What Happened

by Clinton, Hillary Rodham

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  A few weeks after my “gaffe,” I went to Appalachia to apologize directly to people I had offended. I knew it was unlikely to change the outcome of the upcoming West Virginia primary or the general election in November, but I wanted to show my respect. I wanted to make it clear that I would be a President for all Americans, not just the ones who voted for me.

  Prominent Democrats in West Virginia suggested I fly in and out of Charleston and make a speech in front of a friendly audience. My team on the ground liked that—it would take the least amount of time away from my packed campaign schedule and would mean a warmer reception than I was likely to receive in more rural parts of the state. But that wasn’t what I had in mind. I wanted to go deep into the southern coalfields to communities facing the biggest challenges, where Trump was most popular and my coal-miner gaffe was getting the most attention. As one of my advisors put it, that would be like Trump holding a rally in downtown Berkeley, California. That’s pretty much what I was going for.

  We designed a trip that would take me from eastern Kentucky to southern West Virginia to southeastern Ohio, concluding with an economic policy speech in Athens, Ohio, with my friend Senator Sherrod Brown, who was also on my list of potential choices for Vice President.

  We started in Ashland, Kentucky, where I met with a dozen steelworkers who’d lost their jobs when the factory where they’d worked for decades closed. I also talked with men who worked on the railroads and watched as the decline of coal and steel production led to reductions in rail service, which in turn cost more jobs and further isolated the region.

  I had known going into the campaign that many communities still hadn’t recovered from the Great Recession, and a lot of working-class Americans were hurting and frustrated. Unemployment was down and the economy was growing, but most people hadn’t had a raise in fifteen years. The average family income was $4,000 less than when my husband left office in 2001. I knew this backward and forward.

  When I got out there and heard the deep despair, those numbers became ever more real. I listened to people talk about how worried they were about their kids’ futures. A lot of men were embarrassed that they depended on disability checks to pay the bills and that the jobs they could find didn’t pay enough to support a real middle-class life. They were furious that after all they’d done to power our economy, fight our wars, and pay their taxes, no one in Washington seemed to care, much less be trying to do anything about it.

  Usually when I meet people who are frustrated and angry, my instinctive response is to talk about how we can fix things. That’s why I spent so much time and energy coming up with new policies to create jobs and raise wages. But in 2016 a lot of people didn’t really want to hear about plans and policies. They wanted a candidate to be as angry as they were, and they wanted someone to blame. For too many, it was primarily a resentment election. That didn’t come naturally to me. I get angry about injustice and inequality, abuse of power, lying, and bullying. But I’ve always thought it’s better for leaders to offer solutions instead of just more anger. That’s certainly what I want from my leaders. Unfortunately, when the resentment level is through the roof your answers may never get a hearing from the people you want to help most.

  We left Kentucky and crossed into West Virginia. Just as I remembered from 2008, there was very spotty cell phone coverage as we drove into the Mountain State. That drove the traveling team nuts, but I was thinking more about the bigger problem of how the lack of connectivity hamstrung businesses and schools and held back economic development. Nearly 40 percent of people in rural America don’t have access to broadband, and research shows those communities have lower incomes and higher unemployment. That’s a solvable problem, and one I was eager to take on.

  I thought back to how much I loved campaigning in West Virginia during the 2008 primary, when I won the state by 40 points. My favorite memory was celebrating Mother’s Day with my mom and daughter in the small town of Grafton, West Virginia, where the holiday was invented a hundred years earlier. It was one of the last Mother’s Days I ever had with my mom, and it was a great one.

  We drove into Mingo County, arguably Ground Zero for the coal crisis. In 2011 there had been more than 1,400 miners in the county. By 2016, there were just 438. Our destination was the town of Williamson, home to a promising public-private partnership similar to Reconnecting McDowell that was trying desperately to marshal the resources and the political will needed to expand and diversify the local economy, as well as improve public health.

  After about three hours, we arrived at the Williamson Health and Wellness Center. It was drizzling, but outside on the street was a crowd of several hundred angry protestors chanting “We want Trump!” and “Go home Hillary!” Many held up signs about the so-called war on coal. One woman explained to a reporter why she was supporting Trump: “We’re tired of all the darn handouts; nobody takes care of us.” Another had painted her hands red to look like blood and kept yelling about Benghazi. Standing with them was Don Blankenship, the multimillionaire former CEO of a large coal company who was convicted for conspiring to violate mine safety regulations after the Upper Big Branch mine explosion killed twenty-nine workers in 2010. He was due to report to prison just days later, but he made time to come protest me first.

  I knew I wouldn’t get a warm welcome in West Virginia. That was the point of my visit, after all. But this level of anger took me aback. This wasn’t just about my comments in one town hall. This was something deeper.

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  Since the election, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I failed to connect with more working-class whites. Many commentators talk as if my poor showing with that group was a new problem that stemmed mostly from my own weaknesses and Trump’s unique populist appeal. They point to the white voters who switched from Obama to Trump as evidence. West Virginia, a heavily white working-class state, tells a different story. From Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 to Bill’s reelection in 1996, Democrats won fourteen out of seventeen presidential elections there. Since 2000, however, we’ve lost every time, by increasingly bigger margins. In 2012 Obama lost to Mitt Romney by nearly two to one. It’s hard to look at that trend and conclude that it is all about me or about Trump.

  The most prominent explanation, though an insufficient one on its own, is the so-called war on coal. Democrats’ long-standing support for environmental regulations that protect clean air and water and seek to limit carbon emissions has been an easy scapegoat for the misfortunes of the coal industry and the communities that have depended on it. The backlash reached a fevered pitch during the Obama administration, despite strong evidence that government regulation is not the primary cause for the industry’s decline.

  The Obama administration was slow to take on this false narrative. When it was getting ready to announce the sweeping new Clean Power Plan, which was seen as the most anti-coal policy yet, I thought the President should consider making the announcement in Coal Country and couple it with a big effort to help miners and their families by attracting new investments and jobs. That might have softened the blow a little.

  In the end, President Obama announced the new regulations in the White House alongside his administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That was seen by many folks in West Virginia as another signal that Democrats didn’t care about them. Once that perception takes hold, it’s hard to dislodge.

  That said, Democrats’ problems with white working-class voters started long before Obama and go far beyond coal.

  After John Kerry lost to George W. Bush in 2004, the writer Thomas Frank popularized the theory that Republicans persuaded whites in places like West Virginia to vote against their economic interests by appealing to them on cultural issues—in other words, “gays, guns, and God.” There’s definitely merit in that explanation. Remember my earlier description of the man in Arkansas who said Democrats wanted to take his gun and force him to go to a gay wedding?


  Then there’s race. For decades, Republicans have used coded racial appeals on issues such as school busing, crime, and welfare. It was no accident that Ronald Reagan launched his general election campaign in 1980 with a speech about “states’ rights” near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. In 2005 the chairman of the Republican National Committee formally apologized for what’s been called the southern strategy. But in 2016 it was back with a vengeance. Politics was reduced to its most tribal, “us” versus “them,” and “them” grew into a big list: blacks, Latinos, immigrants, liberals, city dwellers, you name it. Like so many demagogues before him, Trump encouraged a zero-sum view of life where if someone else is gaining, you must be losing. You can hear the resentment in the words of that protestor in Williamson: “We’re tired of all the darn handouts; nobody takes care of us.”

  It’s hard to compete against demagoguery when the answers you can offer are all unsatisfying. And years of economic pain provided fertile ground for Republicans’ cultural and racial appeals. Union membership, once a bulwark for Democrats in states like West Virginia, declined. Being part of a union is an important part of someone’s personal identity. It helps shape the way you view the world and think about politics. When that’s gone, it means a lot of people stop identifying primarily as workers—and voting accordingly—and start identifying and voting more as white, male, rural, or all of the above.

  Just look at Don Blankenship, the coal boss who joined the protest against me on his way to prison. In recent years, even as the coal industry has struggled and workers have been laid off, top executives like him have pocketed huge pay increases, with compensation rising 60 percent between 2004 and 2016. Blankenship endangered his workers, undermined their union, and polluted their rivers and streams, all while making big profits and contributing millions to Republican candidates. He should have been the least popular man in West Virginia even before he was convicted in the wake of the death of twenty-nine miners. Instead, he was welcomed by the pro-Trump protesters in Williamson. One of them told a reporter that he’d vote for Blankenship for President if he ran. Meanwhile, I pledged to strengthen the laws to protect workers and hold bosses like Blankenship accountable—the fact that he received a jail sentence of just one year was appalling—yet I was the one being protested.

  Some on the left, including Bernie Sanders, argue that working-class whites have turned away from Democrats because the party became beholden to Wall Street donors and lost touch with its populist roots. It’s hard to believe that voters who embrace Don Blankenship are looking for progressive economics. After all, by nearly every measure, the Democratic Party has moved to the left over the past fifteen years, not to the right. Mitt Romney was certainly not more populist than Barack Obama when he demolished him in West Virginia. And Republicans are unabashedly allied with powerful corporate interests, including the coal companies trying to take away health care and pensions from retired miners. Yet they keep winning elections. During my visit, the Republican Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, was blocking West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s legislation to protect coal miners’ pensions. Why? Senator Brown said it was “because he doesn’t like the United Mine Workers Union,” which endorsed his Democratic opponent in 2014. Yet there was virtually no anti-Republican backlash, and to date, no political consequences for one of the most callous displays of disregard for the needs of coal miners I can remember.

  Now, I’ve met a lot of open-minded, big-hearted men and women who live and work in poor, rural communities. It’s hard to fault them for wanting to shake things up politically after so many years of disappointment. But anger and resentment do run deep. As Appalachian natives such as author J. D. Vance have pointed out, a culture of grievance, victimhood, and scapegoating has taken root as traditional values of self-reliance and hard work have withered. There’s a tendency toward seeing every problem as someone else’s fault, whether it’s Obama, liberal elites in the big cities, undocumented immigrants taking jobs, minorities soaking up government assistance—or me. It’s no accident that this list sounds exactly like Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

  But just because a situation can be exploited for political gain doesn’t mean there’s not a problem. The pain—and panic—that many blue-collar whites feel is real. The old world they talk wistfully about, when men were men and jobs were jobs, really is gone.

  Don’t underestimate the role of gender in this. In an economy where most women don’t have any choice but to work and few men earn enough to support a family on their own, traditional gender roles get redefined. Under the right circumstances, that can be liberating for women, good for kids, and even good for men, who now have a partner in shouldering the economic burden. But if the changes are caused by the inability of men to make a decent living when they want to work and can’t find a job, the toll on their sense of self-worth can be devastating.

  It all adds up to a complex dynamic. There’s both too much change and not enough change, all at the same time.

  When people feel left out, left behind, and left without options, the deep void will be filled by anger and resentment or depression and despair about those who supposedly took away their livelihoods or cut in line.

  Trump brilliantly tapped into all these feelings, especially with his slogan: Make America Great Again. Along with that were two other powerful messages: “What have you got to lose?” and “She’s been there for thirty years and never did anything.” What he meant was: “You can have the old America back once I vanquish the immigrants, especially Mexicans and Muslims, send the Chinese products back, repeal Obamacare, demolish political correctness, ignore inconvenient facts, and pillory Hillary along with all the other liberal elites. I hate all the same people you do, and, unlike the other Republicans, I’ll do something to make your life better.”

  When my husband was a little boy, his uncle Buddy in Hope, Arkansas, liked to say: “Anybody who tries to make you mad and stop you from thinking is not your friend. There’s a lot to be said for thinking.” Like so much wisdom I’ve heard in my life, it’s easier to say than to live by. The far easier choice is to play the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey blame game—which is what has happened to Democrats in too many places.

  One of the most important but least recognized facts in American politics is that Republicans tend to win in places where more people are pessimistic or uncertain about the future, while Democrats tend to win where people are more optimistic. Those sentiments don’t track neatly with the overhyped dichotomy between the coasts and the heartland. There are plenty of thriving communities in both blue and red states that have figured out how to educate their workforces, harness their talents, and participate in the twenty-first-century economy. And some of the most doom-and-gloom Americans are relatively affluent middle-aged and retired whites—the very viewers Fox News prizes—while many poor immigrants, people of color, and young people are burning with energy, ambition, and optimism.

  As an example, in 2016 I got whacked in Arkansas as a whole, but I won Pulaski County, home of Little Rock, the state’s vibrant capital city, by 18 points. I lost Pennsylvania, but I won Pittsburgh with 75 percent of the vote. Trump may think of that city as an emblem of the industrial past—he contrasted it with Paris when he pulled out of the global climate agreement in 2017—but the reality is that Pittsburgh has reinvented itself as a hub of clean energy, education, and biomedical research. As I saw when I campaigned there many times, people in Pittsburgh are determined and optimistic about the future.

  So I can’t say what was in the hearts and minds of those men and women standing in the rain in Williamson chanting “Go home Hillary!” Did they despise me because they’d heard on Fox that I wanted to put coal miners out of business? Did some think I turned my back on them after they’d voted for me in the Democratic primary in 2008? Did they turn against me because I served as Obama’s Secretary of State and believed climate change was a rea
l threat to our future? Or did their rage flow from deeper tribal politics? All I knew for certain was they were angry, they were loud, and they hated my guts. I gave them a big smile, waved, and went inside.

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  Dr. Dino Beckett, the director of the Williamson Health and Wellness Center, was waiting for me, along with about a dozen locals and Senator Joe Manchin. They were eager to tell me about how they were working to turn around their struggling community. They had started an incubator to help local entrepreneurs get new small businesses off the ground. The county was trying to turn abandoned mining properties into industrial parks that could attract new employers. They knew they needed better housing infrastructure, so they put people to work refurbishing homes and businesses. They realized that many of their neighbors were struggling with opiate addiction and other chronic health issues such as diabetes, so they opened a nonprofit health clinic. A recovering drug addict who had become a counselor told me how meaningful the work was, even if stemming the epidemic of substance abuse was a Sisyphean endeavor.

  To make sure I heard a cross section of perspectives, Dr. Beckett had invited a laid-off coal worker he knew from their children’s school soccer team, Bo Copley, along with his wife, Lauren. Bo was a Republican and a fervent Pentecostal, with a T-shirt that said “#JesusIsBetter.” He lost his job as a maintenance planner at a local mining operation the year before. Now the family was getting by on what Lauren could earn through her small business as a photographer. When it was Bo’s turn to speak, his voice was heavy with emotion.

  “Let me say my apologies for what we’ve heard outside,” Bo began, with the chants of the protesters still audible. “The reason you hear those people out there saying some of the things that they say is because when you make comments like ‘We’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs,’ these are the kind of people that you’re affecting.”