Far more controversial and complicated, surely, is the rest of “What Happened,” starting with Clinton’s arguments about the role of misogyny and sexism in the election. It’s hard to buy the idea that she suffered disproportionately from charges of untrustworthiness or inauthenticity simply because she was a woman. Her husband was considered so eely that the tabloids christened him “Slick Willy,” and plenty of male presidential candidates (Mitt Romney, JohnKerry) were regarded as catastrophically insincere. More persuasive is Clinton’s contention that presidential politics, especially compared to parliamentary politics, favors arena-filling showmanship rather than the quieter, detail-oriented realism she prefers. (How many times has Clinton been praised for being “a workhorse, not a show horse”?) And 2016 was nothing if not the year of the blusterer. One of the things that drove Clinton bonkers about Bernie Sanders was that he always managed to outdo her proposals with something larger and less feasible. “That left me to play the unenviable role,” she writes, “of spoilsport schoolmarm.” As her book’s title implies, Clinton has her own version of what happened in 2016, and she eventually forces readers to reckon with it. She seems at once the best and worst possible person to carry out this assessment. But here, at any rate, is her bottom line: Comey’s letter of Oct. 28, 2016, which notified Congress that he was reopening his investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct State Department business, effectively ended her candidacy. (She leans heavily on various analyses done by data maestro Nate Silver to make her case.) Combine that letter with the full-saturation media coverage Comey’s investigation had been getting all along, and then add to it Russian interference — fake news stories on social media, email hacks — and you have the perfect storm. Clinton also blames sexism, citing a 2014 Pew Research Center poll that showed just how few voters hoped to see a female president in their lifetime. She blames racism, too, which she considers inseparable from economic anxiety, because her courting of immigrants and voters of color might have given the impression that she put their economic interests before those of disenfranchised whites. She believes that voter suppression in swing states, made possible by a ruling by the Supreme Court in 2013, also made a difference. So did the ever-present animus toward her, which remains, she writes, something she doesn’t fully understand. It’s hard to say whether readers will buy these explanations. It’s possible that a more inspired candidate would have won the Electoral College, simple as that. Or that the Clinton brand was tarnished among black voters. Or that her campaign, despite its extensive networks and deep pockets, failed to detect that something on the ground was wrong. Or that she should have appeared in more rural areas. Or that she couldn’t find a better way to speak to the fears of the white working class — which she does admit, though she doesn’t think it cost her the election. We’ll be arguing about these questions for decades, surely. But one thing we know for certain: History conspired against Clinton. No non-incumbent Democrat has succeeded a two-term Democratic president since 1836, and 2016 was a year when voters were pining for change. Bigly. In spite of that — in spite of everything — Clinton still won the popular vote by almost 3 million. But it didn’t matter. What happened is, it wasn’t enough.