We asked Hillary Clinton's biggest fans what her worst mistake against Trump was

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox

Get our free Inside Washington email

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

Hillary Clinton’s campaign memoir may be at the top of the best-seller lists, but her favourability ratings are at an all-time low. Recent polling has her at 40 per cent – tied with Donald Trump, the least popular President in recent memory.

As Ms Clinton’s former competitor, Senator Bernie Sanders, put it recently: “Look, Secretary Clinton ran against the most unpopular candidate in the history of this country, and she lost.”

Many have ascribed Ms Clinton’s unpopularity to outside forces: sexism, Russian hacking, and undue focus on her private email server scandal. In her memoir, she discusses each of these at length.

But no campaign is perfect, and even Ms Clinton’s most die-hard supporters must be able to identify some things she did wrong – Right?

To find out, we stopped by the first event of Ms Clinton’s book tour and asked attendees: “What was Hillary Clinton’s biggest campaign mistake?”

“I think the biggest mistake in the campaign might have been that she trusted Bernie Sanders too much. And I’m really, really disappointed in Bernie, who I would've supported as President, and whose liberal goals I am almost 99 per cent behind … The nine out of 10 Bernie Sanders supporters who did say that they came out and voted for her – that did not erase eight months of toxic language about her.”

“I think it was a perfect campaign. Her personality is her personality, you cannot change that. You can’t say, ‘Oh I wish that she was like Bill or Obama. It’s not her fault, and I accepted that.”

“I think that there were states that she should have probably visited. And she ran a very clean campaign against an opponent who was not clean – including Bernie Sanders, who got dirty and got negative way faster than he should have, and stayed negative way longer than he should have.”

“Obviously she didn’t connect to certain people. She connected to me, but I’m a young white woman in New York trying to go to law school. That doesn’t represent a lot of the country. And while, like I said, I don’t understand why [people voted for Donald Trump,] she didn’t either, and I think that’s where she made the mistake.”

“She took too much for granted; I think that was her big mistake. You have to go to every state and speak to the people. I looked at a programme on CNN with Van Jones Called “The Messy Truth,” and he interviewed people in Kentucky to find out why they voted for Trump. And they said: ‘Look, I voted for Obama the last two elections. Even if he couldn't get here, he sent his people here. And she just blew us off.’ A lot of people may have felt that way.”

“I don’t think she made a mistake. I think a lot of men were against her, and they’ve been bad mouthing her for 25 years. And she, in my opinion, hasn’t done any of the things they’ve accused her of.”

“There were probably some mistakes made in the final days of the campaign as to where she decided to have a rally or, for example, go campaign for other politicians who were running, as opposed to solely focusing on her campaign. But I think those are probably more nit-picky than anything that would likely have changed the election.”

“I don’t think she really did make a mistake. It’s just that things went out of hand, out of her control ... But I don’t think she did anything wrong. I think it’s just the times, and just the climate. People were tired of the last eight years – certain types of people were tired. And they came out in droves and they voted, and they made the difference.”

“I forget which ones specifically, but in Wisconsin, Michigan, stuff like that, she went during the primaries, but she didn’t go back … There was just kind of an assumption. And in the military we don’t agree with the word assumption in any way. It is a four-letter word there. We use all the other four-letter words, but not that one.”