SO BILL CLINTON WANTED HILLARY TO PAY MORE ATTENTION TO WORKING-CLASS WHITE VOTERS, AND SHE IGNORED HIM.
Instead, they targeted the emerging electorate of young, Latino and African-American voters who catapulted Mr. Obama to victory twice, expecting, mistakenly, that this coalition would support her in nearly the same numbers. They did not.
In the end, Mr. Trump’s simple promise to “Make America Great Again,” a catchphrase Mrs. Clinton dismissed as a vow to return to a racist past already long disappeared, would draw enough white Americans to the polls to make up for his low minority support.
“The emerging demographic majority isn’t quite there yet,” said Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist and former White House communications director. “The idea you can get to a presidential campaign and just press a button and they’ll vote, it’s not there yet.”
Mrs. Clinton had planned to conclude her 19-month campaign with an elaborate victory celebration on Tuesday night, complete with confetti shaped like glass shards that would fall from the glass ceiling of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Midtown Manhattan — an extravagant production to mark the history of the evening.
Instead, in a hastily scheduled speech in a dreary hotel ballroom on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton gave her concession speech, declaring the country “more deeply divided than we thought.”
A few thoughts. (1) Is it Bill leaking this “they should have listened to Bill” story?
(2) In 2000, there was a similar happening, where former Tennessee Governor (and politico extraordinaire) Ned Ray McWherter tried to warn Al Gore that he would lose Tennessee if he didn’t adjust his campaign, only to be blown off by staffers who didn’t even really know who he was, causing Al to lose the state and the election; and
(3) The big one: What if minority voters just won’t turn out for non-minority candidates any more? That’s a real problem for the Democrats, especially if all the racial politics they pursue in order to try to motivate minority voters (Black Lives Matter, immigration protests, etc.) actually serve to make minorities less likely to vote for whites, even if they’re Democrats. And if working-class whites start to vote Republican the way minorities have voted Democratic — and all that racial politics is likely to encourage that — the Dems are in trouble.
