Clinton campaign rides Nevada bounce
After a rough run of second-guessing, donor hand-wringing and talk of a staff shake-up, no one is more relieved than campaign manager Robby Mook.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/clinton-campaign-rides-nevada-bounce-219656
By ANNIE KARNI
On Feb. 2, the afternoon following Hillary Clinton’s razor-thin win in the Iowa caucus, campaign manager Robby Mook held an all-staff conference call.
Prepare for a nightmarish few weeks, Mook warned his team, with a lot of second-guessing of strategic decisions, donor hand-wringing and finger-pointing directed at staff. The New Hampshire primary was only going to make things worse, he predicted, according to a source on the call. And don’t pay too much attention to cable news, he warned. Focus on Nevada, South Carolina and the March states, instead.
On Saturday in Nevada, Mook’s stay-the-course approach was validated. Nevada didn’t turn out to be the Western firewall he had originally predicted when he first laid out a strategy that was laser-focused on the first four nominating states. But the solid six-point win over a surging Bernie Sanders, which sapped some of the Vermont senator’s momentum and juiced fundraising, is still being hailed by Clinton allies as a turning point for the campaign's morale.
“She won Nevada because of the organization,” said Patti Solis Doyle, who managed Clinton’s 2008 campaign and remains plugged into Clinton world. “It totally quieted a lot of the donor angst and even some of the Clinton angst, about the campaign.”
With the narrow win in Iowa followed by a landslide defeat in New Hampshire, the pressure had been building on Mook in ways he had not shared widely with his troops.
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