In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

135| 8. Run It like a Business May 9, 2008: Goliath has fallen. Like the unbelieving villagers afraid to come out of their homes as the great giant lay motionless in the town square, party insiders are similarly frozen and slow to coalesce around us. With no real path left and certainly no money, HRC has announced she will stay in ’till the end.With six races left we labor on. Still, it really does somehow feel over. Winning Ugly The last day of the primary voting season was set for June 3, featuring a doubleheader with contests in South Dakota and Montana. May 18 was a high point for us during that last stretch. An astonishing eighty thousand supporters turned out for an impressive rally in Portland, Oregon. The aerial photos that came back made it look like Barack had literally been dropped into a sea of people that surrounded him on all sides. Two days later, to nobody’s surprise, we handily won the election in that state. It was an important victory because the Hillary forces really wanted to pull that one out of our column and into theirs. Otherwise, the news wasn’t all that great for us. We lost badly in the Appalachian states of West Virginia on May 13 and Kentucky a week later. We also came up well short in Puerto Rico on June 1. This helped fuel the case being made by Clinton supporters that there was a strain of buyer’s remorse running prominently through the Democratic electorate in the closing days. They partly based their claim on the fact that their candidate had won more races over the final three-month period and that she had bagged 289 pledged delegates since April 22 to our 246. Hillary backers also pointed to her whopping victories during this stretch, including wins in Pennsylvania by ten percentage points, West Virginia by forty-one, Kentucky by thirty-five, and Puerto Rico by thirty-six. But the Clinton campaign was almost out of runway following a 136 | chapter eight ruling by party officials at the end of May that the Michigan and Florida delegations would be seated at half of their voting allotments, as a penalty for their attempts to buck party primary scheduling rules. With the pool of uncommitted delegates having been dramatically narrowed, their side was left with a vanishing path to victory. Still, since neither camp would leave the June 3 contests having gotten the total number of delegates needed to win the nomination, there was hope for the Clinton people in those remaining hold-out superdelegates. Senator Clinton therefore aimed her closing argument in the final days directly at that audience. Hillary continued to insist that based on the states her campaign had won, it was she—and she alone—who could realistically take back the White House from the Republicans in November. Clinton was unwavering in her assertion that she was ahead in the popular vote, while conceding only a “slight lead” to our candidate in the pledged delegate count. This didn’t square at all with our math, which showed us decisively winning in both of those categories. Plouffe was therefore specific in his direction to Dan Pfeiffer that his communications team should lean hard into the delegate number, which was indisputable, rather than engage in a debate over her scoring techniques. New Growing Pains On June 3, while our field organizers and volunteers were pulling supporters to the polls in South Dakota and Montana, I was having a tough afternoon of my own back in Chicago. Despite the fact that we were concluding one of the great political campaign fights in American history —one that I am sure will long be celebrated—there was little fanfare at headquarters. Senator Clinton was already far from my mind; I was now firmly focused on scaling the organization to ready it for the general election on November 4. I was in the midst of a maze of meetings with individual department heads in an effort to shave $3 million from the newly proposed general election staffing budgets to get us through the final five months. This led to some less-than-sparkling conversations with my grumpy peers that went late into the day. On my way to one of those meetings, I bumped into an old friend, Jeff Blodgett, in the middle of a busy hallway. Jeff was the former campaign manager and senior advisor to the late Senator [18.191...

Share