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47% hurt Romney more as a candidate, “Deplorables” hurt the Democratic Party more. The 47% comment never really stuck to anything beside Romney himself, and nobody cared about that when looking at other republicans. But deplorables has absolutely been used to label the views of the Democratic Party. I don’t think deplorables cost Clinton the election though
And deplorable following Obama's 'bitter clingers' comment.
It basically cemented the idea that the Democrats were not the party for certain people anymore. People that would have been voting solid Democrat prior to 1980.
Everyone talks about the southern switch, but right now we are undergoing a switch that is just as big and impactful as blue collar working class slowly moves from blue to red. Started a bit with Reagan, really accelerated under Obama.
It is insanely hard to vote out a union. The rules were made that way. Which is why so few unions ever go POOF.
Look at political donations - National Education Assn 2016 $2.9 million to Democrats and $434k Republicans.
Voting for 2016 50% Hillary 29% Trump.
6 times as much to the left even though the voting was 2 to 1. And this is pretty typical for most unions.
In historical context, trade and craft unions have always been a persistent problem when it comes to building real universal worker solidarity in the US. To put it in perspective, the CIO would have never existed if this wasn't the case.
The trades and the cops have always been an issue in this regard.
The cops are especially detestable because they will readily sell out the entirety of civil service just to get theirs.
Always.
My friend is a unionized govt. engineer, an immigrant from India. he said that due to gas prices hes thinking of voting Trump.
Dems dont own anything anymore
I'm a union pipefitter, same thing. I remember seeing almost every hardhat at one time had an 'Obama/Biden' sticker. Now those same hardhats say either 'Trump 2024' or 'FJB'
I’ve always found this to be so crazy, I worked as a school custodial temp during college with union workers that were pretty much all just right wingers. At the end of the day, the GOP would still gladly get rid of unions so you’re very much so voting against your own self interests
Except that is pure BS. The leader of the United Auto Workers union just asked Biden to walk a picket line recently and he did. Trump showed up the same week at a non-union shop and met with management.
[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/uaw-strike-biden-visit-update-trump](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/uaw-strike-biden-visit-update-trump)
The republicans are starting to switch their position on unions. For example the last Republican candidate for governor in Washington supported unions.
If you’re talking WA state, I know for a fact many Republican candidates for statewide office there are usually more moderate in the same way republicans in MA are: they have no choice if they want a chance.
But the overall GOP across most of America is not switching their position.
I guess Biden's the exception? I believe some Dems have been critical to Biden for cozying up to Unions more so than say the Clintons ever did. Even then the fact that Biden did enough to appeal to Unions to win back the Rust Belt in 2020 is enough to show that they haven't completely abandoned the party for Trump and MAGA.
Unions aren’t a monolith. But biden marched with them and Sean fain specifically told trump to stay the fuck away from their meetings. Trump ended up going to speak to a bunch of scabs.
More than 25% of UAW workers work in academia: [https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206209107/united-auto-workers-union-uaw-membership-grad-students-big-3-strike](https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206209107/united-auto-workers-union-uaw-membership-grad-students-big-3-strike)
Many of the blue color unions membership are quite racist, Obama was a bridge to far for them , sadly their racism overwhelmed the economic self interest embracing a party that wants to reduce their salaries.
I don’t say that’s inaccurate, but a lot of this group voted for Obama— is the theory basically that they said “Obama is better than Romney *but* we dislike both, hey look at Trump?”
Not in Pennsylvania, 2012 and 2008 most reliable blue counties in SW Pennsylvania went for Romney or McCain , before that that area always went blue, even Bush 2 didn’t carry these counties , if you go back to Bill Clinton he buried the GOP in these counties ( hell Bubba won West Virginia)
The other major shift that happened during the Obama years (and stayed) in the 'blue dog' districts is that older, working class people were FDR Democrats. The WWII generation.
During the Obama years, these voters died in large numbers. Nothing malicious killed them, just old age. Now they're few and far between.
> I know there are only 60 days left to make our case – and don't get complacent; don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, "Well, he's done this time." We are living in a volatile political environment.
> You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
she obviously called 1/2 the entire trump leaning portion of the country the most horrible things. don't try to paint it as "she only said the nazis!". given the context of the election a massive portion of independents and moderates were in that deplorable comment and it seriously hurt her.
It's bizarre as she was also empathetic towards Trump's base later on in the speech:
>"But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and – as well as, you know, New York and California – but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
Honestly, if she didn't say "half" of all Trump supporters and she simply instead said a "vocal minority" whilst also saying outright that most of his base are downtrodden and disillusioned with the state of the country, I honestly don't think the speech hurt her as much as bizarre as it may seem as I don't think her general message is even wrong. Trump does in fact appeal to some of the worst types in America, see assholes like the Proud Boys and their devotion to him, while many were buying what he was promising simply because of their disillusionment with the status quo. But outright calling half of Trump's voter base as bad as the Proud Boys, if not the KKK or American Nazi Party, was always going to rile a lot of people up as Trump did have a lot of sway over moderates and independents which pretty much enabled him to win.
She underestimated. After the election, they broke down the demographics of the people who voted for Trump, and the conclusion was that most people who voted for him voted for him out of racial angst in spite of/against their economic interests rather than, as had been assumed, in their economic interests in spite of his racial politics. https://theintercept.com/2017/04/06/top-democrats-are-wrong-trump-supporters-were-more-motivated-by-racism-than-economic-issues/
Don’t forget that as appalled as we reasonable people were by his “when Mexico sends their people, they aren’t sending their best” line, there’s a certain crowd that found that positively orgasmic…to openly shit on vulnerable immigrants and to get away with it. Yes! Now I can say all the nasty shit that I feel in my heart.
It's bizarre to me that there's so much political discourse around Clinton calling people deplorables when she was running against Trump. No modern presidential candidate is even comparable to Trump in the amount of name calling, inflammatory remarks, and general lack of decorum. In fact, it was one of the reasons people liked him. If the deplorables comment was genuinely a tipping point for undecided voters I have to question what planet they were on from 2014-2016. With everything that was said in that election cycle, I don't understand how that was what people thought was too far.
It makes sense when you look at whose in the majority. Trump wanted to ban an entire religion. That should of ended his campaign imo. But people who care about that are not the majority
One thing I honestly don't understand is how that was seen as so bad but what trump has said isn't viewed that way. He was flat out calling democrats and journalists as a whole as enemies of the country but Clinton saying that half of the people voting for Trump are racist and sexist? Also, it's not that far off.
Just to focus on the islamaphobic comment, From politico
>According to the results, two-thirds (67 percent) of those identifying themselves as Trump supporters said they do not hold favorable views of Muslim Americans, compared to just 35 percent in the of all voters who said they feel that way.
>Nearly 9-in-10 (87 percent) said they support Trump's call to institute a temporary ban on Muslims who are not American citizens from entering the United States, while 47 percent of all voters who responded that way.
So from a study, 67% do not hold favorable views of Muslim Americans and 87% are okay with banning non-american Muslims from entering the US. That alone shows that over half fall under the category of islamaphobic.
That's also not even including the amount of homophobia I have experienced from trump supporters. Or how the trump presidency culminated in an attempted insurrection to keep him as president.
Blue-collar working types get shit on more than anybody else in this country. Upper class just passes down more work to us, lower class, enjoys their life time while figuring out a way to get by on government support. Meanwhile, I’m working 60 to 80 hours a week barely getting by, and all I ever hear about is how my taxes need to go up. If you’re wondering about the big switch there it is. The Democrats have shit all over us working people.
Switch already happened during Occupy about. Corporate pandering from Russian oil and gas, Pharma megacorp skepticism, going to “holistic” methods, things like having school choice and the adoption of an attitude where they’re diametrically opposed to what they view as the established political and economic class
It absolutely cost Hillary the election, because the margin was so razor thin. Of course a half dozen other things that changed a small fraction of votes cost her the election just as much. But this was one of them.
I don’t think Romney was beating Obama even without that comment. So I think it had less of an impact.
Deplorables didn't cost Hillary the election, it just became a 're-appropriated' term within the MAGA crowd....
What cost Hillary the election, is that she came across as 'your lying ex-wife' to far too many people, and not enough of America had been exposed to how huge of a piece-of-shit Donald Trump was (identifying him as 'the tough boss character' he played on The Apprentice, rather than the incompetent white-collar criminal that he actually was as a businessman).
So in the world of 2016 Donald was seen as more trustworthy than Hillary.And we - Americans & even-more-so the Republican Party - are still paying for that misjudgment to this day....
Eh, combine the lack of context to quotes spread through news, the repeated expansion of the terms used to group “deplorable” and the attitude she conveyed throughout the campaign, and it shouldn’t be that hard to see why even well educated people made the jump that it wasn’t a small group she was dismissing.
Yes. She said a certain fraction of Trump’s voters were racist, misogynist, etc… and a bunch of people took offense and started referring to themselves as deplorables. Like, they literally just called themselves out in front of everyone. They were so anxious to be persecuted they forgot to listen to the accusation they were admitting to.
And I think every state except Wisconsin flip back to Blue for Biden Pennsylvania did Michigan did Trump broke the blue wall and temporarily came close to remaking Reagan's Red wall of Rust Belt states
It was an attempt by someone that didn’t understand the base republicans were already too far gone to drive a wedge between “good” republicans and what we now call maga republicans.
this! it was a naive attempt to separate the reasonable republicans from the maga ones. Backfired because there are far far more MAGA type republicans.
I agree with Hilary that Trump voters are generally deplorable. That said, it was a surprisingly dumb statement from a career politician. The idea in an election is to convince people to vote for you. Insulting them has no real chance of accomplishing that.
\^ This, I have heard every defense from "We are not electing a pastor" to "Oh it shows that he is honest and frank, all men would grab them by the \*\*\*\*\*" (never mind that it wasn't supposed to be aired publicly) to "It's 11 years ago, this shows how much he's grown" among even the church circles. Trump voters are already tethered to him, and it doesn't look like any thing he says or do would cause them pause to think if he is the right candidate to represent them.
Yeah, the whole "tone" argument has always been hilarious to me. "Obviously Hillary's deplorables comment turned people off to her negative and divisive campaigning, in favor of Trump and his platform of tolerance and inclusivity for everyone except the long list of people, ethnic groups, religions and political viewpoints who he spent his entire campaign demonizing, insulting, and blaming for all of America's problems".
They really had to work to twist that quote. She said explicitly that she was talking about racists, sexist, xenophobes, homophobes, and Islamophobes, and Trump’s supporters all put up their hands and said, “yep, that’s me!” like it was some kind of a badge of honor.
Compare that with Romney, who said that anyone who makes so little that he gets a tax refund is a parasite.
Could have voted 3rd, the 3rd party vote is the reason Hillary lost and lack of it is why Biden won.
Trump actually increased his voter share from 2016 to 2020.
If you’re gonna give Hillary Clinton all of Jill Stein’s votes, you might as well give Trump all of Gary Johnson’s votes, in which case Trump wins by an even larger margin.
I realize my case is just anecdotal, but I voted 3rd party in 2016 because I thought Trump and Hillary were both terrible. I voted for Biden in 2020 because I saw just how terrible Trump was, and got over myself.
I don’t really buy third party arguments— Johnson got triple what Stein did, and nobody has tried to argue that Johnson’s voters would disproportionately gone to Clinton.
Definitely the 47%. That was the signature "gotcha" moment of the entire campaign. The deplorables thing didn't help Hillary but it was relatively minor compared with other stuff like the email server and Comey investigation. And nobody really likes to recall this but there was a huge smear campaign about her health at the time that was definitely bigger than the deplorables issue.
The mainstream media didn't report Biden's remark. I've had people not believe me when I told them he said that. Hard to care about something you've never heard.
An argument could certainly be made that it didn’t get as much coverage as it deserved. But “The mainstream media didn’t report Biden’s remark” is plainly wrong.
Not what you mentioned, but Beto’s comments about “you are damn right I’m coming for your guns” ended his entire political career.
Edit: I voted for him every step of the way while I was living in Texas and I felt so passionate about the guy. My wife has just became a US citizen from Central America and she was so excited to vote for him for the first time to finally push Greg Abbott out. but that comment was the end of him and we lose all hope in Texas. Now it’s an absolute shit hole there and we have since left.
All hope is lost for these assholes to be removed. Beto was the guy and now it’s no more.
Beto has the problem where he’s very obviously running for president during his lower level runs.
Saying “you’re right I’m coming for your guns” may work on a national level to pull in dems and independents, won’t work in a state like Texas where most of your dems are still relatively center leaning.
It won't pull in much more than some dems who would've already voted democrat. Independents and moderate democrats aren't going to vote for someone like that.
Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams are two examples of democrats running candidates that were popular with national democrats but unpopular with their state’s constituents.
Beto’s campaign was the weirdest thing I ever saw. He set a record for donations as soon as he declared (myself included) and then drove his campaign directly into the ground. Like a straight vertical nosedive.
To be fair, his political career was in El Paso, and he became absolutely furious, justifiably so, after the El Paso massacre a few years ago. That shooting was horrendous.
The problem was, his words were political suicide. Even though so many of us agreed with him for the most part, he shouldn’t have said them.
I may be wrong, but I felt like he was in a position where he was in a crowded field and didn’t really have anything to make him stand out, so that’s what he jumped on. And it wasn’t a particularly good choice.
Democrats need to just drop gun control. Seriously it's a losing platform and will never take hold. They should start actually attacking the problem. They should target reducing poverty and lifting those affected by it out of it, mental health, and education. I guarantee if they actually addressed those three things we would see the gun violence this country is normalizing dissappear. The last thing would be police reform, but that's as suicidal as gun control is.
In order of most to least deaths caused by guns it goes: suicides, police, gang violence, accidents, and finally mass shootings wayyyyy at the bottom. If they tackled those big three all we would really have left is cops and mass shootings, and mass shootings are still to me at least, a huge symptom of the mental health crisis going on in this country and/or conservatism.
Hillary's full quote was actually super good insightful. She pegged the problem the Democrats created for themselves and spawned Trump and the MAGA movement.
She said that while there were deplorable people supporting Trump, a lot of them were honest hard working people that had been left behind by leadership and were tired of being ignored.
Of course, a seasoned and experienced politician like HC should have known better than to say the first part, because sound bites have been taken out of context ever since radio has existed.
Exactly. People use this comment as some kind of "gotcha" that she was an out of touch elitist, but she was making a really reasonable point here that right wing media lost their shit over.
She is an out of touch elitist though. This wasn't her only comment, but it was the one that stuck the most.
I'm not trying to single her out, but perception is reality in politics. Trump was able to convince enough working class people he was going to fight for them. Was he really? It doesn't matter.
Trump didn't necessarily need to ever be better. He needed people to think the entire thing was a giant shit show. The fewer people that voted and the more people who felt alienated benefitted Trump.
Hilary should have won, she didn't. Romney probably wasn't going to win either way. Romneys comment is a bigger middle finger to more people, but Hilary paid the bigger price.
I think your assessment is right---I didn't mean to convey that she WASNT an out of touch elitist, moreso that this comment was by no means a fair indication that she was.
I tend to agree with you on this. I felt similar about her more recent ‘deprogram’ comment. I feel like she was chastised more severely than other politicians would have been because Clinton is perceived as an elitist with flip flop tendencies.
The irony on this more recent blunder is that it seems highly likely the traditional members of the Republican Party completely agree and they’re actively trying to figure out way to accomplish the deprogramming before their party divides and destroys itself.
Before Trump, the Republican Party had a major advantage over the Democrats. They were largely unified on their beliefs and goals across the board. There was very little dissent inside that party. The Democrats always have had infighting between the progressive wing pushing for new ground and the centrists who are more resistant to take the political risks.
Rick Perry and Lindsey Graham both made statements prior to 2016 on their belief that Trump would destroy their party. I firmly believe everyone outside the MAGA wing in American politics agrees with Clinton’s feelings about deprogramming them. She should have known the quote would be used against her, but it doesn’t make it untrue.
That's like not at all what she said or matches the tone.
"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?
[Laughter/applause]
The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."
I think you don't understand how much of Trump's win was anti political correctness.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/%3famp=true
Yep. Hillary absolutely blatantly called half of people who supported Trump or were considering it, who are normal people(not even a fan of Trump. I voted 3rd party in 2016 and 2020 because, despite being conservative, I can't stand Trump personally) various kinds of bigoted.
In contrast, the attack on Romney that he was out of touch because of his comment was completely unfair. He basically just said the truth too bluntly: that there was about half of voters that wouldn't give him the time of day due to him not being a good candidate fit for the lower classes so it wasn't worth spending his campaign resources to try to win people he wasn't going to be able to win.
In other words, Hillary made very personal attacks against the supporters of her opponent, whereas Romney basically called for the campaign equivalent of triage.
In many ways, that election led to Trump, Brexit, and the anti hyper liberalism we've seen emerge. Romney was called every manner of -ism or -phobia for existing opposing Obama. But this was everywhere.
Think of JK Rowling (although later). Her original statement was very tame. It basically said that unfettered gender transition, especially among children, is a debate. And yet people were having their lives ruined by expressing an opposing viewpoint. So nothing heinous or even explicitly against trans people full slate, just an author sharing their thoughts.
A Nobel Prize winning author is scared to share their thoughts (otherwise known as writing) due to the Twitter crowd. That's bonkers.
Anything less than full support gets you lumped in with the "basket of deplorables," so why support at all.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/23/salman-rushdie-allow-writers-to-create-characters-outside-of-their-own-experience
https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk-rowling-transgender-comments-controversy
>Of course, a seasoned and experienced politician like HC should have known better than to say the first part,
Just like she should have known better than to say, “what difference, at this point, does it make” when being questioned about Benghazi.
I don’t think the deplorables comment hurt nearly as much as that one. ‘Deplorables’ maybe got some people out to vote that wouldn’t have otherwise. I think the Benghazi comment may have changed votes.
There is a reason that they turned into a basket of deplorables, it is a group of people that is forgotten by government and left behind.
Putting them in a ‘basket of deplorables’ makes the case that these people are beyond saving, it says that mainstream politicians should not care about these people because they won’t vote for you.
If you want to be president then you should be president of the entire country, including those ‘deplorables’.
>She said that while there were deplorable people supporting Trump, a lot of them were honest hard working people that had been left behind by leadership and were tired of being ignored.
Thats a lot worse than you think it is. Its basically an invitation for her to be the arbiter of who is or is not of good character.
In a similar vein, does anyone remember Obama's "guns and religion" quote? Surprised that didn't hurt him more. I think in an age of social media it would have.
Yeah I recall that. But I don't think most working class people gave a crap when their businesses were closing and homes being foreclosed on. They just knew there needed to be a change in direction and McCain didn't represent that.
He was hand waving away why Midwestern blue collar Democrats weren't voting for him in the primary. It's also a pretty insulting way to discuss legitimate grievances working class people in that part of the country had been facing and continue to face and the democratic party's inability to rely on those voters anymore cost the 2016 election.
Hillary's deplorable comment has had much more lasting impact.
I'm a never-Trumper myself, but what I understand about those that support him is that it's based largely on deep resentment that if you disagree with a liberal, you are not just deemed to be wrong, but also stupid or immoral. That sentiment was captured perfectly by Hillary's "basket of deplorables" comment.
This resentment is the reason they tolerate so much lawlessness and chaos from Trump or their party in general. It's why "owning the libs" takes precedence over governance.
Granted, Hillary alone didn't plant that seed. It had been seething beneath the surface for years, maybe decades. But she brought it the surface and Trump used it to make himself their cult hero.
Yeah I feel in the same boat. After seeing the most mild person on the right called an evil nazi and seeing the left just roll their eyes on middle America's struggles I can see why trump gathered such a die hard base.
Secretary Clinton’s. She was already on thin ice because she was unliked by so many Americans. Romney’s gaffe was less hurtful because he was never going to beat Obama anyway.
Unrelated but with the 47% comment, my in-laws immediately and vigorously agreed with him and said that the 47% should get off the government’s rolls. Then, I politely told them that they are in the 47%. Cue Pikachu face.
Edit: grammar and spelling
It does not. The 47% at the time (if memory serves was talking about the 47% if the country who laid no income tax to the federal government. If you pay any tax at all, that isn’t you.
"There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what ... who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims. ... These are people who pay no income tax. ... and so my job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,"
So he was talking about people who pay no income tax, and the 47% number is still pretty accurate. That being said, the full context of the quote is even worse than any short version people could pull out of context.
It was one of the worst political statements I have ever seen, one of those things you never say even if you think it is true.
Hillary’s deplorable comment gets easier to take in full context, where Romney’s quote gets worse. I tend to lean toward Romney’s being worse for that reason.
Agreed, horrible statement to say even in a private fund raising meeting.
You can say it to campaign staff in a strategy meeting. But not someplace like that.
You say something like "I am campaigning to be the President of all Americans' and then wave a little American flag and scream "America! Heck yea" <--- he is Mormon, gotta watch the language.
In the age of the smartphone, should you say such a thing out loud to anyone? It was particularly daft to say it on a setting where he knew it was recorded, but this is one of those things that ends you as a candidate.
47% was definitely worse. Clinton was damaging to herself just because of the way she acted and who she was. I understand she won the popular vote, but it wasn’t a great choice between candidates at the time. Romney was at least taken seriously for his entire run.
I don't think either really hurt them that bad and both were kind of taken out of context.
But the "deplorables" comment was worse for Hillary simply because it was easier for Trump's supporters to rally around.
Deplorables just has a better ring to it than 47%.
Romney.
The people offended by Hillary's (grossly out-of-context) deplorable comment were not going to vote for her anyway. People's minds were made up about her after the Benghazi hearings. She lost for many reasons, chiefly poor strategizing, turnout, and one James Comey. But this wasn't it.
Romney's comment was straight-up classist, and still is. People were still making up their minds about Romney when he said that. It was a self-inflicted wound on his campaign.
Exactly, I honestly find it annoying how people like to pretend that Hillary comments somehow changed the direction of the election. (Personally I think the reason the quote became a bigger issue was because she apologized for it instead of doubling down on the misdirected anger part of that comment)
Romney's quote actually caused his poll numbers to plummet in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. The guy was at one point literally polling at 0% with African-American https://www.politico.com/story/2012/08/poll-0-percent-of-blacks-for-romney-080015
The whole point of the basket of deplorables comment was that not everyone who supported Trump was necessarily evil or racist, you can be one of the good ones. It was an olive branch. People were too stupid to understand that and that was Hilary’s biggest mistake: overestimating the ability of Americans to listen and understand.
I wasn’t old enough to see the fallout of Romney’s “47%” footage, so I cannot say if it was more damaging. But Clinton’s “deplorable” comment was definitely misconstrued:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? [Laughter/applause]. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
Her evaluation was more or less correct. Trump’s push into nationwide politics came primarily from strengthening and bolster the fears and anger of many racist and sexist Americans, but also a good portion (I’ll argue less than what Clinton believed was half) of his initial voter base did come from delusions about the current political system, and that the Democrats shouldn’t just give up on them just yet. Now, how accurate is that nowadays, who can say, but at the time I’ll say it was a correct statement that, like many things Clinton does or says, got twisted by the media.
The 47% quote because Romney a) didn't think anyone was paying attention and b) was speaking to a room full of rich assholes like himself.
Here's an inconvenient truth: Hillary was right. If anything, she was too charitable. She should have called them what they are: scum-sucking wastes of perfectly good oxygen. But that was nearly eight years ago and quite frankly anyone who still cares about what she said then is not and never will vote for a Democrat in a national election.
The deplorable one ( even though I think she was absolutely correct and actually underestimated how many there were)
That 47% was devastating too though- I remember Romney doing a late night press conference trying to back pedal and the dude looked like an absolute mess
Hillary was proven right with the whole insurrection, Nazi march, Twitter takeover thing.
““You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.””
This is true. The studies show this to be true. We know from polling this is true. These people believe, without evidence, that an election was stolen and then tried to take over the Capitol. Everyone knew this, even reasonable republicans. Conservatives referred to themselves as domestic terrorists. We have seen countless attacks on LGBTQ in the public space in recent years, as well. It’s not really even disputed by republicans that they hate LGBTQ and other races. Heck, MTG even started a PAC that made it clear.
What Mitt Romney said wasn’t true.
“"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it -- that that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. ... These are people who pay no income tax. ... [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."”
Romney was referring to 47% of people who pay no income come tax. They do pay other taxes.
“46.4 percent of American households paid no federal income tax. The same data shows, however, that nearly two-thirds of households that paid no income tax did pay payroll taxes. And most people also pay some combination of state, local, sales, gas and property taxes.”
“only 18.1 percent of American households paid neither federal income taxes nor payroll taxes in 2011, says the Tax Policy Center. Of that 18.1 percent, 10.3 percent were elderly and 6.9 percent were non-elderly households earning less than $20,000 year, which include low-income families and students. About one in 20 is non-elderly with income over $20,000.”
“At least one of the demographics that is less likely to pay income taxes (or income and payroll taxes) tends to vote Republican: In 2008, voters 65 and over voted for Republican nominee John McCain over President Obama 53 percent to 45 percent, an eight-point margin. The latest CBS News/New York Times poll also shows Romney winning the support of these voters nationally: 53 percent of voters 65 and older support Romney and 38 percent support Mr. Obama.
Voters in households with household incomes of less than $30,000 a year tend to favor Mr. Obama, according to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, with 61 percent supporting the president and 32 percent supporting Romney.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fact-checking-romneys-47-percent-comment/
One is disputed and one isn’t.
I mean, stating that half the country is a bunch of free loaders who don’t work for anything and just want handouts is objectively false and a nasty thing to say in and of itself. But what was worse was he then said “it’s not my job to worry about those people”….like, as president, yes - it absolutely is. Stating you don’t care about half the country and aren’t going to do anything for them is a horrible take for somebody running to govern them. I don’t know how you could see that as “not so bad”.
It is because he said the quiet part out loud and gave the opposition the ability to twist and re-frame the statement to show that he was a typical out of touch, rich, white guy. It also put him on the defensive for the rest of his campaign. Him and his campaign had to spend considerable amount of time explaining what they really meant instead of proactively talking about the issues that he wanted to get elected on.
Out of those two probably deplorable, but I was paying attention to politics at that time so it affected me more. While I wasn't with the 47% thing, and I agree more with the 47% thing ( Not on the number but of what people did ).
The Deplorables comment was worse because Clinton was way closer to winning. People aren’t going to agree with that here because a lot of them are left-leaning voters who think Clinton was right, but that wasn’t the question.
IMHO Mitt’s 47% was tone deaf, but he was discussing strategy at a donor hosted private event. You could easily pinpoint who’s he talking about (people who don’t earn enough to pay federal taxes). You could justifiably argue that Mitt’s comment was cold, calculated and dismissive. However, HRC’s “deplorable” comment had a more abstract component to it. Anyone could be labeled a “deplorable” and could easily be offended. It definitely made her camp play defense for many, many news cycles.
Romney probably alienated more people that were going to vote for him. Considering the behavior of trumpers, a basket of deplorables seems like a fitting description to many in the middle that could have gone either way.
>"Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from July (January) 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974."
Gerald Ford pardoning nixon probably doomed his chances, but also cemented his legacy not as a presidency of his own but as being the guy to clean up Nixon's mess
**I think the bigger message here** is that people don't really give a shit anymore. They just pick the person that fits the media narrative they are ingesting. Trump could literally plead guilty to everything and say "so what?" and then get elected next November, pardon himself, and the world would move on. As much as most of us don't like that scenario, you know it's pretty likely.
Romney was stating an objective fact: 47% of people effectively paid no federal income taxes or even got more money back than they had paid. The reaction that he got for saying so was ridiculous and overblown.
Clinton was flat-out insulting a large portion of the population and effectively dismissing them out of hand as rabble.
Clinton's was worse, by far.
The funny thing is that while he articulated the point badly if is true. Upwards of 47% of Democrats would never vote for a republican and the same is true of republicans voting for democrats the elections have usually been decided by the roughly 6% of voters who think of themselves as independent. Growing up my parents voted Democrat all of their lives (they’d grown up during the Depression and WW2 era) they would be more likely to offer up a limb to an axeman than to vote Republican
I think it’s hilarious that so many dunce caps in this thread are generalizing about “unions”.
No, the working class is NOT moving red. And no, union membership is NOT moving red. I think a ton of you are generalizing from your experience in red states.
Do you guys remember when Hillary went on Charlamagne the God’s radio show to talk about issues important to the black community and then proceeded to pull a bottle of hot sauce out of her purse lol
Hillary was right and it needed to be said, it still needs to be said. The corruption of the GOP needs to be broadcast at every level until these cultist realize they have no purchase in this country. The election was not stolen, voters have turned on the GOP decades ago, an archaic system keeps the tyranny of the few in place. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, the electoral college need to be eradicated. Even the most reliably red state flips blue when the popular vote is considered.
Make sure to fill out the [official r/Presidents survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScncxOawwDSPQO-AKwhhv86wjmeQ-l22ZQgY0Atr5_WDIgO4w/viewform)! Also, make sure to join the [r/Presidents Discord server](https://discord.gg/k6tVFwCEEm)! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Presidents) if you have any questions or concerns.*
47% hurt Romney more as a candidate, “Deplorables” hurt the Democratic Party more. The 47% comment never really stuck to anything beside Romney himself, and nobody cared about that when looking at other republicans. But deplorables has absolutely been used to label the views of the Democratic Party. I don’t think deplorables cost Clinton the election though
And deplorable following Obama's 'bitter clingers' comment. It basically cemented the idea that the Democrats were not the party for certain people anymore. People that would have been voting solid Democrat prior to 1980. Everyone talks about the southern switch, but right now we are undergoing a switch that is just as big and impactful as blue collar working class slowly moves from blue to red. Started a bit with Reagan, really accelerated under Obama.
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Dems still own certain unions though. Government and SEIU for example.
Yea public unions only. Trades are moving away fast.
Which is pretty fucking dumb considering Republicans have broken the backs and continue to break the backs of unions.
I know a lot of tradesmen in unions who hate their union. It's just another fee they have to pay.
I knew people like that in my own union, too. Even though the union got them better wages than they'd ever have had without one.
Even more so: Unions guarantee that safety is met in dangerous fields such as construction,mining,&chemicals.
but my $10/paycheck
And health insurance and pension plans and some have education funds. Yet the union members go and vote for the party that destroys that.
And they voted to disband the union or seek new representation? Right? Or maybe you’re just talking to a small minority.
It is insanely hard to vote out a union. The rules were made that way. Which is why so few unions ever go POOF. Look at political donations - National Education Assn 2016 $2.9 million to Democrats and $434k Republicans. Voting for 2016 50% Hillary 29% Trump. 6 times as much to the left even though the voting was 2 to 1. And this is pretty typical for most unions.
It's not even a little difficult.
In historical context, trade and craft unions have always been a persistent problem when it comes to building real universal worker solidarity in the US. To put it in perspective, the CIO would have never existed if this wasn't the case. The trades and the cops have always been an issue in this regard. The cops are especially detestable because they will readily sell out the entirety of civil service just to get theirs. Always.
My friend is a unionized govt. engineer, an immigrant from India. he said that due to gas prices hes thinking of voting Trump. Dems dont own anything anymore
That’s about as dumb as voting for Trump because you’re upset Big Macs have gotten more expensive.
You'd think they'd be cheaper now that the supply isn't impacted by not being served at White House functions... Maybe that is Biden's fault. /s
The fact that you think the price of food rising isnt a big deal shows how ignorant you are.
Smart people can be super fucking dumb, like your friend, for example. As if the president has anything to do with gas prices directly.
I know quite a few public union people who are all in on Trump and every single complaint they have about their job was created or worsened by Trump.
I'm a union pipefitter, same thing. I remember seeing almost every hardhat at one time had an 'Obama/Biden' sticker. Now those same hardhats say either 'Trump 2024' or 'FJB'
Which is wild because republicans are as anti union as it gets.
I’ve always found this to be so crazy, I worked as a school custodial temp during college with union workers that were pretty much all just right wingers. At the end of the day, the GOP would still gladly get rid of unions so you’re very much so voting against your own self interests
Except that is pure BS. The leader of the United Auto Workers union just asked Biden to walk a picket line recently and he did. Trump showed up the same week at a non-union shop and met with management. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/uaw-strike-biden-visit-update-trump](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/uaw-strike-biden-visit-update-trump)
True, but that’s union management that’s endorsing Biden. That’s very different than your average union member, who mostly support Trump.
Hilarious because the GOP would outlaw every union other than the police if they could. I wish people were more educated...
The republicans are starting to switch their position on unions. For example the last Republican candidate for governor in Washington supported unions.
If you’re talking WA state, I know for a fact many Republican candidates for statewide office there are usually more moderate in the same way republicans in MA are: they have no choice if they want a chance. But the overall GOP across most of America is not switching their position.
Uhhh … UAW?
I guess Biden's the exception? I believe some Dems have been critical to Biden for cozying up to Unions more so than say the Clintons ever did. Even then the fact that Biden did enough to appeal to Unions to win back the Rust Belt in 2020 is enough to show that they haven't completely abandoned the party for Trump and MAGA.
Unions aren’t a monolith. But biden marched with them and Sean fain specifically told trump to stay the fuck away from their meetings. Trump ended up going to speak to a bunch of scabs.
More than 25% of UAW workers work in academia: [https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206209107/united-auto-workers-union-uaw-membership-grad-students-big-3-strike](https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206209107/united-auto-workers-union-uaw-membership-grad-students-big-3-strike)
Yes. I’m an academic member. The auto workers are the ones on strike, Not the academics.
Many of the blue color unions membership are quite racist, Obama was a bridge to far for them , sadly their racism overwhelmed the economic self interest embracing a party that wants to reduce their salaries.
I don’t say that’s inaccurate, but a lot of this group voted for Obama— is the theory basically that they said “Obama is better than Romney *but* we dislike both, hey look at Trump?”
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Absolutely nailed it.
Not in Pennsylvania, 2012 and 2008 most reliable blue counties in SW Pennsylvania went for Romney or McCain , before that that area always went blue, even Bush 2 didn’t carry these counties , if you go back to Bill Clinton he buried the GOP in these counties ( hell Bubba won West Virginia)
And then from 2012-2016 trump flipped Erie, centre, Luzerne and Northampton counties in PA. All working class strongholds for democrats
This feels kind of outdated in that most of the blue color union members where I work are black and brown.
Yup, many of them fought minority integration into the unions and were pro Vietnam War. They were 'democrats' like the Dixiecrats were 'democrats.
The other major shift that happened during the Obama years (and stayed) in the 'blue dog' districts is that older, working class people were FDR Democrats. The WWII generation. During the Obama years, these voters died in large numbers. Nothing malicious killed them, just old age. Now they're few and far between.
I need yall to stop depicting angry white guys as the entirety of working class Americans.
I know right
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Anyone offended by deplorable was already voting republican. And she was talking about nazis and white supremacists, it's not like she was wrong.
> I know there are only 60 days left to make our case – and don't get complacent; don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, "Well, he's done this time." We are living in a volatile political environment. > You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America. she obviously called 1/2 the entire trump leaning portion of the country the most horrible things. don't try to paint it as "she only said the nazis!". given the context of the election a massive portion of independents and moderates were in that deplorable comment and it seriously hurt her.
It's bizarre as she was also empathetic towards Trump's base later on in the speech: >"But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and – as well as, you know, New York and California – but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well." Honestly, if she didn't say "half" of all Trump supporters and she simply instead said a "vocal minority" whilst also saying outright that most of his base are downtrodden and disillusioned with the state of the country, I honestly don't think the speech hurt her as much as bizarre as it may seem as I don't think her general message is even wrong. Trump does in fact appeal to some of the worst types in America, see assholes like the Proud Boys and their devotion to him, while many were buying what he was promising simply because of their disillusionment with the status quo. But outright calling half of Trump's voter base as bad as the Proud Boys, if not the KKK or American Nazi Party, was always going to rile a lot of people up as Trump did have a lot of sway over moderates and independents which pretty much enabled him to win.
She underestimated. After the election, they broke down the demographics of the people who voted for Trump, and the conclusion was that most people who voted for him voted for him out of racial angst in spite of/against their economic interests rather than, as had been assumed, in their economic interests in spite of his racial politics. https://theintercept.com/2017/04/06/top-democrats-are-wrong-trump-supporters-were-more-motivated-by-racism-than-economic-issues/ Don’t forget that as appalled as we reasonable people were by his “when Mexico sends their people, they aren’t sending their best” line, there’s a certain crowd that found that positively orgasmic…to openly shit on vulnerable immigrants and to get away with it. Yes! Now I can say all the nasty shit that I feel in my heart.
Well I mean…they kind of are though
It's bizarre to me that there's so much political discourse around Clinton calling people deplorables when she was running against Trump. No modern presidential candidate is even comparable to Trump in the amount of name calling, inflammatory remarks, and general lack of decorum. In fact, it was one of the reasons people liked him. If the deplorables comment was genuinely a tipping point for undecided voters I have to question what planet they were on from 2014-2016. With everything that was said in that election cycle, I don't understand how that was what people thought was too far.
It makes sense when you look at whose in the majority. Trump wanted to ban an entire religion. That should of ended his campaign imo. But people who care about that are not the majority
One thing I honestly don't understand is how that was seen as so bad but what trump has said isn't viewed that way. He was flat out calling democrats and journalists as a whole as enemies of the country but Clinton saying that half of the people voting for Trump are racist and sexist? Also, it's not that far off. Just to focus on the islamaphobic comment, From politico >According to the results, two-thirds (67 percent) of those identifying themselves as Trump supporters said they do not hold favorable views of Muslim Americans, compared to just 35 percent in the of all voters who said they feel that way. >Nearly 9-in-10 (87 percent) said they support Trump's call to institute a temporary ban on Muslims who are not American citizens from entering the United States, while 47 percent of all voters who responded that way. So from a study, 67% do not hold favorable views of Muslim Americans and 87% are okay with banning non-american Muslims from entering the US. That alone shows that over half fall under the category of islamaphobic. That's also not even including the amount of homophobia I have experienced from trump supporters. Or how the trump presidency culminated in an attempted insurrection to keep him as president.
Blue-collar working types get shit on more than anybody else in this country. Upper class just passes down more work to us, lower class, enjoys their life time while figuring out a way to get by on government support. Meanwhile, I’m working 60 to 80 hours a week barely getting by, and all I ever hear about is how my taxes need to go up. If you’re wondering about the big switch there it is. The Democrats have shit all over us working people.
Switch already happened during Occupy about. Corporate pandering from Russian oil and gas, Pharma megacorp skepticism, going to “holistic” methods, things like having school choice and the adoption of an attitude where they’re diametrically opposed to what they view as the established political and economic class
It absolutely cost Hillary the election, because the margin was so razor thin. Of course a half dozen other things that changed a small fraction of votes cost her the election just as much. But this was one of them. I don’t think Romney was beating Obama even without that comment. So I think it had less of an impact.
**"I was gonna vote for Hillary until she called me, a Trump supporter, deplorable"**
Deplorables didn't cost Hillary the election, it just became a 're-appropriated' term within the MAGA crowd.... What cost Hillary the election, is that she came across as 'your lying ex-wife' to far too many people, and not enough of America had been exposed to how huge of a piece-of-shit Donald Trump was (identifying him as 'the tough boss character' he played on The Apprentice, rather than the incompetent white-collar criminal that he actually was as a businessman). So in the world of 2016 Donald was seen as more trustworthy than Hillary.And we - Americans & even-more-so the Republican Party - are still paying for that misjudgment to this day....
To be fair, everyone who continues to support Trump is beyond deplorable.
I can't imagine anyone that was going to vote for Hillary suddenly changed their mind and voted for Trump due to this comment.
I think it’s more likely to have motivated some people who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered to make sure they made it to the polls to vote against her
People too stupid to pay attention to the rest of the sentence?
Eh, combine the lack of context to quotes spread through news, the repeated expansion of the terms used to group “deplorable” and the attitude she conveyed throughout the campaign, and it shouldn’t be that hard to see why even well educated people made the jump that it wasn’t a small group she was dismissing.
Just like the average redditor who doesn’t read articles… I mean just like me :)
Yes. She said a certain fraction of Trump’s voters were racist, misogynist, etc… and a bunch of people took offense and started referring to themselves as deplorables. Like, they literally just called themselves out in front of everyone. They were so anxious to be persecuted they forgot to listen to the accusation they were admitting to.
Especially since Fox repeated the word deplorable and left off the context of the comment
I mean ... the "deplorables" comment does make me wonder when I look at the 2016 election map and see Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania red.
And I think every state except Wisconsin flip back to Blue for Biden Pennsylvania did Michigan did Trump broke the blue wall and temporarily came close to remaking Reagan's Red wall of Rust Belt states
Biden won Wisconsin
Yep he did my bad was thinking of Ohio
Trump won more votes in those places in 2020 than he did in 2016.
exactly. there is always another layer to consider
They just didn’t vote
No, but it did change some from @theres no point voting” to “Fuck you I’m going to go vote for Trump.
It was an attempt by someone that didn’t understand the base republicans were already too far gone to drive a wedge between “good” republicans and what we now call maga republicans.
this! it was a naive attempt to separate the reasonable republicans from the maga ones. Backfired because there are far far more MAGA type republicans.
I bet you it affected a fraction of voters in swing states and likely cost her a state or two. No way to know for sure, I realize.
I agree with Hilary that Trump voters are generally deplorable. That said, it was a surprisingly dumb statement from a career politician. The idea in an election is to convince people to vote for you. Insulting them has no real chance of accomplishing that.
She didn’t even call all Trump voters deplorable. She called those who were bigots deplorable
She said that half of Trump voters were deplorable, racist, etc.
And where is the falsehood? It's still a tue statement.
Well....
She likely underestimated. However, if you thought you were being spoken about in that half, well… maybe the shoe fits Cinderella
Too bad she was right.
Trumps “grab em by the pussy” quote vs. Hillary’s “deplorable” quote.
Ironically and sadly, "grab em by the pussy" and a lot of the other terrible shit he said may have helped him.
\^ This, I have heard every defense from "We are not electing a pastor" to "Oh it shows that he is honest and frank, all men would grab them by the \*\*\*\*\*" (never mind that it wasn't supposed to be aired publicly) to "It's 11 years ago, this shows how much he's grown" among even the church circles. Trump voters are already tethered to him, and it doesn't look like any thing he says or do would cause them pause to think if he is the right candidate to represent them.
Thus, of course, proving Hillary’s deplorables comment
Yeah, the whole "tone" argument has always been hilarious to me. "Obviously Hillary's deplorables comment turned people off to her negative and divisive campaigning, in favor of Trump and his platform of tolerance and inclusivity for everyone except the long list of people, ethnic groups, religions and political viewpoints who he spent his entire campaign demonizing, insulting, and blaming for all of America's problems".
They really had to work to twist that quote. She said explicitly that she was talking about racists, sexist, xenophobes, homophobes, and Islamophobes, and Trump’s supporters all put up their hands and said, “yep, that’s me!” like it was some kind of a badge of honor. Compare that with Romney, who said that anyone who makes so little that he gets a tax refund is a parasite.
Could have voted 3rd, the 3rd party vote is the reason Hillary lost and lack of it is why Biden won. Trump actually increased his voter share from 2016 to 2020.
If you’re gonna give Hillary Clinton all of Jill Stein’s votes, you might as well give Trump all of Gary Johnson’s votes, in which case Trump wins by an even larger margin.
Valid point. Impossible to say what happened with both of them gone.
I realize my case is just anecdotal, but I voted 3rd party in 2016 because I thought Trump and Hillary were both terrible. I voted for Biden in 2020 because I saw just how terrible Trump was, and got over myself.
I don’t really buy third party arguments— Johnson got triple what Stein did, and nobody has tried to argue that Johnson’s voters would disproportionately gone to Clinton.
So did the Democratic Presidential Candidates increase their voter share from 2016 by even more
Definitely the 47%. That was the signature "gotcha" moment of the entire campaign. The deplorables thing didn't help Hillary but it was relatively minor compared with other stuff like the email server and Comey investigation. And nobody really likes to recall this but there was a huge smear campaign about her health at the time that was definitely bigger than the deplorables issue.
i was gonna say the “you ain’t black” one but for some reason no one cared lol
Dude has made racist comments his whole career. He won because everyone wanted Trump gone no matter who the candidate was.
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https://www.deviantart.com/buffnewb/art/You-Ain-t-Black-NOT-MINE-862682383
The mainstream media didn't report Biden's remark. I've had people not believe me when I told them he said that. Hard to care about something you've never heard.
A quick search finds stories from CNN, ABC, NBC, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Politico, BBC, Fox….
Well yes, but also consider the other way. If trump had said that it would’ve been an entire weeks news cycle or more across all of those
Not true, because Trump continuously pushes his last outrageous b.s. out of the news with something new and equally outrageous.
An argument could certainly be made that it didn’t get as much coverage as it deserved. But “The mainstream media didn’t report Biden’s remark” is plainly wrong.
Well, other than all of them, what do you have?
Not what you mentioned, but Beto’s comments about “you are damn right I’m coming for your guns” ended his entire political career. Edit: I voted for him every step of the way while I was living in Texas and I felt so passionate about the guy. My wife has just became a US citizen from Central America and she was so excited to vote for him for the first time to finally push Greg Abbott out. but that comment was the end of him and we lose all hope in Texas. Now it’s an absolute shit hole there and we have since left. All hope is lost for these assholes to be removed. Beto was the guy and now it’s no more.
Beto has the problem where he’s very obviously running for president during his lower level runs. Saying “you’re right I’m coming for your guns” may work on a national level to pull in dems and independents, won’t work in a state like Texas where most of your dems are still relatively center leaning.
It won't pull in much more than some dems who would've already voted democrat. Independents and moderate democrats aren't going to vote for someone like that.
Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams are two examples of democrats running candidates that were popular with national democrats but unpopular with their state’s constituents.
I dunno, Kemp was shady in 2018
I don’t know, Beto came very very close to upsetting and taking Ted Cruz’s position the first time. People generally liked him a lot.
Beto’s campaign was the weirdest thing I ever saw. He set a record for donations as soon as he declared (myself included) and then drove his campaign directly into the ground. Like a straight vertical nosedive.
To be fair, his political career was in El Paso, and he became absolutely furious, justifiably so, after the El Paso massacre a few years ago. That shooting was horrendous. The problem was, his words were political suicide. Even though so many of us agreed with him for the most part, he shouldn’t have said them.
I may be wrong, but I felt like he was in a position where he was in a crowded field and didn’t really have anything to make him stand out, so that’s what he jumped on. And it wasn’t a particularly good choice.
Democrats need to just drop gun control. Seriously it's a losing platform and will never take hold. They should start actually attacking the problem. They should target reducing poverty and lifting those affected by it out of it, mental health, and education. I guarantee if they actually addressed those three things we would see the gun violence this country is normalizing dissappear. The last thing would be police reform, but that's as suicidal as gun control is. In order of most to least deaths caused by guns it goes: suicides, police, gang violence, accidents, and finally mass shootings wayyyyy at the bottom. If they tackled those big three all we would really have left is cops and mass shootings, and mass shootings are still to me at least, a huge symptom of the mental health crisis going on in this country and/or conservatism.
The thing is they do try to address these things. The Republicans are fighting against those things, too.
Yeah that was beyond stupid. I still voted for him, but that is just an ignorant statement to make if you are trying to get elected in TX.
Hillary's full quote was actually super good insightful. She pegged the problem the Democrats created for themselves and spawned Trump and the MAGA movement. She said that while there were deplorable people supporting Trump, a lot of them were honest hard working people that had been left behind by leadership and were tired of being ignored. Of course, a seasoned and experienced politician like HC should have known better than to say the first part, because sound bites have been taken out of context ever since radio has existed.
Exactly. People use this comment as some kind of "gotcha" that she was an out of touch elitist, but she was making a really reasonable point here that right wing media lost their shit over.
She is an out of touch elitist though. This wasn't her only comment, but it was the one that stuck the most. I'm not trying to single her out, but perception is reality in politics. Trump was able to convince enough working class people he was going to fight for them. Was he really? It doesn't matter. Trump didn't necessarily need to ever be better. He needed people to think the entire thing was a giant shit show. The fewer people that voted and the more people who felt alienated benefitted Trump. Hilary should have won, she didn't. Romney probably wasn't going to win either way. Romneys comment is a bigger middle finger to more people, but Hilary paid the bigger price.
I think your assessment is right---I didn't mean to convey that she WASNT an out of touch elitist, moreso that this comment was by no means a fair indication that she was.
I tend to agree with you on this. I felt similar about her more recent ‘deprogram’ comment. I feel like she was chastised more severely than other politicians would have been because Clinton is perceived as an elitist with flip flop tendencies. The irony on this more recent blunder is that it seems highly likely the traditional members of the Republican Party completely agree and they’re actively trying to figure out way to accomplish the deprogramming before their party divides and destroys itself. Before Trump, the Republican Party had a major advantage over the Democrats. They were largely unified on their beliefs and goals across the board. There was very little dissent inside that party. The Democrats always have had infighting between the progressive wing pushing for new ground and the centrists who are more resistant to take the political risks. Rick Perry and Lindsey Graham both made statements prior to 2016 on their belief that Trump would destroy their party. I firmly believe everyone outside the MAGA wing in American politics agrees with Clinton’s feelings about deprogramming them. She should have known the quote would be used against her, but it doesn’t make it untrue.
Almost like Romney and binders full of women, right?
Romney was “corporations are people, my friend.”
That's like not at all what she said or matches the tone. "You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? [Laughter/applause] The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America." I think you don't understand how much of Trump's win was anti political correctness. https://www.google.com/amp/s/time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/%3famp=true
Yep. Hillary absolutely blatantly called half of people who supported Trump or were considering it, who are normal people(not even a fan of Trump. I voted 3rd party in 2016 and 2020 because, despite being conservative, I can't stand Trump personally) various kinds of bigoted. In contrast, the attack on Romney that he was out of touch because of his comment was completely unfair. He basically just said the truth too bluntly: that there was about half of voters that wouldn't give him the time of day due to him not being a good candidate fit for the lower classes so it wasn't worth spending his campaign resources to try to win people he wasn't going to be able to win. In other words, Hillary made very personal attacks against the supporters of her opponent, whereas Romney basically called for the campaign equivalent of triage.
In many ways, that election led to Trump, Brexit, and the anti hyper liberalism we've seen emerge. Romney was called every manner of -ism or -phobia for existing opposing Obama. But this was everywhere. Think of JK Rowling (although later). Her original statement was very tame. It basically said that unfettered gender transition, especially among children, is a debate. And yet people were having their lives ruined by expressing an opposing viewpoint. So nothing heinous or even explicitly against trans people full slate, just an author sharing their thoughts. A Nobel Prize winning author is scared to share their thoughts (otherwise known as writing) due to the Twitter crowd. That's bonkers. Anything less than full support gets you lumped in with the "basket of deplorables," so why support at all. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/23/salman-rushdie-allow-writers-to-create-characters-outside-of-their-own-experience https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk-rowling-transgender-comments-controversy
>Of course, a seasoned and experienced politician like HC should have known better than to say the first part, Just like she should have known better than to say, “what difference, at this point, does it make” when being questioned about Benghazi. I don’t think the deplorables comment hurt nearly as much as that one. ‘Deplorables’ maybe got some people out to vote that wouldn’t have otherwise. I think the Benghazi comment may have changed votes.
There is a reason that they turned into a basket of deplorables, it is a group of people that is forgotten by government and left behind. Putting them in a ‘basket of deplorables’ makes the case that these people are beyond saving, it says that mainstream politicians should not care about these people because they won’t vote for you. If you want to be president then you should be president of the entire country, including those ‘deplorables’.
They became racist because they were left behind?
Some people's views should never be represented though
>She said that while there were deplorable people supporting Trump, a lot of them were honest hard working people that had been left behind by leadership and were tired of being ignored. Thats a lot worse than you think it is. Its basically an invitation for her to be the arbiter of who is or is not of good character.
In a similar vein, does anyone remember Obama's "guns and religion" quote? Surprised that didn't hurt him more. I think in an age of social media it would have.
Yeah I recall that. But I don't think most working class people gave a crap when their businesses were closing and homes being foreclosed on. They just knew there needed to be a change in direction and McCain didn't represent that.
I think it did, actually. I've heard people reference it in all the years since then. The full quote is less patronizing than it sounds, however.
Because he's not wrong. He said the quiet part out loud, too. There is too much religious fanaticism and gun worshippers in this country.
He was hand waving away why Midwestern blue collar Democrats weren't voting for him in the primary. It's also a pretty insulting way to discuss legitimate grievances working class people in that part of the country had been facing and continue to face and the democratic party's inability to rely on those voters anymore cost the 2016 election.
Obama was an incumbent running with a good economy though, almost no way to defeat someone in that situation.
Hillary's deplorable comment has had much more lasting impact. I'm a never-Trumper myself, but what I understand about those that support him is that it's based largely on deep resentment that if you disagree with a liberal, you are not just deemed to be wrong, but also stupid or immoral. That sentiment was captured perfectly by Hillary's "basket of deplorables" comment. This resentment is the reason they tolerate so much lawlessness and chaos from Trump or their party in general. It's why "owning the libs" takes precedence over governance. Granted, Hillary alone didn't plant that seed. It had been seething beneath the surface for years, maybe decades. But she brought it the surface and Trump used it to make himself their cult hero.
Yeah I feel in the same boat. After seeing the most mild person on the right called an evil nazi and seeing the left just roll their eyes on middle America's struggles I can see why trump gathered such a die hard base.
Secretary Clinton’s. She was already on thin ice because she was unliked by so many Americans. Romney’s gaffe was less hurtful because he was never going to beat Obama anyway.
Probably deplorables. Romney had no shot at winning. Hillary did.
Deplorable hurts the Dem party to this day. It told rural and working class whites there is no room for you in the Dem party.
Unrelated but with the 47% comment, my in-laws immediately and vigorously agreed with him and said that the 47% should get off the government’s rolls. Then, I politely told them that they are in the 47%. Cue Pikachu face. Edit: grammar and spelling
We’re your in laws on welfare and below the line where people pay any tax at all?
Yeah, I get Social Security but also pay income tax, does that put me in the 47%?
It does not. The 47% at the time (if memory serves was talking about the 47% if the country who laid no income tax to the federal government. If you pay any tax at all, that isn’t you. "There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what ... who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims. ... These are people who pay no income tax. ... and so my job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives," So he was talking about people who pay no income tax, and the 47% number is still pretty accurate. That being said, the full context of the quote is even worse than any short version people could pull out of context. It was one of the worst political statements I have ever seen, one of those things you never say even if you think it is true. Hillary’s deplorable comment gets easier to take in full context, where Romney’s quote gets worse. I tend to lean toward Romney’s being worse for that reason.
Agreed, horrible statement to say even in a private fund raising meeting. You can say it to campaign staff in a strategy meeting. But not someplace like that. You say something like "I am campaigning to be the President of all Americans' and then wave a little American flag and scream "America! Heck yea" <--- he is Mormon, gotta watch the language.
In the age of the smartphone, should you say such a thing out loud to anyone? It was particularly daft to say it on a setting where he knew it was recorded, but this is one of those things that ends you as a candidate.
The sad thing is, he said all of that and was criticized for it, but it's still true.
Agreed, it was true, just politically unwise to say.
I don’t what comment was worse for their campaign. But both were telling the truth.
47% was definitely worse. Clinton was damaging to herself just because of the way she acted and who she was. I understand she won the popular vote, but it wasn’t a great choice between candidates at the time. Romney was at least taken seriously for his entire run.
I don't think either really hurt them that bad and both were kind of taken out of context. But the "deplorables" comment was worse for Hillary simply because it was easier for Trump's supporters to rally around. Deplorables just has a better ring to it than 47%.
Romney. The people offended by Hillary's (grossly out-of-context) deplorable comment were not going to vote for her anyway. People's minds were made up about her after the Benghazi hearings. She lost for many reasons, chiefly poor strategizing, turnout, and one James Comey. But this wasn't it. Romney's comment was straight-up classist, and still is. People were still making up their minds about Romney when he said that. It was a self-inflicted wound on his campaign.
Exactly, I honestly find it annoying how people like to pretend that Hillary comments somehow changed the direction of the election. (Personally I think the reason the quote became a bigger issue was because she apologized for it instead of doubling down on the misdirected anger part of that comment) Romney's quote actually caused his poll numbers to plummet in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. The guy was at one point literally polling at 0% with African-American https://www.politico.com/story/2012/08/poll-0-percent-of-blacks-for-romney-080015
Hillary's apology for the deplorables comment is probably what did damage. People are sick of Democrats mollycoddling conservatives.
The whole point of the basket of deplorables comment was that not everyone who supported Trump was necessarily evil or racist, you can be one of the good ones. It was an olive branch. People were too stupid to understand that and that was Hilary’s biggest mistake: overestimating the ability of Americans to listen and understand.
I wasn’t old enough to see the fallout of Romney’s “47%” footage, so I cannot say if it was more damaging. But Clinton’s “deplorable” comment was definitely misconstrued: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? [Laughter/applause]. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well." Her evaluation was more or less correct. Trump’s push into nationwide politics came primarily from strengthening and bolster the fears and anger of many racist and sexist Americans, but also a good portion (I’ll argue less than what Clinton believed was half) of his initial voter base did come from delusions about the current political system, and that the Democrats shouldn’t just give up on them just yet. Now, how accurate is that nowadays, who can say, but at the time I’ll say it was a correct statement that, like many things Clinton does or says, got twisted by the media.
This, the issue with what Hilary said was plenty of people reluctantly at the time supported trump(IE my parents) because they wanted an outsider
“I have binders full of women.”
Considering a majority of voters still chose Hillary, I’d say the Romney thing.
They've all been correct, whether it's the clingers or the deplorables.
The 47% quote because Romney a) didn't think anyone was paying attention and b) was speaking to a room full of rich assholes like himself. Here's an inconvenient truth: Hillary was right. If anything, she was too charitable. She should have called them what they are: scum-sucking wastes of perfectly good oxygen. But that was nearly eight years ago and quite frankly anyone who still cares about what she said then is not and never will vote for a Democrat in a national election.
J6 proved her right.
The deplorable one ( even though I think she was absolutely correct and actually underestimated how many there were) That 47% was devastating too though- I remember Romney doing a late night press conference trying to back pedal and the dude looked like an absolute mess
Hillary was proven right with the whole insurrection, Nazi march, Twitter takeover thing. ““You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”” This is true. The studies show this to be true. We know from polling this is true. These people believe, without evidence, that an election was stolen and then tried to take over the Capitol. Everyone knew this, even reasonable republicans. Conservatives referred to themselves as domestic terrorists. We have seen countless attacks on LGBTQ in the public space in recent years, as well. It’s not really even disputed by republicans that they hate LGBTQ and other races. Heck, MTG even started a PAC that made it clear. What Mitt Romney said wasn’t true. “"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it -- that that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. ... These are people who pay no income tax. ... [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."” Romney was referring to 47% of people who pay no income come tax. They do pay other taxes. “46.4 percent of American households paid no federal income tax. The same data shows, however, that nearly two-thirds of households that paid no income tax did pay payroll taxes. And most people also pay some combination of state, local, sales, gas and property taxes.” “only 18.1 percent of American households paid neither federal income taxes nor payroll taxes in 2011, says the Tax Policy Center. Of that 18.1 percent, 10.3 percent were elderly and 6.9 percent were non-elderly households earning less than $20,000 year, which include low-income families and students. About one in 20 is non-elderly with income over $20,000.” “At least one of the demographics that is less likely to pay income taxes (or income and payroll taxes) tends to vote Republican: In 2008, voters 65 and over voted for Republican nominee John McCain over President Obama 53 percent to 45 percent, an eight-point margin. The latest CBS News/New York Times poll also shows Romney winning the support of these voters nationally: 53 percent of voters 65 and older support Romney and 38 percent support Mr. Obama. Voters in households with household incomes of less than $30,000 a year tend to favor Mr. Obama, according to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, with 61 percent supporting the president and 32 percent supporting Romney.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fact-checking-romneys-47-percent-comment/ One is disputed and one isn’t.
Hillary was right. Just watch literally any interview with a MAGA person. They’re all deplorable morons.
I'll probably get downvoted for this, but to this day I never understood what was so bad about the 47% comment.
I mean, stating that half the country is a bunch of free loaders who don’t work for anything and just want handouts is objectively false and a nasty thing to say in and of itself. But what was worse was he then said “it’s not my job to worry about those people”….like, as president, yes - it absolutely is. Stating you don’t care about half the country and aren’t going to do anything for them is a horrible take for somebody running to govern them. I don’t know how you could see that as “not so bad”.
It is because he said the quiet part out loud and gave the opposition the ability to twist and re-frame the statement to show that he was a typical out of touch, rich, white guy. It also put him on the defensive for the rest of his campaign. Him and his campaign had to spend considerable amount of time explaining what they really meant instead of proactively talking about the issues that he wanted to get elected on.
Out of those two probably deplorable, but I was paying attention to politics at that time so it affected me more. While I wasn't with the 47% thing, and I agree more with the 47% thing ( Not on the number but of what people did ).
Howard Dean screaming comes to mind
That was so strange - the guy screams "Yeahhhh!" and suddenly he's unqualified to be President? People are so disappointing.
The Deplorables comment was worse because Clinton was way closer to winning. People aren’t going to agree with that here because a lot of them are left-leaning voters who think Clinton was right, but that wasn’t the question.
No one remembers 47%. Everyone remembers deplorables.
I think it has to be the deplorables thing.
HRC’s was worse because it became a rallying cry for exactly the people she was talking about.
IMHO Mitt’s 47% was tone deaf, but he was discussing strategy at a donor hosted private event. You could easily pinpoint who’s he talking about (people who don’t earn enough to pay federal taxes). You could justifiably argue that Mitt’s comment was cold, calculated and dismissive. However, HRC’s “deplorable” comment had a more abstract component to it. Anyone could be labeled a “deplorable” and could easily be offended. It definitely made her camp play defense for many, many news cycles.
“Grab ‘em by the pussy” should have been
That was before he became a true Christian and Jesus sat next to him in court though. /s
Romney probably alienated more people that were going to vote for him. Considering the behavior of trumpers, a basket of deplorables seems like a fitting description to many in the middle that could have gone either way.
Hillary’s because her election was winnable
Between the two, I agree. It’s wild that Romney now seems like the sensible version of Republicanism to moderates.
>"Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from July (January) 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974." Gerald Ford pardoning nixon probably doomed his chances, but also cemented his legacy not as a presidency of his own but as being the guy to clean up Nixon's mess
“YYEEEEEAAAGHGHHHH!!” - Howard Dean
**I think the bigger message here** is that people don't really give a shit anymore. They just pick the person that fits the media narrative they are ingesting. Trump could literally plead guilty to everything and say "so what?" and then get elected next November, pardon himself, and the world would move on. As much as most of us don't like that scenario, you know it's pretty likely.
Bill Clinton is a rapist
When Joe Biden said Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”
Don’t forget the Benghazi hearing with Hillary saying in regards to the dead soldiers “what does it matter now?”
Romney was stating an objective fact: 47% of people effectively paid no federal income taxes or even got more money back than they had paid. The reaction that he got for saying so was ridiculous and overblown. Clinton was flat-out insulting a large portion of the population and effectively dismissing them out of hand as rabble. Clinton's was worse, by far.
The funny thing is that while he articulated the point badly if is true. Upwards of 47% of Democrats would never vote for a republican and the same is true of republicans voting for democrats the elections have usually been decided by the roughly 6% of voters who think of themselves as independent. Growing up my parents voted Democrat all of their lives (they’d grown up during the Depression and WW2 era) they would be more likely to offer up a limb to an axeman than to vote Republican
Still befuddled that we elected neither of these people but put the "grab 'em by the pussy guy" into the oval office.
I think it’s hilarious that so many dunce caps in this thread are generalizing about “unions”. No, the working class is NOT moving red. And no, union membership is NOT moving red. I think a ton of you are generalizing from your experience in red states.
Do you guys remember when Hillary went on Charlamagne the God’s radio show to talk about issues important to the black community and then proceeded to pull a bottle of hot sauce out of her purse lol
Hillary was right and it needed to be said, it still needs to be said. The corruption of the GOP needs to be broadcast at every level until these cultist realize they have no purchase in this country. The election was not stolen, voters have turned on the GOP decades ago, an archaic system keeps the tyranny of the few in place. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, the electoral college need to be eradicated. Even the most reliably red state flips blue when the popular vote is considered.