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Notes -
Your description of her Senate run overstates her case a bit. New York is seen as a Democratic lock now but in 1999 it was widely believed that Rudy Giuliani was going to run for the open seat, and he was expected to beat every Democrat who had expressed interest at the time. After Clinton threw her hat into the ring the field, such as it existed, stepped aside as the party believed that only a candidate with Clinton's star power would be enough to challenge Giuliani. So right off the bat, she had the crowd cleared for her and didn't even have to run in a competitive primary. Then, Giuliani's marriage fell apart right around the time he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and he decided not to run. Now she's running against Rick Lazio, who was less well-known and more conservative than Giuliani. And she underperformed here, too. Though she ended up winning by 12 points, polling was much tighter than anyone had anticipated; Lazio made it a real ballgame. More importantly, though, while 12 points is a healthy margin, Al Gore ended up winning the state on the same ballot by 25 points. In other words, a significant number of Democrats decided that they'd rather vote for a Republican nobody than vote for Mrs. Clinton. This should have been a prodrome for the future but the Democratic establishment never quite got it. It's no coincidence that when Democrats nationwide were given a choice they chose freshman Senator who had made a good speech a few years prior despite the "aura of inevitability" the party sought to create. It was no coincidence that after the part establishment sough to rectify this in 2016 by clearing the field to an unprecedented degree an old socialist who would have been a fringe candidate in any other election threatened to win the nomination, and was possibly only thwarted by the specter of superdelegates whose assumed positions made all media reports look like Clinton had the nomination locked up before the first primary.
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