The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class

[Fast Walker 52]

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/hillary-clinton-working-class/509477/

Perhaps the clearest takeaway from the November election for many liberals is that Hillary Clinton lost because she ignored the working class.

In the days after her shocking loss, Democrats complained that Clinton had no jobs agenda. A widely shared essay in The Nation blamed Clinton's "neoliberalism" for abandoning the voters who swung the election. “I come from the white working class,” Bernie Sanders said on CBS This Morning, “and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from.”

But here is the troubling reality for civically minded liberals looking to justify their preferred strategies: Hillary Clinton talked about the working class, middle class jobs, and the dignity of work constantly. And she still lost.

She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs, and the Obama administration’s record of creating private-sector jobs for a record-breaking number of consecutive months. She said the word “job” more in the Democratic National Convention speech than Trump did in the RNC acceptance speech; she mentioned the word “jobs” more during the first presidential debate than Trump did. She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.

I think it's important to get the right lesson from this election... I think this article shows pretty clearly that the election wasn't lost simply on the issue of jobs for the working class.

It was obviously a complex freaky election, and I think the biggest factors for Hillary losing were 1) decades of right-wing smears on Hillary, 2) the overblown email scandal and Comey, and 3) wikileaks and Russian interference.

IMHO.

[DesertFlower]

1. she worked for everyone, but there

were racists in this country for years. they had no one to represent them until trump came along. that's part of the reason she lost.

[niyad]

16. racists and misogynists, which so many are completely ignoring.

[DesertFlower]

20. that's the thing i can't understand.

don't these people have any moral decency?

[niyad]

22. no

[el_bryanto]

41. When you say these people - who are you referring to? nt

[TreasonousBastard]

2. The working class ignored Hillary Clinton.

[JHan]

3. Mind boggling to see liberals parrot this myth. We happily give our opponents BS talking points..

[gejohnston]

4. she talked about,

but never talked to.

[DesertFlower]

7. i felt that she talked to me.

[Exilednight]

10. I disagree. She talked to them, but not with them. Her other problem was messaging.

She had a plan, but no message. "Go to my website" can not be the message.

[lapucelle]

15. I don't think that's true.

Hillary's campaign hallmark since her first run in 2000 was the listening tour, and she frequently met with smaller groups of people.

Just because the press didn't cover her policy speeches and town hall events doesn't mean she didn't do those things. The media was too busy running Trump rallies 24/7 to notice anything the Democrats were doing unless it concerned the scandalous never ending email story.

[DesertFlower]

21. i agree. they covered trump

almost 24/7. hillary got very little coverage.

[JHan]

24. that's some funny semantics..

yes, I felt she talked to me..

[lapucelle]

47. I got to meet Hillary at one of the very first stops on her listening tour in 1999.

I had my nine year old daughter with me, and she happened to be wearing a shirt that said "Girl Power".

Hillary looked at her and said, "Girl power? We need more of that!"

[Buckeye_Democrat]

5. The problem is that Trump didn't ignore them either, and he won over more...

... of the less educated ones who believed his crap.

[DesertFlower]

8. my late husband always talked about

the dumbing down of america". it's happened.

think about it. who the hell are "the kardashians"? who are "the real housewives, etc."?

who is donald trump? a celebrity who made money in real estate. people found him exciting. let's face it -- he's a good actor and con man.

[mcar]

6. It's been said here lots

And people still ignore the reality of her plans and message. She would have helped us all.

[DesertFlower]

9. she was more than "qualified". the woman

worked her entire life to help people and what did she get -- a smack in the face.

[mcar]

13. I will always believe that any man with her resume would have won 400 EVs

And I will never not be angry about it.

[DesertFlower]

14. same here.

[niyad]

17. so very true

[pressbox69]

11. We have met the enemy

and he is us. We now have the president we deserve. We shunned the nominee who appealed to our better angels. We are damned.

[OhioBlue]

12. I agree with the factors you listed but a message not resonating with the

rural working class was a problem and was a factor in MI, WI, OH and PA.

It didn't get through the noise of the election.

In hindsight, there were many things that could have been done differently.

Those freakin' polls told everyone that what she was doing was working, so giving her campaign the benefit of the doubt, why would they do anything drastically different? Plus, I think the Comey letter changed their strategy for the last weeks.

[NoGoodNamesLeft]

18. She had really good plans but she did not talk about them enough

When people say the Democrats ignored those voters they don't just mean Hillary ignored them. The Democratic PARTY ignored them by being more concerned about less important things than focusing on making sure those families weren't hungry and hurting. And an example of that is fighting harder to let people get high for fun legally than giving two shits about rural Americans with little if any resources and almost no local service programs to turn to. Hillary's part in that was less about her policies or intent and more about her husband's role in NAFTA and Trump keeping her off message by being so offensive.

People can stick their head in the sand and leave their ass exposed or recognize the mistakes and learn from them.

[ucrdem]

23. She came to my town and I HEARD her talk about jobs for an hour.

And immigration, equal rights, unions, universal health care, the ACA, Obama's record, the dismal Bush presidency, Bill's accomplishments, the toxic political climate, the dangers of a Trump presidency, and the need to work together. And a couple of weeks later I heard Bill talk about working class concerns in the working class town of Compton for another two hours!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=2177317


p.s. I don't think either mentioned NAFTA directly but NAFTA didn't kill the US car industry and offshoring started right after the war ended. NAFTA was a net gain and unemployment went down every year for the rest of Bill's term in office. The economy tanked when Junior showed up. That wasn't NAFTA!

[NoGoodNamesLeft]

25. Which Rust Belt location was that? If not in that area it's irrelevant.

She did NOT give the Rust Belt enough attention or time discussing those issues because she was devoting a lot of time on attacking Trump on everything else. THAT was part of the problem.

[ucrdem]

28. Did you know that unemployment in MI was 4.7% in October?

In WI it was 4.1%. For rusty belts they're doing pretty well, thanks to Democrats.

http://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/state-unemployment-update.aspx

[NoGoodNamesLeft]

43. What, are you Kelly Conway? Why did you ignore the question and deflect?

You can't just look at STATE total unemployment rates to get the picture. State totals include urban areas, which have a hell of a lot more jobs. The rural unemployment rate is going to be considerably higher. This is what I mean when I say these people are being ignored. Funding for programs to help people in poverty goes mostly to urban areas. Jobs go mostly to urban areas. People in rural areas are goddamned struggling to just survive and haven't thrived since the 70's or 80's. While democrats are arguing for legalizing the recreational use of marijuana no one is even paying attention to the very REAL suffering of these people. And when they have finally said screw you for ignoring their plight and vote against the ones that don't notice their desperation they get called racists and dozens of people here say things like, "Well screw them if they vote for Trump!" Here's the thing...the have been getting screwed for the last 2 decades anyway...why should they care what Democrats think now? Now the question is what is the Democratic Party going to do about it?

[ucrdem]

19. Repeating RW memes on TV is not helpful

In the days after her shocking loss, Democrats complained that Clinton had no jobs agenda. A widely shared essay in The Nation blamed Clinton's "neoliberalism" for abandoning the voters who swung the election. “I come from the white working class,” Bernie Sanders said on CBS This Morning, “and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from.”

She had her headquarters where he came from.

[JHan]

27. and check the word "neo-liberalism"

I had no time for it this election year, not with the platform we had.

it's been a really dumb-stupid year.

[ucrdem]

29. They finally found a term as meaningless as the DLC

[Fast Walker 52]

36. yeah, Dems really need to stop reacting to RW memes and set their own media narrative

it's long been there pattern to just react to the right.

A little scandal mongering wouldn't hurt either.

[kcdoug1]

30. Agree

It wasn't Hillary who ignored the working class. It was the DNC, for twenty years they have turned their backs on the working class in favor of the centrist, corporate elite. It's time to return to our roots!

[applegrove]

31. She said it in speeches every day that were not covered by the press.

She said it during debates and everyone saw it then. Her polls would go way up after debates. Then a week would pass and people would forget all the great things she said she would do for the middle and working class. Her numbers would go down. Trumps would go up.The press would not cover her speeches on this topic. Then the next debate would happen and people would see her great middle and working class economic policies and her numbers would go way up. Then fall the next week as hardly a story on her economic policies would make the news. It was up to her to find a way to connect her economic policies with working people. It was not fair.

[TheKentuckian]

42. I think few outside of the faithful were overly impressed with any plans made she went up

after the debates because both she won and Trump lost...bigly.

[JCanete]

32. There are ways in which I think, not Clinton specifically, but the party at large

has continued to fail on economic messaging. One failing is that our policies are never strong enough when they pass to have irrefutably positive results(not that we've had many opportunities). Another is that our leadership is too unwilling to put our congressmen and senators on the spot to back the strong stuff that certainly wouldn't be passable with a republican congress let alone our own hold-outs, but would at least signal a clarity of purpose on populist promises that people could understand. I'd be happy if we stood in resistance to policies too, rather than caving.

This unwillingness is no small consequence of our party's need to either be financed by big industries and their moguls, or at least not run too far afoul of them.

That said, any media perpetuated meme along these lines, carries with it the implicit lie that Trump did these things right. Clinton absolutely had better economic policies than Trump. Her policies were sane ways to nicely get corporations to get on board with throwing the public a bone. That's certainly better than Trump's policies, which suggest bending us over and giving us the bone.

I do agree that when it came down to it, those last 20 years of smearing the Clintons with total bullshit paid off . She couldn't wash all that off her. The reaction is nearly in people's DNA at this point. A lot of people who didn't like Trump were saying for a while that both candidates were absolutely horrible. They are all reconciling their purchase now by saying that we need to give the crazy fucker a chance and that he really is going to make things better, just you wait...but if it hadn't been Clinton, I don't think as many of them would have gone his way.

But then, yeah, there was also an embarrassing media effort, which had a hell of a lot more to do with the effect of Comey's hit-job than Comey's effort itself, not to mention Trump's own rise and brand resilience. AND it should never be forgotten how much voter purges and voter suppression in all of its forms, (and shoddy journalism can largely be blamed for this too), have contributed to the ruin of Democratic chances in America.

[LisiFFXV]

33. She didn't ignore them in the slightest

She was real with them. She told them what they didn't want to hear - their job doing whatever the hell they used to do (or imagined they would do) was gone and it wasn't coming back. It wasn't some evil foreign person or politician that did it. It was the free market. We are an ever advancing society with an ever advancing economy. Clinton and Bernie offered education, skill training, etc as a real option to obtain modern jobs in a modern economy.

They rejected this. Why? Because it's hard to get new skills and education. It takes effort on their part. It's much easier to blame the "other" for all your problems and believe we will go back from an information economy to an industrial one.

[jfern]

34. 3rd way told them to go screw themselves and lost without them

Chuck Schumer said "“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

[Fast Walker 52]

37. really-- he said that?

[jfern]

39. Yup. And then got promoted to Senate after Hillary lost 3 of the 4 states he mentioned

And Illinois was always a safe state, so it didn't really belong with the other 3.

http://www.salon.com/2016/11/19/neoliberalisms-epic-fail-the-reaction-to-hillary-clintons-loss-exposed-the-impotent-elitism-of-liberalism/

[Fast Walker 52]

45. WTF, fucking Schumer

Jesus.

[killbotfactory]

35. Trump promised everything to everyone.

The lesson to learn here is that if you are going to run a candidate with high negatives who is enduring an ongoing scandal, you have to have a plan to deal with that and not just rely on the opposition to be a complete shitbag.

[Fast Walker 52]

38. the Dem voters also chose Hillary as their nominee not just the party.

Nonetheless, they were stuck with her as the nominee. I guess they didn't anticipate how bad the attacks would be-- which was a failure, yes. They could have handled the email thing better too. Just a bad set of unique circumstances for this election.

[DeminPennswoods]

40. She had smart plans, but they weren't heard

She laid out some very smart plans when I heard her in Pgh. She put a big emphasis on jobs in the skilled trades (carpenter, plumber, electrician, machinist etc) that pay well and aren't going to be sent overseas.
But these plans got about 0 ink in the press or in broadcast media because they were all too busy following "The Trump Show" around to pay any attention to actual issues and policy.

IMHO, she should have shunned campaign rallies, just spent the election season going to small towns on a listening tour like she did when she ran for Senate in NY and doing local media interviews only. She could have spent her media warchest buying long blocks (15 minutes or more) of time to talk directly about her plans and policies.

[Cha]

44. Thank you, Fast Walker! FACTS that get lost in the barrage of Bullshite Mt.

She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs, and the Obama administration’s record of creating private-sector jobs for a record-breaking number of consecutive months. She said the word “job” more in the Democratic National Convention speech than Trump did in the RNC acceptance speech; she mentioned the word “jobs” more during the first presidential debate than Trump did. She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/hillary-clinton-working-class/509477/

[NCTraveler]

46. Said narrative is being built by the privileged for the privileged.

They always will think they are the smartest and most needed. It's a practice in privilege itself.