Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  I walked through the parking lot, my laptop open in my arms even though I wouldn’t file my story until the end of the day’s swing, around 3:00 a.m. A lone protester held a sign liar, liar, pantsuit on fire.

  I turned my head to the right and saw Hillary’s staff van. The sliding door was open and inside, spread out longways, his legs on the upholstered bench, shoes practically jutting into the sun, was OG, the Original Guy, who years earlier had suckered me with access and charisma and then mindfucked me into believing my colleagues would destroy me and stomp on my cold, irrelevant corpse before we even got to Iowa. The one whose email manifestos had ruined so many weekends. The one whose good side I should’ve tried to stay on, but stupidly chose to provoke, Polar Bear–style. The one who had no idea that the next day he’d watch his dream job in the White House slip away to Hope Hicks, a twenty-eight-year-old former Ralph Lauren model.

  I’d wanted for so long to prove to him, and by extension to Hillary, that I could survive the Steel Cage Match. We locked eyes. I smiled and kept walking.

  8:02 p.m.

  Traveling press and pool depart Philadelphia International Airport en route Independence Hall.

  I held my phone up to the speakers trying to capture Bruce Springsteen’s raspy lyrics as they filled the air outside Independence Hall. In college, Bobby spent summers on a J-1 visa working as a carny on the Jersey shore. He had bleached-blond hair and operated a balloon ride on the boardwalk in Wildwood. He tells the story of his friend’s mum seeing this horde of gangly Irish schoolboys off at the Dublin Airport to America. “Mind the AIDS!” she yelled at them as they boarded.

  I’m more of a Tom Petty person, but for Bobby nothing epitomizes America and why he wanted to move here and become a citizen more than Springsteen. He was so excited to vote for the first time on Tuesday. I wished he’d been there to hear “Long Walk Home” performed live, outside, to thirty thousand people hours before the election. Springsteen called the song “a prayer for postelection,” and declared that on Tuesday, Trump’s “ideas and that campaign are going down.”

  I called Bobby several times, but it kept going to voice mail. I recorded a few minutes of music, and then said, “I love you so much. Thank you for everything. I wouldn’t be here tonight without you. You’re everything,” and hung up.

  9:11 p.m.

  GOTV rally on Independence Mall with Hillary Clinton, President Obama, Michelle Obama, President Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, and Jon Bon Jovi. PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT IS OUTSIDE.

  Hillary and Obama came onstage arm in arm. The sky had cleared and a sliver of a half-moon glowed over Independence Hall. They waved and pointed at the crowd, Hillary’s biggest yet. These two Democrats whose rivalry had been the backdrop of my reentry into American politics now stood as one unit—Stronger Together, or something like that.

  12:52 a.m. (Election Day)

  Midnight Get Out the Vote Rally, Reynolds Coliseum, North Carolina State University, Raleigh.

  Dear HFA Traveling Press:

  Congratulations on making it to the LAST RALLY of this campaign! We hope this Midnight Get Out the Vote Rally is a memorable last stop. We’ve enjoyed working with you lots!

  —Press Advance

  You can count on Hillary’s “midnight” rally starting closer to 1:00 a.m. Bon Jovi decided to tag along on the flight to Raleigh-Durham. We saw him boarding, a silhouette in black who waved to the press. When we landed and walked into the Reynolds Coliseum at North Carolina State University, Lady Gaga, in black aviator glasses and a high-collared velvet brigandine with a red armband, sat at a grand piano singing, “I want your love.”

  You could tell the campaign had screwed up because the narrow passageway they’d carved out for the press, in between the throngs of college students, put us so close to Gaga we could’ve grabbed her as she stood on the piano for the finale of “Born This Way.”

  “This way, traveling press! Keep moving!” a press aide yelled as we stood and gawked at the pop star.

  Bon Jovi and Gaga did an impromptu duet of “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Gaga slid off her glasses and told the crowd, “I could never have fathomed that I would experience in my lifetime that a woman would become president of the United States,” and the six thousand people who seemed unfazed by Hillary’s tardiness exploded. Everywhere I looked, I saw women of all ages, most of them of the Nasty variety, crying as they watched Hillary onstage.

  She joined hands with Bon Jovi and Gaga. This odd threesome thrust their arms overhead. Hillary couldn’t help herself. “Until the polls close tomorrow, we’re gonna be livin’ on a prayer!” she said. The Travelers rolled our eyes at each other and giggled. Would she still make pop-culture puns as president?

  The campaign must’ve relaxed its corporate-issued poster rules because everywhere people held handmade signs that said it’s time! and hillary 4 me. A chant of “I believe that she will win! I believe that she will win!” broke out. At that moment, I believed that she would win, too.

  1:55 a.m.

  Traveling press and pool wheels up Raleigh-Durham International Airport en route Westchester County Airport.

  The next hour had the feel of an in-flight victory party. The flight attendants could hardly get us all to sit for takeoff, and then everyone, including Bill, Hillary, Chelsea, and a cabin packed with their closest aides and friends, bounced out of their seat belts and poured into the aisle.

  Bon Jovi ventured to the back cabin where a couple of Travelers asked for selfies. I scooted around the fangirls who encircled him and saw OG. We talked as if we had no history. As if nothing had passed between us. We were two acquaintances who ran into each other in the grocery store checkout line.

  “How have you been?” I asked.

  “Not bad, and you?”

  I don’t remember how the Russians and WikiLeaks came up, but when it did, he said something like, “Can you imagine the epic scandal if the Times’ emails were hacked? It would make Jayson Blair look like nothing.”

  I nodded and agreed, but I wasn’t sure why he was telling me this. Then he dropped that he knew the cybersecurity firm the Times hired to secure our servers. “Nice guys over there. I’m friends with a couple of them . . .”

  “Well, okay, nice seeing you,” I said, and I walked back to my seat, a pit in my stomach knowing he’d soon be running the country.

  3:45 a.m.

  Traveling press and pool wheels down Westchester County Airport, Ross Aviation.

  Because Hillary didn’t want the day to end and wanted to torture the press with one final rendition of “Fight Song,” Brooklyn assembled a couple hundred of her most loyal neighbors, staff, and supporters for one last soiree on the tarmac in White Plains. Hillary stepped off the Stronger Together Express for the last time, wearing her thick glasses. I stood on the platform set up for the photographers and watched her disembark. I thought about her 70 percent approval rating when she was secretary of state, the last time she’d regularly worn glasses and scrunchies and a multicolored coat she bought at a market in Afghanistan in the ’90s. The country liked Hillary then. Maybe they could like her again when she became the FWP. She spent five minutes shaking hands and stepped into her van for Chappaqua.

  53

  The Tick-Tock Number Two

  New York City, November 8, 2016

  5:58 p.m.

  Hillary’s motorcade arrived at the Peninsula hotel, a limestone and steel tower on Fifth Avenue with a mint-colored cornice as resplendent and dignified as a jade Buddha. Only family and her innermost circle were invited to watch returns come in at the Peninsula, before everyone headed across town to the Javits Center. Hillary stepped out of her van believing that when she got back in later that night—probably around 10:00 p.m., maybe even earlier, her aides assured her—she’d be the president-elect. She strode into the Peninsula’s amber-lit lobby, with its scent of fresh hydrangea and Chanel No. 5 and a row of attendants in white gloves who looked ready to pantomime. Just around the corner, steel barricades set up
along Fifth Avenue fenced in a small crowd of Trump supporters, probably from Staten Island, who chanted “Drain the swamp!”; a couple of protesters who held Andy Warhol–like silhouettes of Trump with the words pro rape; and enough NYPD officers in riot gear to stop the Tiananmen Square massacre.

  If I had to choose a single symbol of Hillary’s outsize optimism that night, it wouldn’t be the two-minute fireworks display over the Hudson River that would’ve burst over the Javits Center’s glass-domed ceiling (until the Coast Guard put the kibosh on the idea), or the speech devoting her victory to Dorothy, which she had recited over and over to make sure she didn’t cry as she had in her Brooklyn speech. It was her choice of hotels.

  For as long as I’d covered the Clintons, they’d been savvy enough to know that New York Democrats hold major events at the sturdy Times Square Sheraton, whose workers are proud AFL-CIO members. Whether you’re rich or rank-and-file, if you’re a Democrat and you’re in Manhattan, chances are you’ve flooded the hotel’s hallways and narrow elevator banks for one cause or another. Al Sharpton held his annual convention of civil rights leaders there, and for years the Clinton Global Initiative had transformed the Sheraton’s gloomy ballrooms into what felt like a multiday walk-through Clinton infomercial. Even before Hillary had a campaign, in 2014, Ready for Hillary chose the Sheraton for its daylong confab with donors.

  Hillary started her campaign with a burrito bowl at a Chipotle in Maumee, Ohio, and a promise to “reshuffle the deck” in favor of the middle class. To end it, she chose the Peninsula, where the nineteenth-floor Peninsula Suite, at $25,000 a night, offered a grand piano, velvet armchairs in earthy tones, Italian silk curtains, and a dining room table that seats eight.

  One thing the Peninsula didn’t offer was easy access to the Javits, which stood on the opposite end of the fat middle of the island, in the muck of construction and gridlock on the far West Side, an area conveniently reached from hundreds of lesser hotels, including the Times Square Sheraton.

  When I heard early that morning that Hillary would watch the results come in at the Peninsula, I’d just assumed the five-star hotel was another ballsy move to troll Trump one last time, his anticipated Election Night rage compounded by knowing that out the window a single block down Fifth Avenue from Trump Tower, a victorious Hillary, living as if she too were a billionaire, was leaving her tastefully appointed hotel suite to ride in a motorcade across town as the nation’s new president-elect. When I later floated this theory by an aide, she shot it down, explaining simply, “Hillary just loves nice hotels and thought she’d win.”

  8:34 p.m.

  People had compared Elan Kriegel, the mastermind behind the Clinton campaign’s data analytics, to John Nash, the paranoid schizophrenic and Nobel Prize–winning mathematician whom Russell Crowe played in A Beautiful Mind. With his husky black eyebrows, five o’clock shadow, and crinkles around his eyes when he smiled, Elan had been the behind-the-scenes beating heart of a campaign that believed it would win, not based on crowd size or voters coming out of their skin each time the candidate spoke but on something more absolute than any of that: math.

  His statistical model showed Hillary couldn’t lose. Robby said it proved the “enormous amount of room we have to maneuver in the map.” Everyone—Democrats, donors, the media—had bowed down in worship of the science and computer-crunching quants who had brought presidential campaigns—once the purview of door-knocking and crusty piles of opposition research and the blind magic of voters’ whims—into the modern era.

  Until the 8:34 p.m. conference call on Election Night.

  “Our models in Florida were off,” Elan explained to Hillary’s top campaign aides.

  The data projections said the surge of early voting and Latinos—the newly arrived Puerto Ricans, for example, drawn into the process by the campaign’s brilliant bilingual “Get Out the Vote” effort that reached out to them in churches and nail salons and on the streets blasting reggaeton music from caravanas—would give Florida to Hillary. But as the count in Broward County came in, Elan realized the math, that seemingly infallible thing, had been wrong. Turnout among Latinos wasn’t what they’d projected, while white voters had stormed the polls in the Panhandle.

  Robby, who put his faith entirely in his calculator, had reassured Hillary minutes earlier that she was in good shape. “If we win Florida, we don’t actually have to win Pennsylvania,” he’d reminded her. On the conference call with senior campaign officials, Robby put on his sunny-bordering-on-delusional disposition. “That’s okay. This is all okay. Our path never relied on Florida. We can lose there and still be fine,” he said in response to Elan’s update.

  Long pause. Exhale.

  “But, Robby,” Elan started slowly, realizing what the next statement would mean, “. . . if our models were wrong in Florida, they could be wrong everywhere.”

  9:02 p.m.

  “Robby, WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?”

  It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for Mandy Grunwald, who’d been in Clinton pressure cookers since 1992, to express her concerns using a choice set of expletives strung together with the élan of a Harvard via Nightingale-Bamford alum. But this time was different.

  The campaign had three power centers on Election Night: backstage at the Javits Center, where in between conference calls, aides tried to avoid the press and keep donors and big-name celebrities (including Cher, Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry) calm; the Peninsula, where Robby delivered updates to Bill and Hillary and Chelsea (usually via Huma or Cheryl); and what several aides described as a faux War Room at Hillary’s personal office in Midtown, an anonymous block of cubicles and a conference room. That’s where Mandy and Joel Benenson, two similarly high-strung New Yorkers whose advice had been largely shunned in the final months of the campaign, and the pollster John Anzalone watched the returns on cable TV and fumed on conference calls at the shocking level of incompetence that slowly, and only late into the night, became apparent. Robby asked Marlon Marshall, his sidekick since the 2008 campaign and the agreeable director of state campaigns who spent most of his time talking to local leaders in Ohio and Pennsylvania and North Carolina, to join Mandy and Joel’s frustrated little army to make what was essentially an Election Night rubber room feel a little more like a legitimate campaign operation.

  The internal projections had given Hillary a 65 percent chance of narrowly winning Florida. Losing the state and realizing the data had been off panicked everyone. (It was around that time I spotted my friend Ned, who had helped put on the Election Night party and who doesn’t smoke, outside the Javits sucking down a Newport menthol he bummed off one of the concession workers.) But for the most part, senior aides remained cautiously optimistic as Elan and Robby tried to figure out whether their modeling had been off only on the East Coast or in the Midwest as well. “There’s still a path to victory. We’re okay,” Robby kept saying.

  By the time everyone joined the next conference call, John King’s magic wall on CNN began to show Pennsylvania awash in red. Panic spread on the floor of the Javits, where people held cupped palms over open mouths and stood in silence, glued to the giant TV screens set up over the stage.

  The only thing worse than the anxiety that now gripped the Javits was the fear that spread across Manhattan Island like a nor’easter and now swept through the modest, virtually empty office on Forty-Fifth Street, where Mandy Grunwald had finally had enough.

  9:17 p.m.

  Things were already looking bad when Chelsea popped the champagne. In the family’s suite at the Peninsula, she was having her hair and makeup done. Charlotte, in a dress decorated with the campaign’s H logo, napped in an adjacent room. Senior aides ducked in and out, but mostly the serene space was reserved for family and their personal staff, who were like a surrogate family. Chelsea filled everyone’s glasses with what somebody told me was Veuve Clicquot, figuring—they all still did—that in a couple of hours Trump’s run of early victories in red states (West Virginia, Oklahoma, Alabama) would end, a
nd the map would inevitably turn back in her mom’s favor. Hillary had just won New Jersey, and in the minutes before Tennessee was called for Trump, she held a narrow electoral edge. Chelsea wanted to look perfect that night when she would wave to supporters at the Javits; the evening would serve as a pivotal moment in her public evolution from gangly kid to the sophisticated daughter of the first woman president—and the sole heir to the Clinton legacy.

  9:47 p.m.

  I was out of breath from running up and down the stairs from the Javits Center’s sepulchral press area, where hundreds of reporters sat stupefied watching CNN, to the upstairs area where TV crews set up around the perimeter, their correspondents’ heads jutting out like gargoyles over the crestfallen supporters below.

  I looked around. After Comey’s letter and the Anthony Weiner connection, Hillary and Huma agreed it would be best if she worked from Brooklyn for at least a week until the outrage machine moved on. Hillary’s friend, Capricia Marshall, pitched in on the road. But the less visible role didn’t make Huma any less central to the campaign. She’d poured herself into planning the Election Night festivities, into making Hillary’s night impeccable. With advice from Vogue’s Anna Wintour, Huma had choreographed the Javits Center festivities with the glitz of a celebrity-wedding planner and the precision of a Broadway stage director. It looked as tasteful as she was, the custom-made stage shaped like the US and blanketed in royal-blue carpet laid for the sole purpose of Hillary, the new president-elect, to walk upon, the two hundred pounds of confetti shaped like shards of glass set to shatter and pour down from the atrium ceiling, the Empire State Building lit up red, white, and blue and glistening in the distance.

  Now, the most beautiful party I’d ever been to, a multicultural bouquet befitting the FWP, was starting to feel like a mass funeral. The Nasty Women had become zombified. Their mascara ran; they let out a collective gasp each time the next state turned red. The gay men hugged each other, some collapsing into human comfort blankets on the floor. I’d called in a favor to get my childhood friend Barry Dale into the Javits. He’d been exuberant until about 9:30, when he went home to his apartment, took a Xanax, and didn’t wake up until the next morning.