WHAT HAPPENED

"In this book, I write about moments from the campaign that I wish I could go back and do over.

"I've tried to learn from my own mistakes. There are plenty, as you'll see in this book, and they are mine and mine alone."

"Still, every time I hugged another sobbing friend—or one stoically holding back tears, which was almost worse—I had to fight back a wave of sadness that threatened to swallow me whole. At every step, I felt that I had let everyone down. Because I had."

"Throughout November and December, Bill and I laced up our shoes and hit the trails again and again, slowly working through why I lost, what I could have done better, what in the world was going to happen to America now."

"Especially after the financial crisis of 2008-2009, I should have realized it would be bad 'optics' and stayed away from anything having to do with Wall Street. I didn't. That's on me.

"This is one of the mistakes I made that you'll read about in this book."

"[David Plouffe] spoke in detail about strategy, data, personnel, and timing. I listened carefully, determined that if I did jump into the race, I would avoid the mistakes that had dogged me the last time."

"Having said all that, of course the campaign didn't go as planned. I ended up falling into many of the pitfalls I had worried about and tried to avoid from the start. Some of that was my own doing, but a lot of it was due to forces beyond my control."

"Once Bill entered politics, the spotlight on me was glaring and often unkind. I've written about this before but it's worth saying again: one of the reasons he lost the Governor's race in 1980 was because I still went by my maiden name."

"As the campaign went on, polls showed that a significant number of Americans questioned my authenticity and trustworthiness. A lot of people said they just didn't like me. I write that matter-of-factly, but believe me, it's devastating."

"To me, Flint was so much more than something to rail about on the campaign trail, even if outrage is good politics. And in this case, it's possible it wasn't good politics. I don't know if my advocacy for the heavily African-American community of Flint alienated white voters in other parts of Michigan, but it certainly didn't seem to help, as I lost the state narrowly in both the primary and the general election."

"Now I wish I had pushed back hard on his question. I should have said, 'You know, Matt, I was the one in the Situation Room advising the president to go after Osama bin Laden...'"

"I made that unfortunate comment about coal miners at a town hall in Columbus just two days before the Ohio primary. You say millions of words in a campaign and you try your best to be clear and accurate. Sometimes it just comes out wrong. It wasn't the first time that happened during the 2016 election, and it wouldn't be the last. But it is the one I regret most."

"Most of the folks I met in places like Ashland, Kentucky, and Williamson, West Virginia, were good people in a bad situation, desperate for change. I wish more than anything that I could have done a better job speaking to their fears and frustrations."

"My first instinct was that my campaign should hit back hard and explain to the public that Comey had badly overstepped his bounds—the same argument Rod Rosenstein would make months after the election. That might have blunted the political damage and made Comey think twice before breaking protocol again a few months later. In the end, we decided it would be better to just let it go and try to move on. Looking back, that was a mistake."

"I blamed myself. My worst fears about my limitations as a candidate had come true. I had tried to learn the lessons of 2008, and in many ways ran a better, smarter campaign this time. But I had been unable to connect with the deep anger so many Americans felt or shake the perception that I was the candidate of the status quo."

"I've spent part of nearly every day since November 8, 2016, wrestling with a single question: Why did I lose? Sometimes it's hard to focus on anything else.

"I go back over my own shortcomings and the mistakes we made. I take responsibility for all of them. You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want—but I was the candidate. It was my campaign. Those were my decisions."

"But I also know that it was my job to try to break through all that noise and convince the American people to vote for me. I wasn't able to do that.

"So yes, I had my shortcomings as a candidate."

"When I said, 'You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,' I was talking about well-documented reality. For example, the General Social survey conducted by the University of Chicago found that in 2016, 55 percent of white Republicans believed that blacks are generally poorer than whites 'because most just don't have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty.' In the same survey, 42 percent of white Republicans described blacks as lazier than whites and 26 percent said they were less intelligent. In all cases, the number of white Democrats who said the same thing was much lower (although still way too high.).

"Generalizing about a broad group of people is almost always unwise. And I regret handing Trump a political gift with my 'deplorables' comment. I know that a lot of well-intentioned people were insulted because they misunderstood me to be criticizing all Trump voters. I'm sorry about that."