A month after Hillary Clinton’s devastating election loss to Donald Trump, progressives have placed blame for their defeat on everything from “fake news” to racism to Russian hackers.
Below is a roundup of the scapegoats progressives blame for Clinton’s loss.
1. “Fake News”
Hillary Clinton used her first public speech since her election loss to blame the “epidemic” rise of fake news for her defeat.
“The epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year — it’s now clear the so-called fake news can have real-world consequences,” Clinton said earlier this month in a speech on Capital Hill.
Clinton said “lives are at risk” because of fake news, calling it “a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly.”
2. Huma Abedin
Clinton advisors, still reeling from defeat, blamed her longtime aide Huma Abedin for their loss.
“She was enjoying the red carpet and enjoying the photo spreads much too much in my opinion,” a close Clinton insider told Vanity Fair. “She enjoyed being a celebrity too much.”
Abedin, who’d spent 20 years as one of Clinton’s closest confidants, caused a campaign crisis weeks before the election after the FBI announced that emails related to its Clinton private server investigation were found on a laptop shared by Abedin and her estranged husband Anthony Weiner, who is being investigated for allegedly sending sexually explicit messages to a 15-year-old girl.
3. Putin’s “Personal Beef”
Hillary Clinton claimed last week that Russia’s hack of her campaign was an attack “to undermine our democracy,” and was ordered by Vladimir V. Putin “because he has a personal beef against me.”
“Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election,” Clinton said in speech to a group of donors referencing charges she made that the Russian President rigged the parliamentary elections in his country in 2011.
“Vladimir Putin himself directed the covert cyberattacks against our electoral system, against our democracy, apparently because he has a personal beef against me,” she said.
4. FBI Director James Comey
During a post-election conference call with Clinton surrogates, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta referred to FBI Director James Comey as the person “who we think may have cost us the election,” The Hill reported.
Two weeks before Election Day, Comey wrote a letter to Congress informing lawmakers of the discovery of a new batch of emails (found on Weiner’s computer), related to the investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State.
Two days before the election, Comey announced the FBI found no new information in the emails. But by then, Clinton’s camp believes the damage to their campaign had already been done.
5. Millennials
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook mentioned young voters as one of the reasons for Clinton’s loss.
During an election postmortem event at Harvard, Mook placed blame on “young people” who “were voting for third-party candidates” as one of the reasons Clinton loss.
6. Racism
During the same post-election session at Harvard, Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri blamed Breitbart News and its former executive chairman turned Trump campaign CEO Stephen K. Bannon for Clinton’s loss.
“If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am proud to have lost,” Palmieri said. “I would rather lose than win the way you guys did.”
7. White women who voted for Trump
Clinton campaign celebrity surrogate Lena Dunham scorned self-hating white women who voted for Donald Trump, and blamed them for her candidate’s defeat.
“It’s painful to know that white women, so unable to see the unity of female identity, so unable to look past their violent privilege, and so inoculated with hate for themselves, showed up to the polls for him, too,” Dunham wrote in an essay for her Lenny Letter blog published days after the election.
8. Electoral college
During his final press briefing of the year, President Obama blamed the Electoral College for Hillary Clinton’s election loss.
The Electoral College, Obama said, is one of the “structures in our political system as envisioned by the Founders that sometimes are going to disadvantage Democrats.”
“The Electoral College is a vestige, it’s a carryover from an earlier vision of how our federal government was going to work that put a lot of premium on states,” he added.
9. “Voter Suppression”
Democratic National Chair Donna Brazile blamed “brand new voting restrictions put in place” to depress votes in “many swing states.”
“In many swing states, voter suppression succeeded in its ultimate, if unstated goal: diluting democracy through disfranchisement,” Brazile wrote weeks after the election.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson
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