On the eve of her 22-point loss to Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton had been fretting about her strategy, questioning her staffing choices and generally flash-backing on her 2008 defeat.

It was at this point, however, that the once-and-future Democratic front-runner huddled with her aide-de-camp Huma Abedin and decided to make a statement that this time would, indeed, be different.


As her staff digested the rotten news on primary day from their digs at the ratty Radisson in downtown Manchester, aides were told to cancel their commercial flights back to New York: Clinton had traded up her small corporate plane for a bigger regional jet, and she was offering 25 of them a ride home. Misery would have company.

When the staff trudged up the steps in the chill, they were surprised to find Bill and Hillary Clinton, tired but smiling, at the hatch to offer hugs, handshakes, solace and offerings of “I appreciate what you did,” according to three people who were on the night flight.

Hillary Clinton is not the most talented candidate in the 2016 race. She isn’t the most electrifying speaker. And with Bernie Sanders’ massive online donor operation, she can’t even stake claim to being the best-funded Democrat in the field (he outraised her by about $10 million last month). But the past month has proved she is the toughest, and most resilient candidate in the field. For all her flaws, Clinton has overcome early stumbles to dominate Sanders on Super Tuesday, and she’s started to gently ease him into the fold even as the GOP descends into political Mogadishu.

The key to Clinton’s resurgence, and her game-changing Nevada and South Carolina wins, was the issue of race. After New Hampshire, she embraced a crusade against racial discrimination that energized black voters, unclogged the campaign’s collective writer’s block on messaging, reconnected with black voters and reactivated the old Hillaryland network of female friends, many of whom are African-American women.

Big challenges loom for Clinton (the intensifying federal probe into her use of a private email server as secretary of state poses, perhaps, the most lethal threat) but she’s already overcome a lot in 2016 — and the 30 days between New Hampshire and Super Tuesday are likely to be remembered as a key turning point in her quest for the presidency. It was a time when Clinton finally learned the most important lessons of her loss in 2008, according to a dozen Clinton insiders POLITICO interviewed for this story: Don’t panic, trust your team — even when you think they screwed up — and stick with the plan.

“She just got back to work,” says her campaign chairman, John Podesta, who served as Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff in the 1990s, of the candidate’s post-New Hampshire approach. “The thing that sets her apart from everybody else is her capacity to just get back up. ... After New Hampshire she didn’t just take the loss or get all down. It’s something people have always said about her, but this whole experience really proved the point. … What grit she has.”

It’s easier to have grit when you have the electoral map in your favor, as Clinton does this time around, and an opponent whose inspiration quotient may be high, but not in Barack Obama’s class. “This one is going to work out just fine [for her],” says David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, who now serves as an informal adviser to campaign manager Robby Mook and other campaign officials.

“Iowa, a very close win. Bernie wins New Hampshire, and I think there must have been a sense of, ‘Oh, here we go again,’” Plouffe added. “But they’ve stabilized. … I think on the morning of March 16, she will be able to look back and say, ‘You know what? My team weathered the storm. The strategy worked.’ And that’s how you build trust. And you go through something like that, you’re just more likely to trust the team the next time you have a moment of trial or tribulation.”

For Clinton, tribulation has never been in short supply — and her 0.2 percentage point victory in Iowa a month ago set off the usual internal recriminations and fingerpointing. Post-Iowa, Clinton expressed resentment at senior staff for failing to adequately recognize the threats posed by Sanders — a 74-year-old democratic socialist with a negligible national following a year ago — and implored her team to hit him harder. “Why don’t we have a plan?” she asked a friend in frustration a few days before the New Hampshire wipeout. And both Clintons were growing increasingly anxious that the team wasn’t coming up with a message to compete with Sanders’ brutally simple crusade against economic inequality.

But the beginnings of her reboot began to take shape even before she left mean old Manchester.

The first step was clearing the candidate’s head. Knowing their friend was feeling down, Clinton’s support network, 25 to 30 women who have known her for decades, sprang into action. The chipper email chain had begun in Iowa but really kicked into gear when it became apparent Clinton would be humbled in New Hampshire. There was no formal effort to soothe the easily agitated front-runner, but her friends talk among themselves, and they urged calm and reminded Clinton they had her back. Later, they even made trucker hats, akin to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” emblazoned with the slogan “H Team” on them.

All the support in the world couldn’t shield Clinton from the magnitude of the dispiriting New Hampshire loss, and she mused about accelerating a staff review that had been planned for the spring. Yet when a POLITICO story popped on the eve of the primary, she ordered her staff to knock it down, even though it was true — and pivoted to a comprehensive rewrite of her messaging strategy, according to people close to Clinton.

To brace the troops for the carnage to come, campaign manager Robby Mook warned his staff on a conference call to prepare for the most emotionally draining stretch of the campaign and to stay focused. If possible, he suggested, avoid cable news completely.

For two days, policy director Jake Sullivan and speechwriter Dan Schwerin holed up in a 12th-floor room in the Radisson in hopes of retooling her pragmatic populist message and give her a fresh start in Nevada. The vehicle for the shift was her New Hampshire concession speech — and it contained a gumbo of different themes, including the campaign’s pollster and strategist Joel Benenson’s favorite message, that Clinton would crusade against “corporate greed” — an extension of Benenson’s messaging against Mitt Romney as a top adviser to Obama in 2012.

At its center, however, was a more compact anti-Sanders argument that labeled him a single-issue candidate so focused on Wall Street that he discounted the underlying impact of prejudice — based on race, gender, class and sexual orientation.

“We have to break through the barriers of bigotry,” Clinton told her audience. “African-American parents shouldn’t have to worry that their children will be harassed, humiliated, even shot because of the color of their skin. Immigrant families shouldn’t have to lie awake at night listening for a knock on the door. … A president has to do all parts of the job. … We need to break down those barriers.”

The speech buoyed morale, but the big worry that surfaced in the candidate’s conversations with staff was one of momentum. Would Sanders substantially erode her big leads in the Super Tuesday states? The internal data showed the Vermont senator making gains, especially in Nevada, but the good news was that there seemed to be a rising tide, not a wave.

In Nevada, the onetime Western firewall that had begun to crumble, Clinton focused on Hispanic voters — but even here, her eye was on African-Americans, who make up 15 percent of the state’s voting population, and the campaign deployed surrogates like Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) to question Sanders’ record on race. Clinton met with civil rights leaders and delivered a high-impact speech in Harlem on systemic racism. The approach helped her in Nevada — but Clinton, factoring in a possible loss in the desert, was now viewing South Carolina on Feb. 27 as her ultimate backstop.

Even now, the Clintons were nervous about their staff’s performance, and distrusted their own internal polling predicting a 2- to 3-point win in Nevada. This was the critical moment for Clinton, a real make-or-break moment, and emotions ran high among local staff who felt the immense pressure of saving an entire candidacy. The day before the caucuses, rattled campaign operatives said they expected to pull out a victory by a hair, but they also said they would not be surprised if Sanders beat them by up to 5 points.

They weren’t the only ones in limbo. The campaign’s Brooklyn-based communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, flew to Las Vegas in case she was needed to spin a loss to reporters on a charter plane to Houston that night.

But here too, aides say, Clinton exhibited a level head — and made a show of confidence in her people, as she had that night in New Hampshire. After the caucuses ended, and Clinton had scored a far-better-than-expected 5-plus-point victory, the candidate made a point of bringing her state director, Emmy Ruiz, onstage. Ruiz was nervous; she had never spoken in front of such a large crowd. But the candidate was insistent. “People need to hear from my captain!” Clinton said of Ruiz, an important vote of confidence to her close-knit Nevada team.

If Nevada was a nail-biter, South Carolina was all about putting a hammer to Sanders, who invested heavily in the state, with more than 200 staffers and close to $2 million in ads, despite polling that showed him losing by 20-plus points overall.

Here was a chance not just for victory but personal redemption: Obama had decimated Clinton in South Carolina by 28 points eight years earlier, and worse, Bill Clinton — who had forged a unique bond with black voters since his days of campaigning in southeast Arkansas — melted down when Obama surrogates suggested he wasn’t showing the first serious African-American presidential contender adequate respect.

Clinton’s embrace of Obama — starting with his rousing “explainer-in-chief” speech at the 2012 Democratic convention in Charlotte — had banished much of the bad blood, and the former president, who had lashed out at reporters for fanning the racial flames in 2008, kibbitzed with them on the rope lines, declaring himself to be “back home.”

His wife enjoyed an even more committed support network. Cheryl Mills, a publicity-shy D.C. power player who found herself in the middle of Clinton’s State Department email controversy, rented a Chevy and took a group of the candidate’s friends on a door-knocking road trip around the state, chowing down on Chick-fil-A sandwiches and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee as they went.

“Cheryl was our driver,” said Minyon Moore, a longtime Clinton adviser and veteran Democratic consultant. “We had just a GPS and some walk-sheets and no campaign staff,” she said of canvassing in South Carolina.

When asked why she did it, Moore said, “We see her. … We identify with the fact that when you’re a trailblazer, it’s not always fun. ... In our own small way, we are saying collectively that as women, we hear her.”

The Hillaryland crew that came out to support Clinton in South Carolina included Marva Smalls, a board member of Clinton’s super PAC, Priorities USA, and a 2008 campaign aide; Ann Walker Marchant, who worked in the Clinton White House and is a niece of power broker Vernon Jordan and a cousin of Valerie Jarrett; Alexis Herman, former labor secretary under Bill Clinton; Cheryl Benton, a longtime Clinton aide who worked for her at the State Department and on her 2008 campaign; Capricia Marshall, a loyal adviser since Clinton’s days as first lady; longtime supporter Judy Byrd, a friend and fundraiser since Clinton’s days in the Senate; Andrea McCoy, who works for South Carolina state Sen. Darrell Jackson and has been a longtime Clinton supporter and friend; Kiki McClean, a senior adviser to Clinton’s 2008 bid; longtime spokeswoman Karen Finney, who still works on the campaign; and Maya Harris, a current campaign policy adviser described as the “newest member of the band.”

Clinton didn’t know the entire group had made the trip for her. At an impromptu reunion just before her victory rally in Columbia, attendees said she was overwhelmed by the unexpected show of support. “It was almost kind of breathtaking,” said Moore, who spent the rest of the night with other Hillarylanders watching the election returns in Clinton’s hotel suite. “When she saw us all as a group, she was like, ‘Oh my God.’ She was really happy to see us.”

Yet for all the feel-good vibe in South Carolina, Clinton’s juggernaut will be remembered as one of the biggest political routs in recent history — a stunning, 48-point victory enabled by her campaign’s steely, methodical dismantling of Sanders’ core argument to the party’s base.

As far back as Iowa, Clinton was looking past the caucuses to appeal to black voters, homing in on issues that undermined Sanders’ support with African-Americans, who would play a huge role in South Carolina and Super Tuesday. Initially, Clinton focused on Sanders’ gun votes, campaigning with the black mothers of children who had died on the streets, even in predominantly white towns like Iowa City.

It was Sanders’ respectful, but unmistakable distancing from Obama and his policies that gave her the opening she needed to turn the race around, though. In debates and on the trail, Clinton portrayed his career-long push for single-payer, government-subsidized health care as an attack on Obamacare, the first black president’s biggest achievement.

And she took advantage of Sanders’ propensity for impolitic truth-telling. “You know Hillary Clinton now is trying to embrace the president as closely as she possibly can. Everything the president does is wonderful. She loves the president, he loves her and all that stuff,” the Vermont senator said mockingly in an interview with BET the day before South Carolinians went to the polls. “And we know what that’s about. That’s trying to win support from the African-American community, where the president is enormously popular.”

There may have been some truth in that comment, but it was a serious unforced error, and Clinton pounced, saying that Sanders was accusing Obama of “failed leadership.” Clinton won black voters in the state by an unprecedented 86 to 14 percent margin, and she won African-Americans in the Super Tuesday states of Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia by comparable margins.

But her approach to beating Sanders — while rooted in race — has a larger purpose, her advisers say.

While Clinton is still struggling mightily with younger voters, she is gaining ground with white progressives: Her aides think it’s because her “barriers” message, which incorporates an anti-Wall Street component, appeals more broadly to progressives because it taps into Democrats’ deeper sense of their party as bulwark against prejudice, bigotry and economic unfairness.

Winning helps too. And Clinton, at this particular moment in an uncommonly turbulent political life, is enjoying genuine momentum and, with it, a measure of peace. How long it will last, no one knows.

“The bottom line,” said one longtime Clinton friend, “is she never lost her sh--. And now she’s going to win.”

