Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign
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Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Jonathan Allen (Author), Amie Parnes (Author), Kimberly Farr (Narrator),
3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 3,911 ratings
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It was never supposed to be this close. And of course she was supposed to win. How Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump is the tragic story of a sure thing gone off the rails. For every Comey revelation or hindsight acknowledgment about the electorate, no explanation of defeat can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary's campaign - the candidate herself.

Through deep access to insiders from the top to the bottom of the campaign, political writers Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have reconstructed the key decisions and unseized opportunities, the well-intentioned misfires and the hidden thorns that turned a winnable contest into a devastating loss. Drawing on the authors' deep knowledge of Hillary from their previous book, the acclaimed biography HRC, Shattered will offer an object lesson in how Hillary herself made victory an uphill battle, how her difficulty articulating a vision irreparably hobbled her impact with voters, and how the campaign failed to internalize the lessons of populist fury from the hard-fought primary against Bernie Sanders.

Moving blow by blow from the campaign's difficult birth through the bewildering terror of election night, Shattered tells an unforgettable story with urgent lessons both political and personal, filled with revelations that will change the way listeners understand just what happened to America on November 8, 2016.

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  1. Listening Length
    16 hours and 52 minutes
  2. Author
    Jonathan Allen, see all
  3. Narrator
    Kimberly Farr
  4. Audible release date
    April 18, 2017
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Random House Audio
  7. ASIN
    B06XDS8FST
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
  10. See all details
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Product details

Listening Length 16 hours and 52 minutes
Author Jonathan Allen, Amie Parnes
Narrator Kimberly Farr
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date April 18, 2017
Publisher Random House Audio
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B06XDS8FST
Best Sellers Rank #114,099 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#29 in Women in Politics (Audible Books & Originals)
#535 in Elections
#732 in Biographies of Politicians

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars
3.9 out of 5
3,911 global ratings
quality is terrible for the price
1 Star
quality is terrible for the price
Extremely disappointed in quality of this book: pages uneven, torn, paper lint falling out of the book, hard to turn pages because uneven edges, some pages stuck together because of dull paper cutter. I love to read and handle real hard-covered books but not this one. Terrible quality.
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Top reviews from the United States

Glynn Young
5.0 out of 5 stars A detailed look at the Clinton campaign and election of 2016
Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2017
Verified Purchase
In “Shattered: Inside the Doomed Clinton Campaign,” Jonathen Allen and Amie Parnes take the reader on a highly detailed, in-depth tour of the Clinton campaign, from the time before the announcement that she was a candidate all the way to the post-election remorse and recriminations. I didn’t for a minute doubt that they themselves were Clinton supporters, but this book is not a flattering kiss-up to the candidate. Instead, it is a clear-eyed view of what happened and why. And other factors built on her inability to articulate her reason for being in the race in the first place.

Clinton was determined to avoid the mistakes she believed her team had made running against Barack Obama in 2008. She was so consumed with this that she ended up making many of the same ones, because she missed the essential nature of those mistakes in 2008.

The campaign relied heavily on data analytics – perfected by the Obama campaign teams in 2008 and 2012 – and less on traditional polling. They likely should have relied on both. Data analytics misled them in Florida, Wisconsin, and Michigan, until it was too late to do anything about it.

The candidate and the campaign team first missed and then misunderstood the huge wave of populism that rose like a monster from the political deep. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both rode that wave. Both Sanders and Trump were able to articulate clearly why they were running for the country’s highest office. And both Clinton and her team saw but seemed unable to deal with the revolt of the American working class, especially in the Rust Belt.

The campaign team and the candidate assumed the “narrative of the blue wall” – and believed that states that had gone Democratic in recent elections would continue to do so. The Sunday before the election, warning lights were flashing full tilt in the Rust Belt, and the response was too little and way too late.

The ruthless power struggles within the campaign team, by the paid consultants, and by the DNC were all factors.

The perceptions of the Clinton political empire played a role.

Clinton went into the campaign hobbled by the ongoing media coverage of her private email server used for State Department business.

And once Wikileaks started the release of the hacked John Podesta and Democratic National Committee emails, most people conflated those emails with Clinton’s server problems.

FBI director James Comey playing popup-head with “We’re ending the criminal investigation of Clinton, no indictment but she did a bunch of illegal things,” “We’re reopening the investigation,” and “We didn’t find anything after all” was also a significant factor.

All of this, and the details of the primary campaigns and the general election, form the narrative of Shattered. Donald Trump plays a small role in this story. Clinton’s campaign team had never run into a candidate like him before, not to mention some of his wild statements and antics (like inviting four alleged women victims of Bill Clinton to one of the presidential debates). But the authors clearly see the reasons for Clinton’s defeat not so much explained by Trump as by the significant failings of the candidate and her campaign team.

Allen is an award-winning journalist with a long political reporting pedigree, including Politico, Bloomberg News, and Roll Call. He’s currently the head of community and content at Sidewire and an adjunct professor at Northwestern University. Parnes is senior White House correspondent for The Hill and has also written for Politico. She has previously reported on the 2008 and 2012 election cycles. Allen and Parnes are also the co-authors of “HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Rodham Clinton” (2014).

The authors rely a lot on unnamed sources (like “a senior campaign official”), but they explain why and how they managed that. The account of the Clinton campaign in Shattered has the ring of truth. And while the authors don’t cover much beyond the two days following the election, there is much here that points to what happened in the months afterward – the shock of the defeat, the rage it engendered, and the “Russia interfered with our election” narrative. Among others.

“Shattered” is an absorbing book, but if you’re not a political junkie, it does require some stamina to get through the detail. But there’s a reason for that – the explanation is in the details.
7 people found this helpful
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S. Wachter
4.0 out of 5 stars Like a number of other reviewers
Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2017
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I just finished Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign. Like a number of other reviewers, I found it interesting and informative--and also biased. Someone has noted that the bias is perhaps natural, given the source of much of the authors' information, but as I read I found myself questioning some of the characterizations. For instance, the authors frequently assert that Bernie Sanders went "negative" in his campaign while Hillary was high-mindedly trying to talk about the issues. My recollections of the campaign don't tally with that, and I wasn't initially a Sanders supporter (disclosure--I became one during the debates--what sealed the deal for me was the Michigan debate, which the authors reference, noting that for many it reinforced a perception that HRC would do and say anything to win).

Book detail about the inner workings of the campaign are interesting, but I find what the book omits equally intriguing. There are no references to any of the dirty tricks the Clinton campaign and its supporters employed in winning the primary. There's no mention of inappropriate Clinton campaigning (or at least voter-influencing) at polling places in Massachusetts. There's no mention of the media shut-out of Sanders during the primary, no acknowledgement that the large crowds he drew were anything more than a cheap trick.

While the book definitely presents information from the Clinton perspective, there is enough information to allow discerning readers to reach their own conclusions--the repeating issues of emails are dealt with extensively, and while the prevailing tone is that they were simply a tool for destroying the Clinton candidacy, the authors do note that to a degree they were a tool that Clinton herself handed her opponents.

The Wikileaks releases are interpreted as Russian interference in an American election. I would tend to agree--but again, those emails were a self-inflicted wound; had the DNC and the emails on the Podesta account not revealed what there's some justification to call corruption and inappropriate party bias, they would have been ineffective. The authors remind us that the Clinton campaign and the DNC was the victim of a cyber attack, and that's very true, and it needs to be addressed. However, the effectiveness of that attack was directly related to the corruption and mean-spiritedness of the correspondents--those emails paint a very different picture of who was "victimized" in the campaign.

Perhaps the biggest question I'm left with after reading this is one that the campaign repeatedly asks itself, and never really manages to answer--perhaps because the principal characters in this book seem to lack any ability to see themselves from any perspective but their own--is the central question that lies of the heart of any discussion of the Clinton political machine, and the Clintons themselves: Why is it that so many people see HRC as corrupt, dishonest, and untrustworthy? I've omitted some of the other accusations that seem more rooted in misogyny than in behavior, but perhaps this book casts some light on those three, at least.

The authors note that HRC's speeches to Wall Street for large sums of money, given at a time when a presidential run and the issue of purchased influence were both strong possibilities, led many to see her as corrupt. While she responded angrily to the question, angry responses are not proof--and it's very possible to find enough political stances she's taken to offer substance to the question. While Politifact ranks her as one of the more honest politicians, it was hard to watch her sometimes-flippant, evolving, and contradictory versions surrounding her email server without seeing her as duplicitous. The book notes this--and goes on to point out that the results of the initial investigation revealed a number of her statements to be falsehoods. The above-cited example from the Michigan debate, where she falsely characterized a Sanders position in a way calculated to destroy his credibility provides another example. The Clintons may not be more dishonest than other politicians, but that's not to say that the perception of dishonesty is unearned. Again, the authors note this, but then shy away from the implications of it.

At the end, the authors speculate that perhaps a quarter of a century in public life had so firmly set the Clintons' images in the electorate's minds that no amount of "reintroducing" and "rebranding" was going to change the way people saw them. While we may not know HRC the person--and to a great degree this book doesn't really change that--we have good reason to know HRC as a public figure. Her public life is real and discoverable, for good or ill. This book adds a great deal of context to that public figure. In the context of the book, HRC's back story is quite possibly the elephant in the room, and the reason the authors describe her campaign as "doomed." I find that a mischaracterization. "Doom" implies that some overwhelming external force acted against her to deprive her of the presidency. If the authors are correct, and her campaign failed not because the candidate couldn't find an effective "brand" but because of actions that grew out of who she was as a person, perhaps the election result was not a failure of the system, but the system working. (I really hate to write that, because I'm finding TrumpWorld to be a confusing and sometimes frightening place.)

In short--while there's definitely bias both in what information is included and how it's interpreted, the book nevertheless offers a fascinating glimpse into an organization that wanted to be secretive, but couldn't quite pull it off. It's a reminder that public lives are led in the public eye, and that a huge part of the Sanders appeal was his lifelong commitment to the same principles on which he campaigned, and that our deepest wounds are those for which we have ourselves provided the weapons. I'd recommend this book be read with an open, analytical mind, as a part of a broader reading program that offers other perspectives.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Andreas Titze
5.0 out of 5 stars Tolles Wahlkampf-Buch!
Reviewed in Germany on November 3, 2023
Verified Purchase
Unfassbar detailreiche und hochspannende Einblicke in die Clinton-Kampagne. Die Quellenlage ist absolut beeindruckend und der Wissensgewinn groß. Der Teil mit den Primaries hätte insgesamt etwas kürzer sein können, aber durch diese wenigen Längen kämpft man sich durch. Der eigentliche Wahlkampf ist spannend beschrieben, obwohl man ja weiß wie es ausgeht. Für Politiknerds ein echtes Vergnügen!
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crossbordershopper
5.0 out of 5 stars LOCK HER UP
Reviewed in Canada on May 27, 2017
Verified Purchase
If only more people read it. they would find out the real truth ahbout how the Clintons operate. Sje is a real eveil person and the USA should be glad she lost the election. "LOCK HER UP" is what the people deserve.
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roumache Nathalie
4.0 out of 5 stars Intéressant
Reviewed in France on August 14, 2017
Verified Purchase
Cette analyse est d'autant plus intéressante qu'en septembre sortira une autre analyse de cette campagne, mais cette fois, faite par Hillary Clinton elle-même. Intéressant de comparer les 2 visions.
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Kurian Kurien
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book. Fast paced
Reviewed in India on June 15, 2017
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It's written so well and it's a definite page turner. It gives a definite insight into the inner workings of the Clinton world. A great read.
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Tnwilk72
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent political book.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 10, 2017
Verified Purchase
A fascinating insight into how modern politics works. If this book is to be believed then "Veep" is not far off the mark! The picture painted here is of a deeply flawed campaign on behalf of a deeply flawed candidate. Also, for me, it highlighted the inherent shallowness of modern politics. Style and personality are more important. At the time of the election I felt that Clinton had not made her policies clear whereas Trump's positions were very clear. For example, everyone, even people with no interest in politics, knew about the wall. This book explains how this bizarre situation happened - after all wasn't Hillary meant to be the consummate political insider? I am no fan of Hillary, but I did feel sympathy as she and her team wrestled with their main predicament: how to deal with the anti-politics mood of parts of the electorate. She was reluctant to attack Sanders, while attacking Trump only served to make the election about him (perhaps Teresa May should have noted this?).
2 people found this helpful
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