Story highlights "I am done with being a candidate," she affirmed in an interview about the book

"There were plenty of people hoping that I, too, would just disappear. But here I am," she writes

(CNN) Hillary Clinton says she isn't running for office ever again, and her latest memoir is nearly 500 pages of proof.

"I am done with being a candidate," she affirmed in an interview about the book that aired on CBS Sunday Morning.

In Clinton's memoir, her third, she blasts other Democrats and spells out views that would make her unlikely to lead any future Democratic Party, in a frank manner that runs counter to her reputation as a cautious, calculated politician.

In addition to her biting criticism for her 2016 Democratic rival Bernie Sanders , she urges Democrats not to shy away from the politics around gun control, pushes them to keep their focus on both the Russia investigation and the economy and stresses the need to learn from her mistakes against Trump.

"Democrats should not respond to my defeat by retreating from our strong commitments on these life-or-death issues," she writes. "The vast majority of Americans agree that we need to do more on gun safety. That is a debate we can win if we keep at it."

Read More </s> If you have any doubt that Kamala Harris’ new autobiography, out today, might be related to the upcoming presidential election, it should be well over by the time you get to the minor anecdote on page five.

“I remember that when I was a little girl, my father wanted me to run free,” the California Senator recalls. “He would turn to my mother and say, ‘Just let her run, Shyamala.’ And then he’d turn to me and say, ‘Run, Kamala. As fast as you can. Run!’ I would take off, the wind in my face, with the feeling that I could do anything.”

The book, , reads exactly like the kind of campaign memoir that you expect it to be. In this case, it has an unexpected twist: It’s not aimed at voters in the general election; it’s aimed at winning the Democratic primary. But along the way, it also reveals what she thinks it will take to win the general election, provided she gets the nomination.

These books are never great literature. Harris moves through the steps of her own life at a dizzying pace, like a harried screenwriter trying to cram a 1,000-page novel into an hour and a half movie. But if books like this aren’t great for readers, they are helpful for voters, who can gain some insight through seeing which issues and personal stories their authors deems important enough to highlight. (One helpful point in Harris’ case: her name is pronounced )

Harris alternates between personal anecdotes that humanize her — the first section of the book might as well be called “Dreams From My Mother” — and sharp asides about the Trump Administration’s policies and her own political ideas that could come right from a pit stop at Pizza Ranch.

She opens the book with the perfect blend of the personal and political, recounting the tears that welled up in her 9-year-old godson’s face on Election Night in 2016 when it started to look like Trump was going to win and how she ate an entire family-sized bag of Doritos later that night to cope. (“Didn’t share a single chip.”) She simultaneously tells the story of her own historic win that night as she became only the second black woman elected Senator.

These stories are targeted directly at the Democratic base, the grassroots volunteers who will start deciding the party’s nominee in the coming months. The book lays out a roadmap to winning over those voters: Supporting immigration and marijuana legalization; opposing police brutality and mass incarceration; highlighting income inequality, rising college tuition and health care costs and the opioid crisis; and criticizing pharmaceutical companies, payday lenders and “greedy predatory corporations.”

On another level, the book makes clear that while Harris was mostly raised by her mother, an Indian immigrant, she feels strong ties to her father’s African-American roots, from the community where she was raised to her experiences at historically black college Howard University and her time as district attorney in San Francisco.

In a potent metaphor, she notes that she loved how “okra could be soul food or Indian food, depending on what spices you chose.”

Highlighting these ties is both personal and political for Harris. Black voters may very well decide the Democratic nominee. As one of the most loyal constituencies of the Democratic Party, they play a key role in several early states, including her home of California, which moved up its primary to play a more influential role.

She gives subtle nods to her experiences as a woman, noting how refreshing it was to have a female colleague in the “male-dominated environment” of her summer internship in a district attorney’s office, recalling the skirt suit she wore to her first trial “back before women were permitted to wear pants in the courtroom” and talking about her work with survivors of sexual abuse and exploitation.

The path she is following in the book is clear, and it was blazed by Barack Obama in 2008. But where the then-Senator from Illinois sought from the start to stress that there was not a red America and a blue America, the Senator from California is banking on outrage from blue America to fuel turnout in 2020 the way that it did in the 2018 midterms.

To that end, she highlights Trump Administration policies that have drawn ire on the left: the travel ban, the family separation policy at the border, attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the 2017 tax cut, the proposal for a border wall, opposition to efforts to address climate change and the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Although she never connects the issue to President Trump, she spends several pages discussing election security and Russian attempts to influence U.S. politics, highlighting a bill she coauthored with Republican Sen. James Lankford that stalled in the Senate.

Still, Harris shows a cautious streak that is reminiscent of Obama’s approach to politics. Although she endorses Medicare for All, she talks about it more as a long-term aspiration. “Even if we could snap our fingers and make Medicare for All a reality, this alone would not alleviate the problems in the system,” she notes.

Elsewhere, she praises the idea of a jobs guarantee program, while raising pragmatic, almost Obamaesque, doubts.

“Rather than guarantee a base cash payment, a federal jobs guarantee would ensure that anyone who wants to work will have a good-paying job with dignity,” she writes. “It’s an idea straight out of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights. Is it possible? Would it work? If it’s part of ‘the Plan’ you’re running on, you’re compelled to say yes. But the better answer is ‘Let’s find out.'”

In the end, “let’s find out” may be less inspiring than “run, Kamala,” but it is a mark of a decent campaign book that it provides the reader with both. Will it be enough for voters? We’ll find out soon enough. </s> Is Hillary Clinton Right About Why She Lost?

In this week’s politics chat, we talk about Hillary Clinton’s new book. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Today’s chat topic: The media reaction to Hillary Clinton’s new book, released on Tuesday, “What Happened.”

We’re going to do this in two parts. First, we’ll talk about how the media has covered Clinton’s book. Then we’ll go through the various factors that Clinton points to in the book to explain her loss in 2016.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): So we’re covering the coverage of the coverage? Got it.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): We will tell you WHAT HAPPENED — no question mark.

micah: The headline for this will be WTF Happened!

OK, so first up: How would you describe the general coverage of Clinton’s book? As an opener (and Clare has talked about this): I’ve been struck by how much coverage there’s been of the very fact that she wrote a book.

But I’ll say again here: People who are out there saying that she should go quietly into the night are sort of being intellectually dishonest about what happens after campaigns. She was one of the major players in the election, she’s entitled to her telling of things, she is the Democrat who got more votes, so she represents a sizable ideological chunk of the party, etc. etc. etc.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I expected there would be a lot of coverage. There are lots of reporters who covered her. Lots of opportunity for reporters who have slammed President Trump to now slam Clinton to show that they are balanced, will criticize both sides, etc.

clare.malone: Yeah, it’s totally fashionable to slam her on Twitter in a way that I do understand — she’s been around a long time, etc. But it’s out of whack.

natesilver: Are we talking about coverage of Clinton overall? Or, like, reviews of the book itself?

micah: Well, the latter has ballooned into the former, right?

natesilver: On the latter front, The New York Times published a review that was fairly gracious — considering that Clinton (mostly deservedly, IMO) criticized the NYT a lot in the book. Although, that review mostly sidestepped the media criticism parts of Clinton’s book, I think that this quote from Clinton — via Brian Stelter — gets at a key dynamic here:

micah: Clinton’s book may be a more accurate 2016 postmortem than most media postmortems.

Before we get to what the book itself lays out, though: How much of the “why won’t Clinton go away?” convo would be happening if Clinton were a man?

That has felt to me like it infuses a lot of the chatter surrounding the book.

clare.malone: Yeah, so I have some thoughts! Some of it has to do with political reporters explicitly; she’s been around a long time, it’s fashionable to hate her, etc. And I think she gets less respect from political reporters than say, John McCain or John Kerry did in the aftermaths of their campaigns. Female reporters play into this too.

But, in part, that’s because politics in general and political journalism in particular has a really … how you say? … masculine energy.

It picks up the inherent biases that we all have — women included — from being shaped in a patriarchal culture.

micah: I mean, Al Gore made a freaking movie after he lost and no one was like, “Why is he making this movie?” (At least, as far as I can remember.)

And Gore is a good comp because he too won the popular vote.

natesilver: There’s something about the overlap between Clinton being representative of the establishment — she is nobody’s idea of an underdog — and her being a woman that makes it especially tough for her.

perry: The “she should not write a book because she is distracting from the Democrats’ strategy” crowd is making such a dumb argument that it’s not really worth debating it.

micah: A lot of the criticism of the book goes something like “Clinton is blaming everyone else for her losing” instead of taking responsibility. Now, she very much does take responsibility for losing in the book. But she also points to other factors that helped Trump and hurt her.

natesilver: That criticism is such a dumb argument that it’s not really worth debating it.

To repeat the quote I linked to above, the media doesn’t want to debate the reasons for Clinton losing because it potentially makes them look really bad. Or some of them, anyway, since there was a lot of variation in how Clinton was covered from outlet to outlet.

micah: Let’s take this tweet from a Washington Examiner reporter:

clare.malone: It’s the tenor of these tweets that are the problem. Because, to use a favorite Nate Silver metaphor, it takes a lot of things to go wrong in order for a plane to crash.

micah: How dare Clinton do a reasonable postmortem on the 2016 election instead of nailing herself to a cross!

clare.malone: “Blame” vs. “causes of loss” are tonally different.

natesilver: Yeah. Tweets like these are implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) mocking Clinton for blaming all these other factors, apart from herself. And yet, if you look at the list — it’s a pretty darned good list! A lot of those factors were really important!

clare.malone: So, I used to be a fact-checker, and one of the things we would do when we would call around and make sure information was correct was include the context of a quote in a piece, give a person a fair shot at saying, “Hmm, that could be out of context.” And that’s what is really irritating about this kind of coverage — it’s really disingenuous to say she’s not taking responsibility AND it makes the discussion dumber and more boring.

But let’s go through each of the reasons for Clinton’s defeat listed in that tweet and answer this question: How big of a factor was this?

natesilver: Do we want to use a scale? Like 1 to 5?

perry: Can I reject the premise of this scale and propose my own? (kidding)

OK, first up: “The audacious information warfare waged from the Kremlin.”

There’s been some recent reporting fleshing out the extent to which Russia was playing a media game.

perry: 4. I feel like the whole Russian interference, the release of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked e-mails was a huge factor in October. Maybe a 5 even.

clare.malone: There’s almost two levels to this, right?
• The effect that Russian interference/hacking/bots or whatever might have had on influencing disinformation to voters, etc.

micah: Yeah, we probably have to include the media’s amplifying effects for each of these.

clare.malone: I would agree with Perry that it was important from that email coverage angle.

natesilver: I’d say more like a 2.5 or a 3, on the Kremlin.

natesilver: It’s certainly hard to prove the connection, in part because it may have occurred in a lot of small ways, not all of which are necessarily uncovered yet.

Harry wrote about this in December.

clare.malone: I’m not sure that we know enough yet to know how influential the bots actually were in changing votes.

micah: But it being hard to measure doesn’t mean it didn’t have a big effect.

That’s some version of the availability heuristic, right? We’re assigning importance to the things we happen to be able to measure well.

natesilver: I mean, I agree. And giving it a 2.5 or 3 isn’t saying it’s nothing.

clare.malone: Now I’m interested to see what Nate gives a 5.

natesilver: I’m just saying — there are a lot of things that had a much clearer effect on the outcome.

natesilver: Some of which are also … problematic. Problematic in the sense of implicating other people’s judgment.

clare.malone: But this is the problem with numbers! (She says to numbers people.)

clare.malone: There are some squishy things that affected people in this election that we can’t quantify.

natesilver: Russia could have been a 1.5, or it could have been a 4.5. I suppose we don’t know. Maybe we’ll never know.

micah: Speaking of … next: “The unprecedented intervention in our election by the director of the FBI.”

natesilver: It was a big deal. And because it was a discrete event — it happened at one time — it’s relatively easy to measure.

There’s still a range of impacts, from maybe 1 percentage point of the national popular vote on the low end to 3 or 4 points on the high end. But you really have to twist yourself into a pretzel to conclude that the impact wasn’t large enough to cost Clinton the election.

clare.malone: I cosign with the above views.

natesilver: With that said, if the impact was only like 2 points in the polls — that was enough to swing a close election, obviously, but it also isn’t that large. Clinton’s gender could have had a larger impact, for instance. But that’s harder to quantify.

micah: We’ll get to that!

OK, next: “A political press that told voters that my emails were the most important story.”

For context, from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, here’s the amount of coverage of various topics on social media and top media outlets:

natesilver: Granted, this overlaps with the Comey letter. The Comey letter was a huge story in part because of the importance the press placed on “email stuff.”

clare.malone: It was important, in part because we have a media environment fed by social media that plays up the easily understood, salacious stories, and this was the salacious story for Clinton, although it obviously didn’t compare to the norm-busting GOP nominee.

Yeah, these things are all related. But I happen to think the Russia-related stuff (bots, Podesta emails) and Comey were more damaging than the controversy over Clinton’s private email server as secretary of state. She would have won, I think, if Podesta/Comey hadn’t revived the Clinton e-mail/scandal in the final weeks.

But I could be convinced otherwise.

natesilver: I don’t know. The email story completely dominated media coverage of Clinton.

Every week, it was the thing people heard by far the most about. Here’s a word cloud from Gallup of what people had read/heard the most about Clinton in the media from July 11 through Sept. 18 last year:

clare.malone: I would argue that it was the accelerant on an image problem Clinton already had, which is why I wouldn’t rate it a 5.

natesilver: But, Clare, I think a lot of that image problem was a self-perpetuating media narrative. We wrote about this way back in September 2015. It was apparent even back then.

clare.malone: Maybe you’re right, but this was an election cycle about crusty insiders vs. outsiders, and Clinton certainly falls into consummate insider camp, someone “above the rules.”

natesilver: She certainly doesn’t color strictly within the lines.

clare.malone: And that’s just because of years in the public eye, often not being viewed favorably — and, again, this is where you have to factor in some sexist societal views. But many critiques of her history in public life were also valid. We’re parsing here, I would note. I rate the emails as highly influential.

natesilver: Clinton has been viewed favorably at several points in her career. But usually they were points at which she didn’t threaten a man’s job or wasn’t otherwise being too ambitious.

natesilver: I’m just saying — there’s a lot of circular reasoning on the part of Clinton’s critics.

They’ll say, “She has a trust problem; therefore the public had a strong reaction to the emails.” But part of the reason that she has a trust problem is because stories are constantly framed as presenting a trust problem for her.

The Comey letter in October was a good example of this. Outlets jumped way out ahead of the story and presented it as “raising doubts” or “casting shadows” over her campaign even though it wasn’t clear what in the hell the letter was all about. It was a triumph of narrative over substance.

perry: I think we all agree about this. And my suspicion is that a lot of the bad coverage came from a desire to find a way to balance the sharp coverage of Trump with coverage that was negative about Clinton. The both-sides model of political journalism left you with 15 Trump scandals and 1 Clinton scandal, so you have to pump up the Clinton scandal/controversy/whatever to make up for that big gap since all of these outlets are obsessed with attacks from the right.

natesilver: Yeah, no doubt a lot of this stems from false equivalence.

clare.malone: Yessss … but can I say that Hillary Clinton also didn’t endear herself to a lot of “women in the center” when she made her first forays onto the national stage? She was not a very good “choice feminist” (the whole, “I suppose I could have stayed at home, baked cookies and had teas” thing), and I think, yes, people didn’t give her credit for evolving … but that’s just the breaks in public life. First impressions last.

natesilver: Basically, half the media’s problems in covering the election stemmed from actual liberal bias. And the other half stemmed from overcompensating for perceived liberal bias.

micah: Next: “Deep currents of anger and resentment flowing through our culture.”

natesilver: I’m not quite sure what that means — is she referring to racial resentment? The “deplorables”?

But Trump clearly became an effective conduit for people’s anger, so I have to give this one at least a 4.

clare.malone: I think it refers to that, but maybe also partisanship, right?

natesilver: Maybe that’s too low. Maybe it’s obviously a 5.

perry: 3? Those currents exist. I’m having a hard time seeing them as particularly unique or important to 2016, as opposed to being a part of every event in politics, Obama’s presidency, etc. Racial resentment may have gotten Trump the Republican nomination, but I’m not sure about the general election. (But again, I’m thinking this all through.)

micah: Let’s go to the next one!

natesilver: A 5 in the primary, but like a 2 in the general election. Here’s primary coverage from the Shorenstein Center:

perry: 3. If I were Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, I would say 5.

Right. What Nate said.

clare.malone: Well Nate … howdya think he got to the general?

natesilver: That’s why I said a 5 in the primary!

micah: Trump also got far more news coverage than Clinton in the general, according to another Shorenstein study:

Though a lot of Trump’s coverage, just like Clinton’s, was negative:

clare.malone: The fact that Trump was Trump is more precisely what I’m talking about —

i.e., free coverage, but also a free pass when he says things about women, doesn’t release his taxes.

natesilver: I’m not sure the media’s constant focus on Trump was necessarily a bad thing for Clinton from day to day, although it did make it hard for her to drive a message. Slightly paradoxically, however, the fact that the media spent so much time focusing on Trump made it hard for anyone to focus on any one aspect of Trump’s behavior.

As you can see from the Gallup charts I posted earlier, people had lots of different feelings about Trump and heard lots of different negative stories about him. But none of them as persistently as Clinton and trust and emails.

micah: Next: “Fox News was turning politics into an evidence-free zone of seething resentments.”

natesilver: Yeesh. I guess like a 2.5? I think Fox News is pretty darn important to the history of American politics since 2000 or thereabouts. I’m not convinced they were particularly important in this general election, since they had a somewhat weird relationship with Trump.

perry: 2. Just if we are ranking things, I rank this lower. Fox’s highest-rated show gets 4 million viewers; more than 60 million people voted for Trump. There is a whole apparatus of Fox-like media that has the ethos of Fox, but if Fox closed tomorrow, that ecosystem would still thrive.

clare.malone: I think Facebook probably had more influence.

micah: Next: “Maybe it’s because I’m a woman, and we’re not used to women running for president.”

clare.malone: I’m sick of defending this, so someone else try.

natesilver: Shit, I was going to defer to you, Clare!

micah: I’ll happily do so. I’d rate this a 20, tbh.

perry: 4. I left this election thinking that many of the things said about Clinton would have been said, with different phrasing, about Elizabeth Warren, for example. Or any other woman.

micah: If you spent any time at Trump rallies, or watching Fox News, or reading the political web, or talking to voters at all, gender suffused EVERYTHING. You could see it in what people wrote on their signs, in the reasons they gave for disliking her, in the coverage of her speeches. It was implicit and explicit. Subconscious and conscious. I mean … good god.

micah: This is, again, an example of something that’s hard to measure, so people don’t talk about it enough.

But like … I’m as confident as I can be about anything that if not for misogyny/sexism, Clinton wins. It’s almost prima facie true. But there’s also lots of evidence for it.

natesilver: I’ll give a range of 2.5 to 5. I’m just not sure how to measure it. Which doesn’t mean it’s not important. Keep in mind that Clinton’s gender could have had some positive effects too — e.g., inspiring women to turn out. But obviously, the prior here is that it’s hard for women to advance, especially in traditionally male-dominated occupations, and no occupation has been more male-dominated than the presidency of the United States.

perry: I don’t think it’s worth ranking racism vs. sexism, but Obama, at least in 2008, was able to generate coverage that was not always infused with his race. He was inexperienced, but that was true and not really a racial critique. The things Clinton was criticized for (secretive, ambitious, untrustworthy, craven) were things that male politicians aren’t often criticized for.

perry: I want to emphasize, though, that I think a woman can be elected president, maybe as soon as 2020 and maybe in 2016 but for Russia/Comey.

clare.malone: It’s obviously a 5. And by the way, I would really urge men to think about the way that you interact with women on a daily basis as a stand-in for how you might have reacted to Hillary Clinton. Not even the women in your personal life, just take it professionally. How do you talk to women during meetings? Do you talk over them? Are you listening to what they actually say in meetings or just waiting to talk yourself? Do you take their ideas and fashion them as your own? Do you think their voices are kinda annoying sometimes because they remind you of a teacher? Are they always bringing up institutional sexism as part of the problem that they might face in day-to-day life? Do you secretly find that a little annoying to hear? It might be annoying to hear, but it’s annoying because it’s true!

Anyhow. It’s a 5. And by the way, lest anyone misunderstand me — this sexism applies to the portrayal of conservative female candidates as well. They get treated differently than men.

perry: And a 5 should be interpreted as America needs to do a lot of work on sexism — not that Democrats should run Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Tim Ryan, etc., in 2020. And I feel like there has been a bit of a move in the party toward the latter.

perry: If Biden was so electable, maybe he should get elected president instead of sniping about Clinton.

Second to last from that tweet: “The problems started with history. It was exceedingly difficult for either party to hold onto the White House for more than eight years in a row.”

natesilver: So, I’m gonna give this like a 4.25.

It’s not clear to me whether a party is actually at a disadvantage after holding the White House for two straight terms. But it’s certainly not at an advantage either, and Gore lost in 2000 under highly similar circumstances to Clinton.

perry: 3. I think this is generally true. But once the candidate was Trump, that changed the calculus a lot. Trump has governed like a traditional Republican in most ways. But it wasn’t clear that would be the case during the campaign.

natesilver: Fundamentally, the media treated the election as being Clinton’s to lose, but it wasn’t. She actually overperformed the consensus of fundamentals-based political science models by a point or two. Now, those models are very blunt instruments. But they’re worth something.

micah: OK, last one from the tweet: “There was also a ‘Clinton fatigue’ to consider.” Then I have two more quick ones (Bernie Sanders and not visiting Wisconsin).

perry: 2. This may have hurt Clinton in 2008 and in the Democratic primary in 2016. The broader electorate views her husband and his tenure pretty positively, though.

natesilver: I’m not sure about Clinton fatigue in particular, but I buy something to the idea that it was an anti-establishment/anti-incumbent climate. This is sort of tied in to the point above, actually, about it not being an advantage to run as part of the incumbent party once your party has been in power.

clare.malone: Yeah, the establishment vs. outsider zeitgeist was real.

natesilver: Also, it seems important to me that voters who disliked both Clinton and Trump — about 20 percent of the electorate — went mostly for Trump. That was worth a net swing of about 3 points to him, compared with if they’d split evenly.

Anyway, I’m giving this one like a 3.75.

clare.malone: And in that sense, she’s just been around too long if you’re, say, an Obama-Trump voter who’s telling people you’re voting for change to shake up the system.

natesilver: In practice what probably happened was: The environment was pretty neutral or maybe slightly negative for a Democratic candidate. Clinton was a below-average candidate, but not terrible. Trump was also a below-average candidate, but his weaknesses weren’t as much of a liability as the media assumed. All of those worked out to Clinton winning the popular vote, but only narrowly. And Trump benefited from the Electoral College, of course.

micah: OK, now two other “reasons Clinton lost” that have been bouncing around and which Clinton talks about in “What Happened.”

natesilver: Anything about Sanders in particular?

I’d basically say like a 2, though.

micah: His “system is rigged” argument against Clinton during the primary set Trump’s message up perfectly in the general.

That’s basically what Clinton says in the book.

perry: 1. I think Sanders was simply the vessel for criticisms of Clinton from the left, the media and Republicans that would have emerged anyway.

natesilver: I agree. On that particular point, you could go to like a 3 or a 3.5. Still, almost every candidate has primary opponents, and those primary opponents usually say a few things that wind up damaging their opponents. I don’t think what Bernie did or said in the aggregate was atypical.

clare.malone: I think that’s underrating it a little. I’d call it a 3.

natesilver: He could have stood down a little earlier, once the delegate math had become hopeless for him. That period — and all the arguing over superdelegates, etc. — seemed to give more resonance to the “system is rigged” arguments.

clare.malone: Without Sanders as the personification of a movement, an explicit anti-establishment foil to Clinton, I’m not sure those feelings would have been so directly expressed. They would have been there in the electorate, but more inchoately expressed.

natesilver: At the same time, like 80 percent of Sanders voters wound up voting for Clinton — which isn’t perfect but is fairly typical for a primary opponent.

Clinton’s Midwest strategy. In the book, Clinton says her campaign did not underinvest in the Midwest.

natesilver: So, I don’t totally buy that claim. Clinton definitely did underinvest in Michigan and Wisconsin (and Minnesota).

clare.malone: She also brings up outspending Obama in those states.

perry: If it is really about going physically to Wisconsin, I rank this a 1. She went to Pennsylvania plenty and lost there in a similar way to Wisconsin. If it is about writing off too many white working-class voters, then I think that’s more valid.

natesilver: Well, it wasn’t about the Midwest per se — it was about campaigning in too narrow a range of states. She could also have campaigned more in Colorado and Arizona, for example.

But in terms of evidence of this mattering? There’s very little of it, actually. There’s basically no relationship between how much the candidates campaigned in a state and how well they did there.

perry: I see their mistake in being too focused on certain kinds of voters (non-white, college-educated, suburban). That is what I came away thinking might be the case after reading the Jonathan Allen-Amie Parnes book. But her staff, when I talked to them, and maybe this is self-serving, said that Clinton visits to some areas in rural Pennsylvania turned off voters. Her campaigning more there would not have helped and may have hurt.

natesilver: Things like advertisements and rallies don’t move the needle all that much, in a race where the issues are as momentous as the ones being debated in 2016.

Also, the math doesn’t really check out. Even if Clinton had won Wisconsin and Michigan, that wouldn’t have been enough to win the Electoral College. She’d also have needed to win Pennsylvania or Florida, where she campaigned extensively.

Anyway, I give that one a 1.5. A good litmus test is that if a reporter says “But Wisconsin” when someone brings up another cause of Clinton’s defeat, that reporter doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

It seems like we thought most of these were real factors in Trump winning and Clinton losing?

natesilver: You might even say, Micah, that Clinton got closer to … The Real Story Of 2016 than most of the media’s postmortems have.

micah: So, to bring things full circle, the objections to Clinton pointing them out — in addition to taking responsibility herself — aren’t about substance, they’re about theater … or “manners” … or what Clinton “should” be doing?

perry: I think Clinton, like Obama, should do whatever makes her happy and keeps the checks coming in. And if that is a book, fine. In terms of the party moving forward, fair or unfair, I’m not sure people are listening to her.

natesilver: I’m repeating myself here, but a lot of the admonitions that Clinton is getting from the press are about the media pre-empting discussions that could make them look bad and call into question their editorial decision-making.

perry: We should talk about that. Why can’t The New York Times say “we covered Clinton’s e-mails too much”? The Times admitted at some point that the weapons of mass destruction coverage ahead of the Iraq War was bad. The paper survived that, and my guess is gained credibility from it.

It’s obviously true. They must know that.

We are hinting around about the media stuff so much here that we may want to get just to the issue. I think we are really saying the Times, Politico, NBC News, etc., can’t say “Clinton is right in some ways” without saying “we were wrong.” But journalists are supposed to be for truth, not defending themselves at all costs like businesses or politicians. I should note: I covered the 2016 campaign for NBC News. In my writing and television appearances, I was critical, at times very sharply, of how Clinton handled the email controversy. I haven’t gone back and examined all that coverage, but I’m generally of the view that I personally covered the Clinton e-mails too much.

micah: To that point, and not to end on a self-deprecating FiveThirtyEight brag, but we have a history of saying “we fucked up” when we fuck up. While painful in the moment, it’s really not that hard and has long-term benefits. It’s like eating salad. </s> The New Yorker on Wednesday revealed the Hillary Clinton electoral victory cover that never saw the light of day.

The revered cultural magazine unveiled the magazine cover they would have released had Clinton won the presidential election last November. Titled “The First,” by French illustrator Malika Favre, the artwork promotes the magazine’s November 2017 interview with Clinton in which she discusses her controversial new memoir, What Happened.

“Over the past ten months, many Americans, regardless of how they voted, have contemplated what life would have looked like if Hillary Clinton had been elected President on November 8, 2016,” The New Yorker explained.

And, of course, Twitter had some thoughts on the art: </s> News outlets across the political spectrum are weighing in on Hillary Clinton’s new memoir ‘What Happened’ about her presidential campaign and her defeat.

The New York Times’ review admits there is nothing new about the campaign in the book, but it does tell a story of what it is like running as a female nominee for the president of the United States, “a first in American history.”

“It is worth reading,” writes Times critic Jennifer Senior. “Winning by the popular vote by nearly 3 million may not have been enough to shatter the country’s highest, hardest glass ceiling. But it seems to have 2,864,974 extra cracks in Clinton’s reserve.”

Clinton complains of misogyny and sexism and that she suffered disproportionately from charges of untrustworthiness or inauthenticity because she was a woman. Senior considers the arguments controversial and complicated, but accepts that presidential politics are about “arena-filling showmanship” rather than being a “workhorse.”

“I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions,” Clinton wrote, “while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stocked Americans’ anger and resentment.”

The conservative-leaning Washington Examiner review thinks the book will keep the Democrats “divided and focused on the past.”

The Examiner’s W. James Antle III focused his review on Clinton’s attacks against Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), her rival for the nomination during the Democratic primaries.

“His attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ campaign,” Clinton wrote of Sanders.

The Examiner agreed that she took “friendly fire from Sanders supporters” but argued that Sanders was “slow to attack her” and said he was “sick of hearing about her ‘damn emails’.”

Noting that Sanders turned into an unlikely hero for millennials, Antle argued that it was Sanders who was warning Clinton she wasn’t populist enough, and that she became a divisive figure within her own party.

The Guardian’s Sabrina Siddiqui and David Smith highlighted Clinton’s parallels between between Trump’s “war on truth” and the Soviet Union and George Orwell’s ‘1984’.

“Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism,” Clinton wrote. “This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos. This is what happens in George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered.”

“The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust,” Clinton added. “For Trump, as with so much he does, it’s simple dominance.”

Siddiqui and Smith found that Clinton “peppers the book with insults aimed at Trump” referring to him as “a clear and present danger” and remaking himself from a “tabloid scoundrel into right-wing crank.”

Clinton devoted a lengthy section of the book complaining about the lack of media attention toward reported attempts by Moscow to interfere with the presidential race. She has followed every twist and turn of the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and accuses Russian President Vladimir Putin of being out to get her personally.

“Putin doesn’t respect women and despises anyone who stands up to him, so I am a double problem,” wrote Clinton and argues that Putin had developed a “personal vendetta” against her.

Clinton’s critics say she blames everyone but herself.

Fox & Friends ran a segment on Tuesday asking “Why can’t Hillary accept defeat and move on?” in which they argued that she blames the Russians, Comey, (former head of the FBI) Wikileaks, Facebook and misogyny, by interviewing Jonathan Allen about his book called Shattered: Inside the Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.

“She is putting out these excuses one after another that do nothing but refocus the blame on everybody but herself,” said media critic Lionel, of Lionel Media. He called Clinton’s account a “cotton candy matrix” and “a lattice-worked fiction.”

One of the reasons Clinton neglected the critical Rust Belt states is that she didn’t even handle her own polling, Lionel noted.

“Trump paid for the best polling there was. Polling is critical. She is so cheap…that she used these fraudulent polls that underestimated Republican voters that were put out to create the momentum that she was winning,” Lionel said, adding that Clinton can’t accept fault or apologize for “letting her people down.” </s> Hillary Clinton Is 'Done,' But Not Going Away

Hillary Clinton's final campaign for office ended in a shocking defeat. But she isn't going quietly into the night.

"I think the country's at risk, and I'm trying to sound the alarm so more people will at least pay attention," Clinton told NPR.

That said, her career as a candidate is over.

"I'm done. I'm not running for office," Clinton said. But for those, including Democrats, who would like her to just go away? "Well, they're going to be disappointed," she said.

"I'm not going anywhere. I have the experience, I have the insight, I have the scars that I think give me not only the right, but the responsibility to speak out," Clinton said.

In her new campaign memoir, What Happened, and in interviews with Morning Edition's Rachel Martin and NPR's Tamara Keith, Clinton talks about her own failings, but she doesn't hold back on calling out sexism in American politics and heaping criticism on President Trump.

"I think he's being played," Clinton said of Trump, suggesting that he's given aid and comfort to Russia's Vladimir Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong Un. "I think he doesn't even understand the kind of strategic overview of what's happening in the world, and what we need to be doing to prepare, and so I'm gonna keep speaking out."

Asked if she is able to turn on the news without thinking, "What would I do in this situation?" Clinton responded with a laugh.

"No, I do it every single time! Look, I was prepared to be president. I had prepared and worked at it, and I go a little bit batty when I hear him say, 'Gee, this is a really hard job. Who knew health care was so complicated?' I did. No, I always am responding and reacting. Sometimes I yell at the TV even."

But Trump is the one in the Oval Office, not Clinton, and she offers a series of explanations for what she did wrong, in the book and in her interviews with NPR.

"I take ultimate responsibility for the loss," Clinton said. "I was the candidate. I was the person whose name was on the ballot. And I'll never get over that."

There was the private email server she used for official business while secretary of state, a cloud that hung over her campaign from start to finish.

"It was a dumb mistake. I think it was a dumber scandal, but it hurt," she said.

She also describes an inability to connect with the anger coursing through the electorate.

"I understood there was anger and fear and people were really unhappy because of what had happened in the financial crash. I understood all of that," Clinton said. "What I didn't — and I say this in the book — I didn't really do well is conveying how much I understood of that, conveying how I got the despair and the anger."

Clinton had plans — so many plans — for combating the opioid crisis, for helping people in coal country, for creating jobs through infrastructure spending and more.

"I talked about it, but I didn't really convey the emotional resonance," she said.

While Trump was sending a signal to voters by talking about making America great again, bringing back coal jobs and building a wall, Clinton's detailed plans didn't break through.

"The amount of time and effort we spent not only devising the best infrastructure plan you could imagine but figuring out how it was gonna be paid for, nobody cared," she said.

Meanwhile, she said, Trump tapped into something, even fed it.

His message was "discriminatory, it was bigoted, it was prejudiced," Clinton said. "And yet it fed into part of the electorate that just wanted to have a primal scream. They didn't like what was going on. They wanted something different. They weren't interested in what you could actually do, because clearly Trump hasn't done very much that he said he would do. But they really responded to his racial and ethnic and sexist appeals."

And while Trump started his campaign with a memorable line, Make America Great Again, Clinton said her team was headed into the general election trying to develop a theme that fit.

"I had three different very smart groups work independently, and I asked them, 'So what should be the theme of our general election?' And they each, amazingly, came up with the same slogan: 'Stronger Together.' Because what they argued, and what I believed, was that America does better when we're working together, when we're helping each other, when we're aiming toward a future of opportunity where we have broad-based economic growth that includes everybody, and where, yes, we stand up for human rights and civil rights," Clinton said.

But, asked to choose her biggest regret, Clinton didn't look inward.

"Losing is my biggest regret," she said. "And losing to someone who was not qualified and did not have the experience or the temperament to be president of the United States. That is my biggest regret."

Clinton deflected the question of whether another Democrat could have beaten Trump, saying, "Well, I don't think it's useful to speculate, because I was the nominee."

What if Joe Biden had been the nominee?

"Well, he wasn't. And you know he ran in '08, and he didn't run in this this time — if he wants to run in the future, he can do that," she said.

Comey, The Russians, Voter Suppression And Other External Forces

In an election decided by fewer than 100,000 votes in three states, Clinton argues any number of factors could have decided the election.

"I was on the path to winning, and I felt great about the three debates," Clinton said when asked about issues of trust that dogged her campaign. "And then unfortunately the Comey letter, aided in great measure by the Russian WikiLeaks, raised all those doubts again."

Less than two weeks before the election, then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress the Bureau would be revisiting its investigation into the handling of classified information in connection with Clinton. On Nov. 6, he said a newly discovered trove of emails did not change the FBI's recommendation that Clinton not be charged. Nevertheless, Clinton has repeatedly placed blame on this sequence of events for undermining her candidacy at a crucial moment.

WikiLeaks' release of thousands of emails allegedly tied to Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, is another frequent target of hers. The documents disclosed internal campaign deliberation about Clinton's private email server and excerpts from her Wall Street speeches. The campaign linked the release to Russia.

In the states Clinton lost, she argues voter ID requirements and other changes in the law made it harder for people who supported her to vote.

"In Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania in particular, as well as North Carolina, there was a concerted effort to suppress the vote," she said, recounting anecdotes about people whose identification didn't qualify them to vote in Milwaukee.

As for Russian interference in the election, Clinton thinks that in addition to the investigation being led by special counsel Robert Mueller, there should be an independent commission, like the 9/11 Commission.

"And if we don't come together as a country and with leadership from the White House and the Congress to combat it, to try to prevent it from happening again, we are really putting our democracy at risk," Clinton said.

She has been following the twists and turns of the Russia investigations and devotes a chapter of her book to the topic.

"We're only now finding out what we did try to warn people about starting last summer," Clinton said. But back then those warnings were often dismissed as a campaign trying to distract from the damaging revelations from the WikiLeaks emails. "And I think because it was so surreal — how, what do you mean the Russians are influencing our election? Now we know. Not only were they, they did. And not only did they, they will continue to do so."

Clinton devotes a chapter of her book to being a woman in politics, and in conversations with NPR, she had a lot to say about it. Clinton said it is clear some share of the electorate "is just not ready" for a woman to be president. "They just cannot imagine it, and they are resistant to it. And I want in this book to make it very clear that what happened to me was not just about me," Clinton said.

There were some voters who said they were open to a woman as president, just not that woman, in reference to Clinton. But she doesn't buy that a different female candidate would have had it any easier.

"Look, if you think it's just about me, you don't have to deal with it. ... OK, I lost, you know? Have a nice time walking in the woods. But if you think it's endemic as I believe it is, and that when a woman sticks her head up, she gets hit from both the right and the left by men who — primarily men — who do not want to accept the reality of a woman being a leader, an executive," Clinton said.

Her reference to men on "both the right and the left" isn't without purpose. In the book she has harsh words for supporters of Bernie Sanders, so-called Bernie Bros, who intimidated her supporters online to the point that they hid their feelings in private Facebook groups.

"I want people to understand sexism and misogyny are real," Clinton said. "They're real in business, they're real in politics, and people have to start standing up against it. And we have to equip young women to be able to ward it off and speak out, and we have to encourage men, particularly young men, not to buy into it. And we have to recognize there are deep stereotypes."

As to the claim from some Sanders supporters that Clinton ran with a sense of entitlement, she said, "I just totally reject that." Clinton called the criticism "off base."

Even after she clinched the nomination, she said, Sanders "just kept going, and he and his followers' attacks on me kept getting more and more personal, despite him asking me not to attack him personally. And you know, I really regret that. But now he's got a chance to prove that he's something other than a spoiler. And that is to help other Democrats. And I don't know if he will or not, but I'm hoping he will."

Out Of The Woods

Immediately following her election loss, Clinton returned home to Chappaqua, N.Y., and spent a lot of time hiking in the woods nearby with her husband, the former president, and their dogs.

"It was part of a process after the election to come to terms with having lost, and my personal disappointment in letting millions of people down. Also my fears about what a Trump presidency might mean for our country and the world," Clinton said, back in the woods for her interview with Keith. "So I had a lot to think about. And I think well when I'm walking. I sort of clear my mind."

That first day in the woods, she ran into a woman walking with her baby and dog. Her Facebook post spawned a meme, "HRC in the wild," and rapidly led to people looking for Clinton in the woods.

"One time we drove up here to go for a walk, and there were about a dozen people lying in wait, and I thought, 'OK we're gonna go somewhere more peaceful than that,' " Clinton said.

As the interview wrapped up, Clinton was approached by two women and a yellow Labrador. </s> Hillary Clinton’s final campaign for office ended in a shocking defeat. But she isn’t going quietly into the night.

“I think the country’s at risk, and I’m trying to sound the alarm so more people will at least pay attention,” Clinton told NPR.

That said, her career as a candidate is over.

“I’m done. I’m not running for office,” Clinton said. But for those, including Democrats, who would like her to just go away? “Well, they’re going to be disappointed,” she said.

“I’m not going anywhere. I have the experience, I have the insight, I have the scars that I think give me not only the right, but the responsibility to speak out,” Clinton said.

In her new campaign memoir, What Happened, and in interviews with Morning Edition‘s Rachel Martin and NPR’s Tamara Keith, Clinton talks about her own failings, but she doesn’t hold back on calling out sexism in American politics and heaping criticism on President Trump.

“I think he’s being played,” Clinton said of Trump, suggesting that he’s given aid and comfort to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. “I think he doesn’t even understand the kind of strategic overview of what’s happening in the world, and what we need to be doing to prepare, and so I’m gonna keep speaking out.”

Asked if she is able to turn on the news without thinking, “What would I do in this situation?” Clinton responded with a laugh.

“No, I do it every single time! Look, I was prepared to be president. I had prepared and worked at it, and I go a little bit batty when I hear him say, ‘Gee, this is a really hard job. Who knew health care was so complicated?’ I did. No, I always am responding and reacting. Sometimes I yell at the TV even.”

But Trump is the one in the Oval Office, not Clinton, and she offers a series of explanations for what she did wrong, in the book and in her interviews with NPR.

“I take ultimate responsibility for the loss,” Clinton said. “I was the candidate. I was the person whose name was on the ballot. And I’ll never get over that.”

There was the private email server she used for official business while secretary of state, a cloud that hung over her campaign from start to finish.

“It was a dumb mistake. I think it was a dumber scandal, but it hurt,” she said.

She also describes an inability to connect with the anger coursing through the electorate.

“I understood there was anger and fear and people were really unhappy because of what had happened in the financial crash. I understood all of that,” Clinton said. “What I didn’t — and I say this in the book — I didn’t really do well is conveying how much I understood of that, conveying how I got the despair and the anger.”

Clinton had plans — so many plans — for combating the opioid crisis, for helping people in coal country, for creating jobs through infrastructure spending and more.

“I talked about it, but I didn’t really convey the emotional resonance,” she said.

While Trump was sending a signal to voters by talking about making America great again, bringing back coal jobs and building a wall, Clinton’s detailed plans didn’t break through.

“The amount of time and effort we spent not only devising the best infrastructure plan you could imagine but figuring out how it was gonna be paid for, nobody cared,” she said.

Meanwhile, she said, Trump tapped into something, even fed it.

His message was “discriminatory, it was bigoted, it was prejudiced,” Clinton said. “And yet it fed into part of the electorate that just wanted to have a primal scream. They didn’t like what was going on. They wanted something different. They weren’t interested in what you could actually do, because clearly Trump hasn’t done very much that he said he would do. But they really responded to his racial and ethnic and sexist appeals.”

And while Trump started his campaign with a memorable line, Make America Great Again, Clinton said her team was headed into the general election trying to develop a theme that fit.

“I had three different very smart groups work independently, and I asked them, ‘So what should be the theme of our general election?’ And they each, amazingly, came up with the same slogan: ‘Stronger Together.’ Because what they argued, and what I believed, was that America does better when we’re working together, when we’re helping each other, when we’re aiming toward a future of opportunity where we have broad-based economic growth that includes everybody, and where, yes, we stand up for human rights and civil rights,” Clinton said.

But, asked to choose her biggest regret, Clinton didn’t look inward.

“Losing is my biggest regret,” she said. “And losing to someone who was not qualified and did not have the experience or the temperament to be president of the United States. That is my biggest regret.”

Clinton deflected the question of whether another Democrat could have beaten Trump, saying, “Well, I don’t think it’s useful to speculate, because I was the nominee.”

What if Joe Biden had been the nominee?

“Well, he wasn’t. And you know he ran in ’08, and he didn’t run in this this time — if he wants to run in the future, he can do that,” she said.

Comey, the Russians, voter suppression and other external forces

In an election decided by fewer than 100,000 votes in three states, Clinton argues any number of factors could have decided the election.

“I was on the path to winning, and I felt great about the three debates,” Clinton said when asked about issues of trust that dogged her campaign. “And then unfortunately the Comey letter, aided in great measure by the Russian WikiLeaks, raised all those doubts again.”

Less than two weeks before the election, then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress that the bureau would be revisiting its investigation into the handling of classified information in connection with Clinton. On Nov. 6, he said a newly discovered trove of emails did not change the FBI’s recommendation that Clinton not be charged. Nevertheless, Clinton has repeatedly placed blame on this sequence of events for undermining her candidacy at a crucial moment.

WikiLeaks’ release of thousands of emails allegedly tied to Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, is another frequent target of hers. The documents disclosed internal campaign deliberation about Clinton’s private email server and excerpts from her Wall Street speeches. The campaign linked the release to Russia.

In the states Clinton lost, she argues voter ID requirements and other changes in the law made it harder for people who supported her to vote.

“In Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, in particular, as well as North Carolina, there was a concerted effort to suppress the vote,” she said, recounting anecdotes about people whose identification didn’t qualify them to vote in Milwaukee.

As for Russian interference in the election, Clinton thinks that in addition to the investigation being led by special counsel Robert Mueller, there should be an independent commission, like the 9/11 Commission.

“And if we don’t come together as a country and with leadership from the White House and the Congress to combat it, to try to prevent it from happening again, we are really putting our democracy at risk,” Clinton said.

She has been following the twists and turns of the Russia investigations and devotes a chapter of her book to the topic.

“We’re only now finding out what we did try to warn people about starting last summer,” Clinton said. But back then those warnings were often dismissed as a campaign trying to distract from the damaging revelations from the WikiLeaks emails. “And I think because it was so surreal — how, what do you mean the Russians are influencing our election? Now we know. Not only were they, they did. And not only did they, they will continue to do so.”

Clinton devotes a chapter of her book to being a woman in politics, and in conversations with NPR, she had a lot to say about it. Clinton said it is clear some share of the electorate “is just not ready” for a woman to be president. “They just cannot imagine it, and they are resistant to it. And I want in this book to make it very clear that what happened to me was not just about me,” Clinton said.

There were some voters who said they were open to a woman as president, just not that woman, in reference to Clinton. But she doesn’t buy that a different female candidate would have had it any easier.

“Look, if you think it’s just about me, you don’t have to deal with it. … OK, I lost, you know? Have a nice time walking in the woods. But if you think it’s endemic, as I believe it is, and that when a woman sticks her head up, she gets hit from both the right and the left by men who — primarily men — who do not want to accept the reality of a woman being a leader, an executive,” Clinton said.

Her reference to men on “both the right and the left” isn’t without purpose. In the book she has harsh words for supporters of Bernie Sanders, so-called Bernie Bros, who intimidated her supporters online to the point that they hid their feelings in private Facebook groups.

“I want people to understand sexism and misogyny are real,” Clinton said. “They’re real in business, they’re real in politics, and people have to start standing up against it. And we have to equip young women to be able to ward it off and speak out, and we have to encourage men, particularly young men, not to buy into it. And we have to recognize there are deep stereotypes.”

As to the claim from some Sanders supporters that Clinton ran with a sense of entitlement, she said, “I just totally reject that.” Clinton called the criticism “off base.”

Even after she clinched the nomination, she said, Sanders “just kept going, and he and his followers’ attacks on me kept getting more and more personal, despite him asking me not to attack him personally. And you know, I really regret that. But now he’s got a chance to prove that he’s something other than a spoiler. And that is to help other Democrats. And I don’t know if he will or not, but I’m hoping he will.”

Out of the woods

Immediately following her election loss, Clinton returned home to Chappaqua, N.Y., and spent a lot of time hiking in the woods nearby with her husband (the former president) and their dogs.

“It was part of a process after the election to come to terms with having lost, and my personal disappointment in letting millions of people down. Also my fears about what a Trump presidency might mean for our country and the world,” Clinton said, back in the woods for her interview with Keith. “So I had a lot to think about. And I think well when I’m walking. I sort of clear my mind.”

That first day in the woods, she ran into a woman walking with her baby and dog. Her Facebook post spawned a meme, “HRC in the wild,” and rapidly led to people looking for Clinton in the woods.

“One time we drove up here to go for a walk, and there were about a dozen people lying in wait, and I thought, ‘OK we’re gonna go somewhere more peaceful than that,’ ” Clinton said.

As the interview wrapped up, Clinton was approached by two women and a yellow Labrador. </s> The 2020 presidential race is starting to heat up, and the Democratic field could get crowded — fast.

Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro and a handful of other well-known Democrats have seemingly tossed their hats into the presidential ring, and more popular politicians are likely to follow suit in the coming weeks. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said he'd consider a comeback after aiming to inspire a progressive movement during his 2016 campaign.

“If there’s somebody else who appears who can, for whatever reason, do a better job than me, I’ll work my a-- off to elect him or her,” Sanders told New York Magazine in November. “If it turns out that I am the best candidate to beat Donald Trump, then I will probably run.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden — as predicted — has stayed silent about his plans thus far.

Apparently, Biden's advisers have floated Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, as a potential running mate, given his recent rise in popularity. Despite losing the Texas Senate race to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, O'Rourke is still considered a "rising star" in his party.

In a January op-ed in The New York Times, titled "Run, Joe, Run," a columnist advised Biden to enter the race because he has "strengths that no other Democratic candidate does," citing his decades of experience and ties to the Obama administration.

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, an outspoken Trump critic, is expected to announce the formation of a 2020 exploratory committee during a Jan. 15 appearance on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," CBS News reports.

As some political heavyweights continue to mull it over, take a look at those who have already made moves ahead of the 2020 election.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren took a major step in her political career by launching an exploratory committee for president in late December.

She made a splash on Dec. 31 when she released a campaign-style video that slams the "corrupt" government, making an appeal to her party's base.

5 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT MASSACHUSETTS SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN

"[The government] has been bought and paid for by a bunch of billionaires and giant corporations that think they get to dictate the rules that affect everyone," Warren tells supporters, adding, "that’s not how the government is supposed to work. You know it. I know it. And we know it is time to fight back."

Warren, who was reportedly a registered Republican well into her 40s, already tested out a stump speech in Sioux City, Iowa, telling a crowd in the first-in-the-nation caucus state "we need to make a structural change."

“We need to return politics to the people,” Warren said at the Jan. 4 event.

“I can’t stop Donald Trump from what he’s going to do, I can’t stop him from hurling racial insults, I don’t have any power to do that, but what I can do is I can be in this fight for all of our families,” she added.

The 69-year-old previously taught law at Harvard University. When Warren was hired at the Ivy League school in the early 1990s, there were only 60 tenured female professors, according to The Daily Beast. According to Harvard, Warren has written more than 100 educational articles and ten books. She’s also been awarded several teaching awards — at least two from Harvard.

Warren has also been a vocal critic of Wall Street — originally conceiving what became the government's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Former President Barack Obama appointed Warren to serve as assistant to the president and special advisor to the secretary of the treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in September 2010. Warren burst onto the national scene during the financial crisis with calls for greater consumer protections. She quickly became one of the party's more prominent liberals even as she sometimes fought with Obama administration officials over their response to the market turmoil.

Former Maryland Rep. John Delaney was the first person — by far — to announce his 2020 campaign. Delaney announced his intent to run for president in July 2017, just six months into Trump's presidency.

“I'm running for President,” Delaney, a wealthy former bank executive, tweeted on July 28, 2017.

Delaney, who is socially liberal, emphasized his pro-business views in his announcement.

PRESIDENT TRUMP GETS HIS FIRST 2020 CHALLENGER

“We need to encourage a more just and inclusive form of capitalism and reduce barriers to small-business formation, start-ups, job creation, investment and growth,” Delaney said.

He has already invested considerable time and money in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro is hoping to make history as the country's first Latino president. Castro, who served under Obama, announced his campaign for president in his hometown, San Antonio, on Jan. 12.

"I’m running for President because it’s time for new leadership and to make sure opportunities I had are available to every American," he said during his announcement speech, which focused on immigration.

Castro, the grandson of a Mexican immigrant, mocked Trump for claiming that the U.S. faces an "invasion" from its ally to the south. "He called it a national security crisis," Castro said. "Well, there is a crisis today. It's a crisis of leadership. Donald Trump has failed to uphold the values of our great nation."

Castro, 44, became San Antonio's youngest-ever city councilman in 2001 at just 26 years old, The Atlantic Journal-Constitution reports. Years later, he became the city's mayor, serving from 2009 to 2014. During that time, he was thrust into the limelight. In 2012, he delivered the Democratic National Convention keynote speech, leading political pundits to grant him the nickname "Latino Barack Obama," according to the Texas Tribune.

The Stanford University and Harvard Law School graduate was in the running to become Hillary Clinton's potential presidential running mate but ultimately lost to Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine.

Democrat Richard Ojeda, a retired Army paratrooper and West Virginia lawmaker, formalized his campaign for the presidency on Veterans Day 2018. He announced he was going to resign his state Senate seat on Jan. 12 to focus on campaigning for president in 2020.

The so-called "Trump Democrat," who has been branded as a "JFK with tattoos and a bench press" by Politico Magazine, is of Mexican descent and became a champion of teachers during their fight for better pay and benefits. He sponsored successful legislation to make medical marijuana legal and has stressed health care and economic issues.

Ojeda came under fire in September 2018 for allegedly threatening state delegate Rupie Phillips, writing in a Facebook message, "When I'm done with you, you will beg me to ease up. I’m going to make you famous… and it’s not going to be in a good way."

At the time, the Ojeda campaign didn't deny the message was sent but pushed back against its meaning.

“This is absurd and obviously not a threat of physical violence,” the campaign’s spokeswoman told Fox News. “Richard was speaking about exposing Del. Phillips for his corruption in the West Virginia legislature."

Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is also planning to run for president in 2020.

"There are a lot of reasons for me to make this decision,” Gabbard told CNN on Jan. 12, though she plans to make a more formal announcement within the week. “There are a lot of challenges that are facing the American people that I'm concerned about and that I want to help solve.”

The 37-year-old Iraq War veteran, who served two tours of duty in the Middle East, is the first Hindu elected to Congress and the first member born in the U.S. territory of American Samoa. She has visited early primary and caucus states New Hampshire and Iowa in recent months and has written a memoir that’s due to be published in May.

The lawmaker made news during the 2016 presidential campaign when she opted to back Sanders instead of Clinton.

TULSI GABBARD, HAWAII DEMOCRAT, SAYS SHE WILL RUN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2020

“As a veteran of two Middle East deployments, I know first hand the cost of war,” Gabbard explained in a YouTube video in February 2016, per The New York Times. “I know how important it is that our commander-in-chief has the sound judgment required to know when to use America’s military power and when not to use that power.

“As a vice chair of the D.N.C., I am required to stay neutral in Democratic primaries, but I cannot remain neutral any longer. The stakes are just too high. That’s why today I’m endorsing Senator Bernie Sanders to be our next president and commander in chief of the United States," she concluded.

Gabbard’s run would not be without controversy.

In 2016, she alarmed fellow Democrats when she met with Donald Trump during his transition to president and later when she took a secret trip to Syria and met with President Bashar Assad, who has been accused of war crimes and genocide. She questioned whether he was responsible for a chemical attack on civilians that killed dozens and led the U.S. to attack a Syrian airbase.

She said she doesn’t regret the trip and considers it important to meet with adversaries if “you are serious about pursuing peace.” She also noted that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was based on faulty intelligence and said that she wanted to understand the evidence of the Syria attack.

Fox News' Madeleine Rivera, Alex Pappas, Lukas Mikelionis and The Associated Press contributed to this report. </s> By David Weigel, (c) 2017, The Washington Post

Hillary Clinton was surrounded by women the moment she lost the 2016 presidential election. “Things had been going too well for too long” when, on the morning of Oct. 28, her spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri approached her and longtime aide Huma Abedin and said two words: Jim Comey. “I immediately knew it was bad,” Clinton writes in her memoir “What Happened.” There was a moment of mournful sisterhood as Abedin learned that the FBI was probing her husband Anthony Weiner’s computer, ensuring that the final week of the election was going to be about Clinton’s email server. “This man is going to be the death of me,” Abedin said of Weiner. Clinton gave her a hug.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first female presidential nominee of a major party — defeated by a man who even Republicans called a sexist — is, as she points out in the book, the frequent answer to Gallup’s question of who is “most admired woman in America.” Nonetheless, she was unable to break the presidential glass ceiling, and her defeat has been genuinely traumatizing for millions of women.

Locked out of the White House, she offers solidarity with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other women who are called shrill, or unlikable, because they want to climb the same ladder as men. “I wish so badly we were a country where a candidate who said, ‘My story is the story of a life shaped by and devoted to the movement for women’s liberation’ would be cheered, not jeered,” she writes. “But that’s not who we are.”

Her book finally takes on directly what has been muttered for years: That Clinton was often treated poorly simply because she was a woman.

It will be up to some other woman to carry on the battle, Clinton writes. She’s done with politics. Much of “What Happened” is a meditation on powerful women, a test-run for the speeches Clinton will give for the rest of her life. “I’ve seen women CEOs serve coffee at meetings,” she writes, “women heads of state walk tissues over to a sneezing staffer.”

But still Clinton cannot let that Comey moment go. She quotes Fox News clips, legal analysis and congressional testimony to conclude that she was wronged. She takes subtle pleasure in Comey being fired by Donald Trump six months later. She apologizes to the reader, who has to relive all of this. “It wasn’t healthy or productive,” she writes, “to dwell on the ways I felt I’d been shivved.”

It’s a perfect word, “shivved.” The Hillary Clinton of this bitter memoir resembles the shrunken, beaten Richard Nixon who told David Frost that he gave his enemies a sword and “they twisted it with relish.” Again and again she blames herself for losing, apologizing for her “dumb” email management, for giving paid speeches to banks, for saying she’d put coal miners “out of business.” She veers between regret and righteous anger, sometimes in the same paragraph.
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• Other voices: Now is Paul Ryan’s chance to do more than talk about tax reform “I regret handing Trump a political gift with my ‘deplorables’ comment,” she writes. Then she lays out studies on voter biases from the University of Chicago and the Voter Study Group. Data amassed, Clinton clarifies: “Too many of Trump’s core supporters do hold views that I find — there’s no other word for it — deplorable.”

“What Happened” is a raw and bracing book, a guide to our political arena. Clinton, who came within less than 100,000 votes of the White House, recalls how friends urged her to take Xanax (she declined), how there “are times when all I want to do is scream into a pillow,” and how she had to restrain herself at snapping at a young woman who tells her after the election that she didn’t vote: “Now you want me to make you feel better?”

Democrats who once begged her to run for president now squirm when they’re asked about her. Clinton no longer cares; exiled to her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., she is liberated from the public eye and dismissive of the media which, in her view, maintains one rule book for every other candidate and a Necronomicon for her.

“Why am I seen as such a divisive figure and, say, Joe Biden and John Kerry aren’t?” she asks. “They’ve cast votes of all kinds, including some they regret, just like me? What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I’m really asking. I’m at a loss.”

There has never been a candidate memoir like this, but there has never been a defeated contender like Hillary Clinton. Since at least 1999, when she leapt into the race for one of New York’s open Senate seats, the idea of a second President Clinton had loomed in our national consciousness. In 2004, superfans tried to draft her into the presidential race; in 2011, pollster Pat Caddell argued that “the Hillary moment” had come, and that Clinton could “step above partisan politics” if Barack Obama stepped aside. It didn’t happen.

The book is also sometimes corny, with quotes from “Hamilton” and details about the hot sauce she carries everywhere (Ninja Squirrel Siracha), suggesting that the Clinton who told young voters to “Pokemon-go-to-the-polls” really meant it. The aphorism “What does not kill us makes us stronger” is credited to both Friedrich Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson. It is, perhaps, the only political memoir that takes time to thank Beyoncé for her support.

That approach to politics is part of “what happened.” The caterwauling about Clinton’s loss basically takes two forms – whether one event or gaffe could have reversed the election, and whether another candidate would have let the election even get close.

Clinton is convincing on the first point, citing Trump’s own strategists about how the election was lost before the Comey letter. She is all over the map on the second. It’s dishonest and unfair, she writes, to suggest that she ran a my-turn campaign that ignored economic issues.

She insists that the press, which she never has to deal with again, is to blame for that impression. It “often seemed bored” by the roundtables she held with voters, which she used “to guide the policies already being hammered out back in our Brooklyn headquarters.” Clinton charges that coverage of her campaign was dominated by emails; coverage of Trump’s, including start-to-finish live shots of his rallies, focused on the issues.

She is easier on Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who she credits for “understanding the political power of big, bold ideas,” than on Biden, who “campaigned for me all over the Midwest” then claimed Democrats never talked about his issues.

In a point-by-point debunking of the idea that she ignored the Midwest, Clinton chides the press for ignoring the substance of the Rust Belt tour that followed the Democratic National Convention. “The very same week that Tim [Kaine] and I were driving around Pennsylvania and Ohio, Donald Trump was picking a high-profile fight with the Khans, the grieving Gold Star parents,” she writes. “That sucked up all the oxygen in the media. … 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.”

The saga of the Khan family, Muslims in Charlottesville whose son joined the Army and died in Iraq, was compelling and harmful to Trump in the short term. It was also precipitated by the Clinton campaign. It had decided to bring the Khans onstage and elevate their issue; it delighted when Trump took the bait, burning up several news cycles. Two weeks before the election, it rolled out a 60-second ad in which Khizr Khan watched Trump on television and wept at the memory of his son.

Her campaign’s messaging, Clinton argues, would have locked up the election had Comey not intervened and sent suburban moderates scrambling. But she made a choice with that messaging. She did talk about jobs, but until the last moments of the campaign, Clinton and most Democrats were convinced that Trump was less vulnerable on traditional issues than on his frequent, insulting gaffes.

Clinton has more in common with Sanders than the book lets on. Both of them wanted to run substantive campaigns. Both of them resented a media that Trump seemed to understand intuitively, even if it was reporting on how this-or-that mistake was, finally, the end for him. Clinton spends two pages on the concept of a shared national resource fund, a concept barely discussed in the campaign – “we would call it Alaska for America,” a reference to that state’s practice of cutting checks to residents from the oil industry’s profits. The reader knows that this is dull; the reader, like Clinton, relies on media that prioritizes scandal and narrative over news. Trump, in the campaign and in power, never let go of the narrative; Clinton could never get her hands around it.

She admits that after her loss she didn’t want to go to the inauguration until George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter did. She arrived, and settled scores, making fun of a classless Rep. Jason Chaffetz (who would leave Congress after realizing it was no fun without Clinton scandals to probe). Amid the ceremony, she ran into incoming Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke who, as a congressman from Montana, had called her “the Antichrist.” Now she watched him blanch as she quoted the insult back to him.

“One thing I’ve learned over the years is how easy it is for some people to say horrible things about me when I’m not around,” she writes, “but how hard it is for them to look me in the eye and say it to my face.”
Hillary Clinton releases the book What Happened, a memoir about her most recent presidential campaign. Clinton has implied that she may not run again in 2020.