Politico: “On a call with surrogates Thursday afternoon, top advisers John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri pinned blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss on a host of uncontrollable headwinds that ultimately felled a well–run campaign that executed a sensible strategy, and a soldier of a candidate who appealed to the broadest coalition of voters in the country.”

“They shot down questions about whether they should have run a more populist campaign with a greater appeal to angry white voters, pointing to exit polls that showed Clinton beat Trump on the issue of the economy. They explained that internal polling from May showed that attacking Trump on the issue of temperament was a more effective message.”

“They offered no apology for the unexpected loss.”

Politico: “Democrats and many others are now in crisis, wrapping their minds around the reality of a President Donald Trump. But the crisis is sharpest in Clinton campaign headquarters: not only do they feel like everything is about to go deeply, collapse-of-America wrong, but it’s going to happen because she failed, and they failed her.”

“Clinton and her operatives went into the race predicting her biggest problems would be inevitability and her age, trying to succeed a two-term president of her own party. But the mood of the country surprised them. They recognized that Sanders and Trump had correctly defined the problem—addressing anger about a rigged economy and government—and that Clinton already never authentically could. Worse still, her continuing email saga and extended revelations about the Clinton Foundation connections made any anti-establishment strategy completely impossible.”

“So instead of answering the question of how Clinton represented change, they tried to change the question to temperament, what kind of change people wanted, what kind of America they wanted to live in. It wasn’t enough.”

Hillary Clinton’s final ad doesn’t even mention Donald Trump.

Playbook: “It’s a minute-long spot, and it’s running in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin through Election Day.”

New York Times: “Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, told donors on a conference call Thursday that the campaign expected to win Florida and North Carolina in large part because of Hispanic turnout. In Nevada, a third diverse battleground state, Mr. Mook said he no longer saw a path for Mr. Trump to win there.”

“Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.”

“Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.”

CNN: “Several Republican congressmen have been asked this week about a potential Clinton impeachment if she were indicted as a result of an FBI investigation into her emails; all of them warned of a ‘constitutional crisis’ if Clinton were to be elected.”

“Their answers mirror what Donald Trump has being saying on the campaign trail. At a rally Monday, Trump warned of the ‘very possibility of constitutional crisis’ and said if Clinton were elected, she would face criminal investigations and possibly a trial.”

“I had a team of people who were relentless, totally in the head of what Trump might do. A lot of this comes down to who gets into whose head. It’s like an athletic contest or maybe a high-stakes entertainment performance.”

— Hillary Clinton, quoted by People Magazine, on how she prepared for the debates.

Joe Klein: “We are about to experience a radical change in American politics: a woman may well be our next President. It’s a transformation that’s been lost in the roil of the campaign. Clinton is so familiar a character that she has been disaggregated from her gender. She is the experienced candidate, the status quo candidate, the Establishment candidate; she is the awkward, slippery, morally challenged candidate.”

“All true, but she is also a woman—and women are different from men…. when you think about it, having an intellectually mature and experienced President would be a seismic shift away from the long run of ‘outsiders’ in the oval office. And guys, if you don’t believe that having a female President would be a dramatic rupture from male governance, well, your wives probably have a list of reasons why it would.”