From Chappaqua to Comey, we sought to tell her story and the story of a long campaign.

When did Hillary Clinton's campaign for president begin? Was it April 12, 2015, when she announced this run? Or Jan. 21, 2007, when she announced the last one? Feb. 6, 2000, when she announced her run for Senate? Or some earlier moment — Wellesley, why not? — when she first saw how she could reach that prize?

We started covering the campaign — this campaign — soon after Barack Obama's 2012 re-election. Ruby Cramer reported on the early stirrings — a provocative tribute video, a ripple of expectation in her hometown of Chappaqua, and on the real mechanics (in February 2013) of a presidential campaign.

Cramer reported on people — Huma Abedin, for instance — who would later become central to the 2016 narrative; and on positions and comments that would later emerge as pivotal. In 2014 she started chipping away at a story few reporters have tried to approach since the 1990s: What is it like to know, and be, Hillary Clinton? And that November, Cramer offered the definitive look at the shadow campaign.

Here's what happened next, in her and other BuzzFeed News reporters' words and two memorable interviews:

The 20-Year Hillary Clinton Humanization Project (April 2015)

There are, in her telling of the story, two Hillary Clintons: the person she knows, consisting of “different, and sometimes paradoxical, parts”; and the person the public sees, as in a museum, the “most recognizable woman in America,” but “reduced to a snapshot.”

“The truth is that sometimes it is hard even for me to recognize the Hillary Clinton that other people see,” she wrote.

Twenty years later, Clinton is perhaps better understood and better liked. But the distance between the person and the public figure remains.

As she prepares to run for president a second time — with plans to run a more open, humble, approachable operation — her campaign staff will spend the next 100 days trying to solve the same challenge Clinton herself alluded to in the 1995 column: how to make the “real” Hillary accessible.

Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed

Two Actual Everyday Americans Walk Into a Hillary Clinton Event… (May 2015)

…and get crushed. The challenges of the “everyday” campaign.

Ruby Cramer / BuzzFeed News

The Robby Mook Playbook (June 2015)

For many of the affiliated, Team Robby is as much about its leader as the political philosophy he champions: namely, the power of “organizing.”

Mook is now at the helm of Clinton’s second presidential campaign — and that model will be tested like never before, on the biggest stage there is. In each of the early states, he’ll construct what he did eight years ago in Nevada: a true organizing program.

It will be the biggest challenge of his young career. Mook has managed plenty of races since 2008. Most recently, he helped Terry McAuliffe, the longtime Democratic fundraiser and Clinton family friend, become governor of Virginia. But now Mook is running a campaign larger than his background in field. And to accomplish what he does best, he’ll have to foster the environment his campaigns require.

At the center of the intractable, messy thing known as “Clintonworld,” Mook needs another Nevada: that rare mix of discipline and accountability with enthusiasm and encouragement that makes his field programs possible.

It will be a momentous first — for Mook, for his followers, and for a generation of operatives who see themselves as organizers. Never before has a manager constructed a national campaign operation like this, so deliberately or so squarely, under the banner of organizing or in the mold of the so-called engagement campaign.

Courtesy of David Boyle

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