Hillary Clinton reveals why she lost the 2016 election

HILLARY Clinton takes sole responsibility for her stunning election loss to Donald Trump in her new tell-all, acknowledging, “It was my campaign. Those were my decisions.”

“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,” she writes in “What Happened,” CNN reported on Wednesday.

In the book, which is scheduled to be released next Tuesday, the former secretary of state admits she misjudged the political environment and Mr Trump’s unorthodox presidential campaign, reports the New York Post.

“I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t realise how quickly the ground was shifting under all our feet,” she writes, CNN reported, citing an early copy of the book.

“I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions, while Mr Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans’ anger and resentment.”

But she takes time to fault James Comey — whom she refers to as a “rash FBI director” — for reopening the investigation into her email server a week before the election, and Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders for muddying the message about how Democrats could help the middle class.

And she wonders why, after years as first lady, secretary of state, senator from New York and two-time presidential candidate, the public turned against her.

“What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I’m really asking. I’m at a loss,” she writes. Then she says: “I think it’s partly because I’m a woman.”

She also addresses other controversial elements of her campaign, including the bad “optics” she created by delivering paid speeches to Wall Street banking firms, how “I regret the most” the comment she made about putting coal miners out of business and the “dumb” decision to use a private email server during her tenure at the State Department.

She also describes the final hours of the 2016 election, when states began to fall to Mr Trump and her dream to become president came crashing down.

She took a nap as the election results began to pour in as her husband, former President Bill Clinton, stood nearby “chomping on an unlit cigar.”

When she woke, “the mood in the hotel had darkened considerably.”

She said then-President Barack Obama urged her to call Mr Trump and concede defeat to not draw out the campaign needlessly.

She said the call with Mr Trump was “without a doubt one of the strangest moments of my life.”

“I congratulated Trump and offered to do anything I could to make sure the transition was smooth,” she writes. “It was all perfectly nice and weirdly ordinary, like calling a neighbour to say you can’t make it to his barbecue. It was mercifully brief … I was numb. It was all so shocking.”

This article was first published in the New York Post.