Hillary Clinton formally campaigned for the Presidency for eighteen months, and informally campaigned for years before that, and when the end neared she seemed to want to gather her movement around her. On Monday, Barack and Michelle Obama joined her for a final rally in Philadelphia, her family surrounded her, famous musicians warmed up the crowd, and volunteers who believed in her introduced her. She arrived at the Westchester Airport at three-thirty on Tuesday morning, and moved slowly through a large crowd of her campaign staff who had come to greet her at home. Her staff had made plans to show the press a proprietary computer algorithm called Ada, and to explain that the algorithm had showed how to win the election. Credit was to be broadly shared; that was the plan and the ethic. Clinton began Election Day by FaceTiming with her grandchild, and ended it by losing the Presidency. From a distance, the crowd around her could look like courtiers. Up close, they seemed to be a movement.

Clinton was late to her concession speech this morning at the New Yorker Hotel, across the street from Penn Station. Awaiting her, MSNBC’s cameras zoomed in on John Podesta, her campaign chair, until his face, chin in hand, filled the screen. Huma Abedin, her longtime aide, came in just before Clinton, and the room gave her a standing ovation. When Clinton appeared, the applause was longer and deeply felt. “A very unruly group,” Clinton said. She wanted her supporters to sit down so that she could begin; they wanted to cheer her more. Clinton did concede the election to Donald Trump, saying that “we owe him an open mind” and expressing hope that he will govern with decency. But her real subject and audience were the people who had been part of “this vast, diverse, creative, unruly campaign.” Clinton said, “You represent the best of America, and being your candidate has been one of the greatest honors of my life.”

The best of America—the phrase lingered. It implied that there is another side to it, too. “She knows the country for what it is,” Tim Kaine said, in his introduction. “She knows its warts and blemishes.” Late in the campaign, Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters “deplorables,” saying that they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it,” and the phrase stuck. Perhaps it played some part in her loss. It was a partisan way of speaking—aimed at the character of her opponents, rather than their condition—but then Clinton has always understood whom she was against and whom she was for. To leaven this skepticism on the campaign trail, she leaned on the hope that her candidacy represented: that a woman could be President, and that hard work would be rewarded.

“To all the women, and especially the young women, who put their faith in this campaign and in me: I want you to know that nothing has made me prouder than to be your champion,” Clinton said. “To all of the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.” She cited scripture and said, “There are more seasons to come. There is more work to do.”

The ferocity of the attachments between Clinton and her staffers has been part of the story of her campaign; at times it has made them more defensive and probably (in the case of her private e-mail server) helped to trap Clinton into some bad choices. Her concession speech suggested a reason for that intensity: she believed that she and her staff represented a movement, even if her opponents to her left and right never saw her that way. To her adversaries, Clinton seemed like someone who had already won. To her adherents it seemed that she, and they, had so much further to go. “I count my blessings every single day that I am an American,” Clinton said. “Our best days are still ahead of us.” Perhaps just a little further off than she thought before.

More on Donald Trump’s victory: David Remnick on an American tragedy, Amy Davidson on Trump’s stunning win, Evan Osnos on Trump’s supporters, Adam Gopnik on talking to kids about Trump’s victory, John Cassidy on how Trump prevailed, Benjamin Wallace-Wells on who is to blame.