What Happened

by Clinton, Hillary Rodham

  Cornell Belcher, a respected Democratic pollster, has studied changing racial attitudes in America extensively and documented this backlash in his book A Black Man in the White House. He described Obama’s election as setting off anxiety among many white Americans that built over time. “After a significantly brief honeymoon in November 2008, racial aversion among Republicans climbed precipitously,” Belcher wrote, “and stayed at that level until October 2014 when it again spiked—to an all-time high.” It’s not surprising that those spikes occurred around the two midterm elections, when Republican candidates were working double-time to demonize Obama and he wasn’t on the ballot and fully engaged in fighting back.

  Other academic researchers have studied a phenomenon they call “racial priming.” Their findings show that when white voters are encouraged to view the world through a racial lens and to be more conscious of their own racial identity, they act and vote more conservatively. That’s exactly what happened in 2016. John McCain and Mitt Romney made principled decisions not to make their campaigns about race. McCain famously stood up to one of his own voters at a town hall in October 2008 and assured the crowd that rumors about Obama being foreign were false. By contrast, Donald Trump rose to prominence by spreading the racist “birther” lie that President Obama was not born in the United States. Trump launched his campaign for President by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. And he continued to make racially charged attacks right up until Election Day. All this happened against the backdrop of police shootings and Black Lives Matter protests. It makes sense that by Election Day, more white voters may have been thinking about race and identity than in 2012, when those issues were rarely talked about on either side.

  To be fair, I likely contributed to a heightened racial consciousness as well. I called out Trump’s bigotry and his appeal to white supremacists and the so-called Alt-Right. In a speech in Reno, Nevada, in August 2016, I laid out a detailed case documenting Trump’s history of racial discrimination in his business career and how he used a campaign based on prejudice and paranoia to take hate groups mainstream and help a radical fringe take over the Republican Party. I denounced his decision to hire Stephen Bannon, the head of Breitbart, as campaign CEO. I also spoke positively throughout the campaign about racial justice, immigration, and Muslims.

  As a result, some white voters may have decided I wasn’t on their side. For example, my meeting with Black Lives Matter activists and support for the Mothers of the Movement was seen by some white police officers as presuming their guilt, in spite of my long-standing support for more police on the street, community policing, and 9/11 first responders. I always said we needed to both reform policing and support police officers. It didn’t seem to matter. But this is one issue on which I don’t second-guess myself. No parent should fear for the life of an unarmed, law-abiding child when he walks out of the house. That’s not “identity politics.” It’s simple justice.

  But back to the question at hand. I find the data on all this to be compelling. Yet I believe that, in the end, the debate between “economic anxiety” and racism or “cultural anxiety” is a false choice. If you listen to many Trump voters talk, you start to see that all these different strands of anxiety and resentment are related: the decline of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest that had allowed white men without a college degree to provide their families with middle-class lives, the breakdown of traditional gender roles, anger at immigrants and other minorities for “cutting in line” and getting more than their “fair share,” discomfort with a more diverse and cosmopolitan culture, worries about Muslims and terrorism, and a general sense that things aren’t going the way they should and that life was better and easier for previous generations. In people’s lives and worldviews, concerns about economics, race, gender, class, and culture all blend together.

  The academics see this, too. According to the director of the Voter Study Group, which followed thousands of voters from 2012 to 2016, “Voters who experienced increased or continued economic stress were inclined to have become more negative about immigration and terrorism, demonstrating how economic pressures coincided with cultural concerns.”

  This isn’t new. Back in 1984, Ronald Reagan won by a landslide by flipping formerly Democratic blue-collar whites. The term “Reagan Democrats” came out of a series of famous focus groups conducted in Macomb County, Michigan, by Stan Greenberg, who went on to become Bill’s pollster in 1992. Stan found that many working-class white voters “interpreted Democratic calls for economic fairness as code for transfer payments to African-Americans,” and blamed blacks “for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives.” After the 2016 election, Stan went back to Macomb County to talk to “Trump Democrats.” He found pretty much all the sentiments you would expect—frustration with elites and a rigged political system, and a desire for fundamental change, but also anger at immigrants who compete with them for jobs and don’t speak English, fear of Muslims, and resentment of minorities who are seen as collecting more than their fair share of government benefits. Some of the comments sounded like they were ripped straight from the 1984 focus groups.

  Stan largely blames President Obama for turning working-class voters away from the Democratic Party by embracing free trade and “heralding economic progress and the bailout of the irresponsible elites, while ordinary people’s incomes crashed and they continued to struggle financially.” That’s another reminder that, despite the heroic work President Obama did to get our economy back on the right track after the financial crisis, many Americans didn’t feel the recovery in their own lives and didn’t give Democrats credit. Stan also thought my campaign was too upbeat on the economy, too liberal on immigration, and not vocal enough about trade. Still, he notes that coming out of the third debate, I was poised to overperform with white working-class women compared with Obama in 2012 and perhaps achieve “historic numbers,” until those voters broke away in the final week and went to Trump.

  Stan thinks this happened because I “went silent on the economy and change.” But that’s baloney. I went back to look at what I said in my final rallies across the battlegrounds. The day before the election, I told a crowd in Grand Rapids, Michigan, “We’ve got to get the economy working for everybody, not just those at the top. If you believe, as I do, that America thrives when the middle class thrives, then you have to vote tomorrow!” I went on to pledge “the biggest investment in good paying jobs since World War Two,” with an emphasis on infrastructure jobs that can’t be outsourced, advanced manufacturing that pays high wages, stronger unions, a higher minimum wage, and equal pay for women. I also hit Trump for buying cheap Chinese steel and aluminum for his buildings and for wanting to cut taxes for millionaires, billionaires, and corporations. I spoke directly to “people in our country who feel like they’ve been knocked down, and nobody cares.” I said, “If you give me the honor of being your President, I am going to do everything I can to get this country and everybody in it back up on our feet.” I wouldn’t call that going “silent on the economy and change.”

  That said, I do sometimes lie awake at night thinking about how we closed the campaign and if there was anything different we could have done that would have made a difference. It’s true that before Comey’s letter, I had planned to close with aggressive advertising reminding working families of my plans to change our country and their lives for the better. But after Comey’s letter sent my numbers sliding, the consensus on my team was that our best strategy was to hit Trump hard and remind voters why he was an unacceptable choice. Was that a mistake? Maybe. But we were competing against wall-to-wall negative coverage of emails, plus the slime of fake news.

  It’s easy to second-guess. It’s also easy to listen to the ugliest comments in Stan’s focus groups and just get furious. But I try to hold on to my empathy. I still believe what I said immediately after my ill-fated comment about the “basket of deplorables,” although this part didn’t get much attention: many Trump supporters “are people w
ho feel that 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 . . . Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.” Those were people I intended to help.

  Voter Suppression

  All of this played out against a landscape shaped by structural factors that didn’t get enough scrutiny during the campaign. Most notable is the impact of voter suppression, through restrictive laws as well as efforts to discourage and depress turnout.

  An unnamed senior Trump campaign official boasted to the press in late October 2016 that “we have three major voter suppression operations underway,” aimed at white liberals, young women, and African Americans. It’s worth pausing on this for a moment and reflecting on the fact that they weren’t even trying to hide that they were suppressing the vote. Most campaigns try to win by attracting more support. Trump actively tried to discourage people from voting at all. They used some of the same tactics as the Russians, including trafficking in fake news and under-the-radar Facebook attacks. Despicable stuff. After the election, Trump even thanked African Americans for not voting.

  But whatever Trump was up to was just the latest in a long-term Republican strategy to discourage and disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters.

  The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts opened the floodgates by gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013. When I was in the Senate, we voted to reauthorize the law 98 to 0 and President George W. Bush signed it. But Justice Roberts essentially argued that racism was a thing of the past, and therefore the country no longer needed key protections of the Voting Rights Act. It was one of the worst decisions the court has ever made. By 2016, fourteen states had new restrictions on voting, including burdensome ID requirements aimed at weeding out students, poor people, the elderly, and people of color. Republicans in many states also limited the number and hours of polling places, curtailed early voting and same-day registration, scrapped language assistance for non-English speakers, and purged large numbers of voters from the rolls, sometimes erroneously. Ohio alone has removed up to two million voters since 2011. Much of this national effort was coordinated by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who runs a suppression initiative called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program.

  Kobach is the nation’s leading voter suppression advocate and was recently fined for misleading a federal court. He is also the vice chairman of the new commission Trump has created to deal with the phantom epidemic of voting fraud. Studies have found that out of the more than a billion votes cast in the United States between 2000 and 2014, there were just 31 credible cases of voter impersonation. Yet Trump has claimed that millions of people voted illegally in 2016. A review by the Washington Post found only 4 documented instances of voter fraud out of 136 million votes cast in 2016—including an Iowa woman who voted twice for Trump. As Trump’s own lawyers asserted in a Michigan court: “All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.” Nonetheless, Kobach and Republicans across the country continue to use false claims about fraud to justify curtailing voting rights.

  Since the election, studies have documented how big an impact all this suppression had on the outcome. States with harsh new voting laws, such as Wisconsin, saw turnout dip 1.7 points, compared with a 1.3-point increase in states where the law didn’t change. And the drop was particularly acute among black voters. Turnout was down 5 points in heavily African American counties in states with strict new ID laws, but down just 2.2 points in similar counties in states without the new laws.

  In Wisconsin, where I lost by just 22,748 votes, a study from Priorities USA estimated that the new voter ID law helped reduce turnout by 200,000 votes, primarily from low-income and minority areas. We know for sure that turnout in the city of Milwaukee fell by 13 percent. By contrast, in neighboring Minnesota, which has similar demographics but did not impose arduous new restrictions on voting, turnout in heavily African American counties declined much less and overall turnout was essentially flat. In Illinois, where the state put in place new measures to make it easier to vote, not harder, turnout was up more than 5 percent overall. Among African Americans, turnout was 14 points higher in Illinois than in Wisconsin. The experience living under a deeply unpopular Trumpian governor there may also have motivated people to show up and reject the even worse national version. In short, voting laws matter. A lot. Before the election, one Republican state representative in Wisconsin predicted the new law would help Trump pull off an upset in the state. It turns out he was right.

  The Associated Press profiled several Wisconsinites who were turned away or did not have their votes counted because they did not have the required identification, including a Navy veteran with an out-of-state driver’s license, a recent college graduate whose student ID was disqualified because it lacked an expiration date, and a sixty-six-year old woman with chronic lung disease who lost her driver’s license just before Election Day. She provided Social Security and Medicare cards and a government-issued bus pass with a photo, but her vote was still not counted. The AP reported that these disenfranchised citizens were “not hard to find.”

  Reading these stories is both eye-opening and infuriating. The right to vote is the foundation of our free society, and protecting that right is the single most important thing we can do to strengthen our democracy. Yet in state after state, Republicans are still at it. President Trump’s obsession to root out nonexistent voter fraud is just cover for further suppression. Already in 2017, more states have imposed new restrictions on voting than in 2015 and 2016 combined. Nearly a hundred bills have been introduced in thirty-one states. This is a problem that will grow only more pervasive and urgent in future elections.

  Where Do Democrats Go from Here?

  Republicans have another advantage: a powerful, permanent political infrastructure, particularly online. After Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, and widespread praise for the Obama campaign’s technology, Republicans vowed to catch up. Between 2013 and 2016, the Republican National Committee invested more than $100 million in data operations. Outside groups such as the Mercers and the Koch brothers also spent heavily.

  By contrast, the Democratic National Committee was badly outgunned. Tom Perez, the new DNC chair, has said, “We’ve got to up our game on technology.” He’s right. Perez pledged to “do a better job of building the data analytics platform that will enable us not only to succeed in elections today but to be the state of the art for decades to come.” That’s crucial.

  If we want to win in the future, Democrats need to catch up and leapfrog ahead. And this isn’t just about data. We need an “always-on” content distribution network that can match what the right-wing has built. That means an array of loosely connected Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, Twitter feeds, Snapchat stories, and Reddit communities churning out memes, graphics, and videos. More sophisticated data collection and analysis can support and feed this network. I’m no expert in these matters, but I know enough to understand that most people get their news from screens, so we have to be there 24/7.

  There are other lessons I hope Democrats learn from 2016. Since the election, the party has been debating how best to set ourselves up to win in the future, starting with the midterms in 2018. I think most of the perceived drama between the center-left and the left-left on this question is overblown. We’re far closer together than any of us are to Trump and the Republicans, who just keep getting more extreme. Bernie Sanders and I wrote the 2016 platform together, and he called it the most progressive one in history. We share many of the same values and most of our differences over policy are relatively minor compared to the stark divide between the two parties.

  You’d also be hard pressed to find any Democrat who doesn’t agree that we need to continue sharpening our economic pitch and that we should make a sustained effort to win back voters who switched from Obama to Trump. We
’ll have to convince them that Democrats respect them, care about them, and have a plan to make life better, not just in big cities but also in small towns and rural areas. That might become easier as voters watch Trump break his populist promises and embrace a congressional Republican agenda that tilts the playing field even more toward the wealthy and powerful at the expense of working families. So far, their health care debate is about whether they’re going to take it away from 22 million Americans to fund tax cuts for the wealthy!

  So yes, we need to compete everywhere, and we can’t afford to write off any voter or any state. But it’s not all kumbaya in the Democratic Party. We’re hearing a lot of misguided rhetoric and analysis that could lead us in the wrong direction.

  One argument is about whether pursuing the Russia investigation is distracting from making the case to voters about health care and the economy. This is another false choice. It makes all the sense in the world for congressional candidates to focus on pocketbook issues, and the disastrous Republican health care legislation should be front and center. But that doesn’t mean Democrats already in Congress should stop doing their jobs. They should continue providing rigorous oversight and hold the Trump administration accountable. I have confidence that Democrats can walk and chew gum at the same time. Plus, the ever-growing Russia scandal is showing Americans that Trump is a liar, and that will help us convince them that he’s lying about health care and jobs, too. And don’t underestimate how, if left unchecked, Russia’s covert operations can easily be used again in the future to defeat other Democrats. That torrent of misinformation helped drown out my message and steal my voice. It gave Trump cover to escape his own problems. This can all happen again if we don’t stop it. Oh, and for any Democratic members of Congress feeling squeamish about pushing too hard, just ask yourselves what Republicans would be doing if the situation were reversed.