So it has been 10 days since the election debacle. I still feel overwhelmed, sad, terrified, depressed, angry, powerless, but at least now I can get out of bed — it took 3 days of almost constant sleep to do that.
I wanted to share some experiences I’ve had with three women voters just to illustrate the level of awareness that some voters have on the issue. I happen to be presenting three women because these are the most intriguing instances I encountered, but I’m sure I could tell similar stories about male voters as well.
Let me first begin with a little disclosure: I worked for Trump indirectly for quite some time. No, I can’t go into greater detail and no, while my experiences proved that he is just the kind of person we all know him to be, I really didn’t have stuff salacious enough to be of interest to the media.
So, let me present these portraits of three voters and I hope that will illustrate my point about some of the choices that some voters made.
I am in Connecticut. We are not a swing state, so we see very little advertising, unless it is on Dish from the New York/New Jersey area. Hillary did not come her during the general, Trump sadly did.
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So one Tuesday night a month or so ago, I am sitting in a Fairfield CT Italian restaurant. I was waiting for my partner when the waitress brought some water and asked, “Can I ask you a question? Who are you voting for?” I was stunned as around here, people don’t openly discuss politics much. I was taken aback but yet impressed with her frankness. I knew I’d get maybe 10 sentences in. So I gave the general pro-Hillary spiel. I asked her what she thought.
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t like either, so I’m just asking people.”
“Why don’t you like Hillary?” I asked.
“I don’t know, there is just something I don’t like...”
“Well, if you’re concerned about the email issue, you do understand that she was only the second Secretary of State in the country to use email. Colin Powell deleted all of his emails and used AOL. People are upset about three emails that were not properly marked, one was about a new president of Malawi, the other about Kofi Annan stepping down at the UN”
“No,” she signed, “I don’t know anything. All I know are Facebook memes, so that’s why I’m asking people.”
It became clear to me that even this was probably going over her head. I’m sure she’d never heard of Kofi Annan and had no clue what Malawi was. But I pressed on — does the email thing still bother her? No, not really. Well, what about Benghazi. You do know that there were losses under Bush, President Clinton etc. No, that didn’t bother her that much. Well, what about Trump? His dishonest business practices, cheating people, his vile comments about women? She nodded in agreement.
“Yeah, there’s just something I don’t like about her...”
No clue how she voted or if she voted.
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New York City — meeting a friend a pretty actress, whose paths have also crossed with Trump. She is an immigrant but from an Eastern European country and someone who (or at least whose type) Trump has found attractive in the past. She started by expressing her general disdain for Trump, what a nightmare it will be if he won. Ok, everything’s groovy so far. Then it came.
“But, I won’t be voting...”
“Whaaaaaat?” I exclaimed. (Because she remembers the days in a communist regime when people weren’t given that right).
“I just don’t like Hillary,” she said. “Yes, she’d be a thousand times better than Trump and I’m glad it’s a woman, but she just doesn’t inspire me. I just don’t like her.”
So I wanted to coax this out. What was it? She didn’t care about the emails. She didn’t care about Benghazi. She was fully aware of what Trump was. But it took me five minutes to finally get it out of her, “I don’t like how she handled Bill’s affairs. She should have dumped him.” “So, wait, with everything that is at stake here, you are letting an affair from 20 years ago guide your decision and blaming Hillary for her husband’s actions or her deeply personal choice to stay?” Even she knew how shallow this sounded.
“Well, Hillary will win New York, so it is just not worth my time.. she’ll win New York anyway..”
She then went on to say that she likes Obama because she recently had a cancer scare and all of the procedures would have cost her $50,000. Thank God for Obamacare. Our previous discussions had been that Obama wasn’t great because, “He hasn’t done shit.” I would retort that he has indeed done shit and he can’t do that much when every proposal he makes is blocked. I made this point several times.
Result: As far as I know, she didn’t vote, because other people in New York would vote and do the job.
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Elsewhere in Connecticut. I’m at the gym talking to my trainer “Cindy”. Now generally this is a neutral space but there are a few jocks running around with “Hillary for Jail” shirts. I’m quite sure they couldn’t give a cohesive sentence about the emails or Benghazi, but they want to “lock her up”. And I’m sure it’s obvious that trainers spend many hours at the gym, so they mainly rely on what they see on Facebook or word-of-mouth from clients. I’ve also heard individual trainers talking at different times, and voila, their political views shifted depending on the client they were with.
So “Cindy” and I started talking. She was quick to haul out the false equivalence. “I don’t like either one. Both are bad!” Oh, really? So we started with the basics. Yes, emails. It was THREE in question. You get that. You know how the Bush admin deleted 22 million emails? Benghazi. You know about embassy deaths under Bush? This was all news to her. I started filling in details about Trump, some from my own experience. Who has a wife or a daughter or sister or female friend for whom they’d accept, “I’d go after her like a bitch..”? So over the course of several sessions, I was able to convince her that they weren’t “both alike or equally bad”. She lacked very basic knowledge of the electoral college. On election day she asked me if Hillary and Trump were at the White House.
Result: She voted for Hillary. But had it not been for some very careful reasoning, she probably would have just sat at home.
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So what do these three stories have in common? That if you are an uniformed voter and don’t follow politics, you are mainly informed by anecdotes of anecdotes. Or worse, you don’t have any of the tangibles, just this general feeling of malaise and distrust which the media have dumped on Hillary Clinton for decades. If you try and dissect it, there is often little there. Just this healthy yearly, monthly, weekly, daily injection of disdain that you would get. It wasn’t rational, these are just regular people who hang out on the margins of the news, hear the occasional snippet, but do pick up on the million and one subtle clues, “Drip, drip, drip” drones Andrea Mitchell post-Comey — about absolutely nothing. Tweety and others were half expecting her to be perp walked that very minute while the Chris Christie case, a case of real criminal activity, goes on for years. And Christie had the audacity to want Hillary “locked up.” I think this is a very typical portrait of the average uniformed voter. It doesn’t take a lot to create subtle memes to change their belief system. I’m sure had Hillary been Republican, the messages they would be getting is that they should be swelled with pride at this historic event. And they would have gotten this constant, prevalent message even if Hillary had all of Trumps offenses. We here at Kos live in a type of bubble. We understand media constructs and how they work. Your average uninformed voter does not. These voters had decades of unfounded mistrust drilled into them.
Which brings me to the current round of diaries, also based on the Guardian article, blaming the loss on Hillary’s “neglect” of the Rust Belt. Were there miscalculations? Yes. Will Robby Mook be asking himself for the rest of his days what he could have done differently? Yes.
But the common wisdom has been: Protect the swing states at all cost. Hillary had a major presence in Pennsylvania, was there every few days. She had a major presence in Ohio despite numbers which were not so encouraging. But Hillary neglected the Rust Belt. She neglected what was believed to be blue states with limited time and resources, perhaps in order to have more rallies in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania. This theory of neglect of the Rust Belt kind of falls apart when you see she lost Pennsylvania, where she was practically camped out. And who here wasn’t cheering when she went to Arizona? “50 state strategy! Broaden the electoral map!” Does any one believe she could have not taken a plane to Madison WI instead of Arizona for a rally? And she lost Wisconsin by just 13,000 votes. It was a miscalculation. But she didn’t appeal to white, blue collar workers? Really? I saw a number of adds about Trump getting his products made in other countries, people cheated at Trump U, ads on his business history. But unlike Romney, there was so much more wrong with Trump — his basic treatment of people, his misogyny, his objectivization of women, his denigrating a war hero, his lack of common decency. Perhaps the Clinton campaign made the mistake of trying to appeal to people’s better angels.
But what was she fighting against? An invisible wall of innuendo built up over decades. This mistrust just built in. Echos of Katie Couric asking Hillary, “Why don’t they like you?” when she would never ask the same question of Boehner or McConnell. Mrs. Allan Greenspan (Andrea Mitchell), whose husband’s ideas almost wrecked the world economy, get to wax poetic about “Drip, drip, drip..” further feeding the irrational disdain which people cannot understand. And make no mistake: they can build negative memes about anybody: Jimmy Carter got some really shitty cards during his presidency but he is forever labeled with “malaise”, Al Gore was a brilliant man, but was labeled an effeminate robot. John Kerry was a Purple Heart war hero, they tore him down. They would have done the same to Bernie, O’Malley, Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman. They did it to Obama, with a fresh political slate. It doesn’t matter who, they will construct the hate.
And if you are an uninformed voter like the three ladies I presented, that’s all you pick up. Just the ginned up outrage. And I would argue that the stronger the candidate, the stronger the pushback of constructed hate will be. The question is — how do we change it? Hillary’s campaign wasn’t perfect but it faced so many odds that others have not had to encounter — people programmed, relentlessly and for decades to irrationally hate her.
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_Karen_Rubin.jpg?1460907726 "Democratic Presidential Candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders debate in Brooklyn, April 14, 2016")
