. Talk about culture contrasts!
The price hikes announced by the Obamacare health exchanges on the eve of the election further undermined the "sincerity" factor of the incumbent Democratic leadership. Obama had pledged cost reductions and the ability to "keep your own doctor" - pledges that for many people turned out to be hollow. Even with Obama's high approval rating, clearly there were important factors at work generating those right track/wrong track numbers. The principal shortcomings that led to Clinton's surprise defeat, however, were hers and hers alone.
Going forward, with down-ballot Democrats decimated at every level - in Congress, in statehouses, and in state legislatures - the immediate task for the Democratic party is to select leaders who can reconcile the progressive and the pragmatic wings of the party. With the Clintons now sidelined from power, it will be fascinating to see how this reconciliation evolves. Recent history -- whether Bill Clinton in the United States or Tony Blair in the United Kingdom -- suggests that center Left parties enjoy more success when they find ways to "triangulate" their message in ways that address the real concerns of the electorate and not those of the party elites.
Republicans must avoid gloating and over-reading the election results. With the country still deeply divided, they, too, must triangulate in their own fashion. Both political parties - and American voters - need to remember that the political pendulum will swing once again in another direction.
Charles Kolb served as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy from 1990-1992 in the George H.W. Bush White House. He was president of the French-American Foundation - United States from 2012-2014 and president of the Committee for Economic Development from 1997-2012.