Why Hillary Clinton Lost
Why Hillary Clinton Lost
Zach Carter
Huffington Post
But Clintonia’s (persuasive) defense of its own righteousness helps explain why the election was close to begin with. Trump ran a deeply bigoted campaign that whipped up and played off of white resentment. But his dominant performance among white working-class voters wasn’t due to his campaign message alone. Much of Clinton’s poor performance resulted from her campaign’s strategic decision to not even contest the demographic. A good chunk of the Democratic Party intelligentsia applauded Clinton for taking the moral high ground, declaring the entire white working class to be a deplorable racist swamp. The notion that economic issues played literally no role ― zero ― in Trump’s appeal became a common Democratic talking point. Democrats were Good People, and anyone even considering voting for Trump was a Bad Person.
There is no need to pretend the white working class is a monolith of moral excellence. Many working-class people, like many middle- and upper-class people, are bigoted, hostile to all kinds of people and lifestyles. But the job of a presidential candidate is to appeal to our better angels and win votes anyway. In 2008, the Democratic coalition included millions of black churchgoers who opposed same-sex marriage. In 2012, Democrats welcomed millions of Catholic Latino voters who opposed abortion. These people were not scolded for their shortcomings but celebrated for their virtues. This year, Democratic elites decided that the entire white working class was unworthy of sharing their company.
In an era of extreme economic inequality, the votes are where the money isn’t ― the working class. Writing off the white working class is a pretty bad way to start, especially if the party can’t run up the score with the black and brown working class. And the Clinton campaign didn’t run up the score. Trump ― who opened his campaign by deriding Mexicans as “rapists” ― outperformed Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign among black and Latino voters.
Being pro white working class doesn’t mean being anti-brown working class. True, Bill Clinton campaigned on white working-class grievances against the black and brown working class, and he governed with tragic results (welfare reform, the crime bill). But Obama aggressively courted working-class voters of all colors with a populist economic assault straight out of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaigns. Obama’s entire 2012 message was devoted to trashing Romney as a corporate raider who said “corporations are people.” Obama ran ads blasting Romney’s tax-dodging Cayman Islands investment funds. The Obama campaign relentlessly touted the Detroit auto bailout as a win for working people. At the time, nobody in the Democratic Party’s chattering class saw a conflict between the first black president courting black voters and white working-class voters at the same time. Today, we are told that “identity politics” and “economic justice” are incompatible.
I'm not sure I agree with everything in the article, but this point is salient:
Today, we are told that “identity politics” and “economic justice” are incompatible.
I've yet to hear a cogent argument as to why the Democratic Party shouldn't have campaigned on a platform of economic justice in addition to social justice, racial justice, environmental justice, etc. There seems to be an assumption that focusing on economic justice somehow must come at the expense of something else. This is an idea that must die before 2018.
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