On Friday’s broadcast of PBS’ “Washington Week,” Associated Press National Politics Reporter Lisa Lerer argued that Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s problem “wasn’t so deplorables as ignorables.”
Lerer said, “I think it wasn’t so deplorables as ignorables. She simply didn’t fight for those voters. She — the last time she was in Wisconsin was in April, when she was fighting the primary race against [Sen.] Bernie Sanders (I-VT). She really only went to Michigan at the very, very end of this campaign. Her campaign banked on the fact that they could get the Obama coalition, young voters, female voters, minority voters to turn out for her. But Hillary Clinton, it turns out, is not Barack Obama. She couldn’t motivate those supporters in the same number. And she wasn’t making outreach to these white working-class voters that were fueling Trump. So she just wasn’t fighting for them. And in the end, that hurt her.”
She added, “Women did not turn out in the numbers that her campaign had expected, particularly non-college-educated women. But she wasn’t really making the argument for them. She wasn’t going to these places…making this fight. They didn’t see a battleground map. They weren’t really calculating Wisconsin and Michigan in their calculations until very late. So, this came as a complete shock. And the irony here, of course, is that these are the people that fueled Bill Clinton to victory twice. These are his voters. These are people he understood — he understands. And throughout the campaign, he was arguing to her campaign staff, We need to go to Wisconsin. We need to go to Michigan. And they said, no, no, that’s not how it works anymore. We’re OK. We don’t need to go to those places. And it turns out he was right.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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