The Silencing of the Hillary Clinton Supporter
The entire article is here. The article is very good and well-worth the read. (Goes to Dame Magazine)
One issue they bring up right away in the article is that the media dismisses the women who supported Hillary Clinton as not mattering, and exonerates itself in its culpability in Mrs. Clinton’s loss.
It seems to me (though your mileage may vary), the media is working very hard to ignore the overwhelming majority of African-American women who voted for Mrs. Clinton, as well as a sizeable portion of white men. The media seems to be focused on either the “regretful Trump voter” or normalising Donald Trump entirely for access on an equal footing with outlets like Breitbart and Infowars. Of the majority that voted for Hillary Clinton, they don’t just want her to go away, they want to treat us all as if we don’t exist.
That said, the opening of the article:
Last Friday, Hillary Clinton delivered the commencement speech at her alma mater, Wellesley, to a rapt audience of young women, just as Rebecca Traister’s New York magazine cover story went live online, vaulting the former presidential candidate back into the news. And with Clinton’s interview at Recode’s Code2017 yesterday where she addressed the myriad reasons for her loss, so came the return of trolls and the tiresome exegesis that demands a single “truth”: that Clinton lost because she and her campaign failed to connect with the white working class. Misogyny, James Comey, the Russians be damned.
As we know now, only 43 percent of white women voted for Hillary, which of course had a major impact in the end. However the narrative being pushed by the right and even from some on the left is that Trump voters were predominantly middle and working class and disenfranchised, and that she ignored them. According to The Atlantic Monthly’s Derek Thompson, that is a dangerous myth. “Hillary Clinton talked about the working class, middle-class jobs, and the dignity of work constantly. And she still lost,” Thompson writes. “She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs … She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.”