was pretty stupid. For every Republican vote she picked up in an affluent suburb of the SF Bay Area, Southern California, Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, or the Gold Coast of Connecticut, Clinton lost two or three middle or even lower-income white voters in areas of the Midwest and even the Northeast in some cases (particularly white voters without degrees, of course - and I'd argue that these losses to Trump were more disturbing/alarming in the case of women, considering that the race was between the single most prominent icon of feminism in American politics vs. a crassly racist, pathologically narcissistic, and shamelessly mean-spirited billionaire heir and reality TV star who regularly indulges in the most outlandish of conspiracy theories and bragged about his ability to get away with sexually assaulting women).
Furthermore, note that many of those aforementioned areas of the country that swung so dramatically to Trump had voted for Democrats for decades. These were not necessarily lifelong Republican voters, by any means; indeed, some of the same voters that Trump picked up in those crucial swing states voted for Democrats down-ballot even as they didn't vote for Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, Clinton's comparatively modest inroads into Republican suburbs did not help Democrats downballot; most of the voters that she picked up in those places continued to vote Republican for Congress as well as state and local offices. And much of the Obama coalition - including many voters belonging to ethnic and racial minority groups, younger voters (men and women) - either voted for third parties, wrote-in Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or whomever, or simply stayed home. This was obviously very disturbing as well.
Yes, racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, and Islamophobia were all major factors in this election.Hillary Clinton has been treated horribly since 1992 purely because she's a woman in politics - more specifically, a feminist woman in politics. And yes, the media - both the "mainstream media" and the "alt-right" as well as trolls and Fake News (which were often Russian-sponsored, as we are all now painfully aware) gave Hillary Clinton a raw deal in 2016 (and that of course came on top of the decade-long campaign against the very legitimacy of Barack Obama and the agenda of the entire Democratic Party). And yes, Bernie Sanders was marginalized or more often, utterly ignored by much of the media in favor of Donald Trump's billions of dollars of free air time where he could spout his insane bullshit for everyone to see (because crazy brings ratings, and with them, advertising revenue and so on). And yes, the Trump campaign, the broader Republican Party and right-wing troll pundits, the FBI, the media, WikiLeaks, etc. all blew up any hint of a scandal that could be connected to Hillary Clinton (as has been done by many of the same people for over two decades). And yes, the interference from Russia was unprecedented and scary. And yes, Republicans in many states' efforts at voter suppression seemed to pay off for Trump and others. I do not dispute any of these things. But that doesn't mean make the more credible criticisms of Clinton irrelevant (from my point of view and the point of view of many others as well). What happened last year had many causes and with many factors relevant to the outcome, and all of our voices here on this website matter in debating both what happened and how to move forward.
And just for the record, I voted for Clinton and straight-ticket Democratic in both the primaries and the general election, and encouraged others to do the same. And I don't regret any of that, in spite of my disappointment and to a certain extent, disillusionment, which I've clearly stated here in recent months. But I think it's clear that the Democratic Party has some major, arguably systemic problems right now, and I take no pleasure in any acknowledging in any of this.
I truly hope that this party and all of us who vote for it find a way to move forward that both solidifies our current coalition but just as importantly, expands it. Because at the end of the day, the Democratic Party only matters to the extent that it has the power to stand up for those who suffer, those who are marginalized by the economic, social, and political hierarchies embedded in the United States, and dare I say, the extent that the party has to flatten all of those hierarchies to create liberty, justice, and equality for all. That is my hope, at least.
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I miss Hillary
