What Happened ? Hillary Clinton’s Defeat in the 2016 Presidential Election

The 2024 presidential contest in the US may see the election of the 1st female president. This is the perfect opportunity to revisit the 2016 election, where the 1st female candidate for a major party, Hillary Clinton, lost to Donald Trump (while winning the popular vote by 3 million votes). With a little bit of historical hindsight, it seems interesting to understand what went wrong then, especially through the lens of Clinton’s own post-mortem book What Happened (2017).

A graduate of Ecole Normale Supérieure – Fontenay St Cloud, Françoise Coste is a Professor of American History at the University of Toulouse. She works on the history of the conservative movement in the United States in the 20th  and 21st centuries. She has devoted many articles and book chapters to the history of women’s rights in the US and the intellectual history of American conservatism. Her biography of Ronald Reagan (Reagan, Editions Perrin) received the Award for best political biography of the year in France in 2015. She is currently working on a history of the Republican Party since 1945, to be published by Humensis.