Last weekend, Hillary Clinton spoke in India. There, she continued to struggle publicly with the most humiliating experience of her life, not her husband's continual sexual misconduct or her State Department's mishandling of Benghazi but her loss of the presidency to a reality television show host. Hillary's not over it. And she never will be.
That much was obvious from her incredible, palpable anger at the American public. She first explained that Trump voters are stupid poor people: "what the map doesn't show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward."
But Clinton wasn't done. She then stated that Trump voters are ignoramuses who still stumble out to their outhouses in the middle of the night and stoop over a hole in the ground while reading old copies of Ku Klux Klan newsletters. Those people, she said, fell prey to Trump's racist "Elmer Gantry" pitch: "you didn't like black people getting rights. You don't like women ... getting jobs. You don't want to ... see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are. Whatever your problem is, I'm going to solve it."
For good measure, Clinton tore into women who voted for Trump as well -- and suggested that they are all little Tammy Wynettes standing by their men. "(W)e don't do well with married white women," Clinton explained. "And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever believes you should." Yes, women who voted Republican only did so because they are afraid that ol' Bob is going to come home, get the beatin' stick out of the closet and start a-whoopin' and a-whalin' on the little woman.
And then, Democrats wonder why they had trouble winning Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Here's the reality: None of this is true. The average Trump voter outearned the average Clinton voter, and 86 percent of Trump voters were employed, about the same percentage as Clinton voters. Tribalism in voting exists on both sides: The intersectional politics of the Democratic Party is inherently race based, and Trump successfully responded to that sort of politics in reactionary fashion. As to the notion that married women didn't vote for Clinton because of their husbands, 52 percent of married women voted for Trump; 53 percent of married women voted Republican candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, and 51 percent voted for Republican candidate John McCain in 2008. Married women vote differently than single women not because of pressure from their menfolk but because they often have children, value family over career more than single women and are older than single women on average.
But here's the point: Clinton represents a nasty, vengeful take on populations she has trouble winning over. That nastiness has filtered through the Democratic Party, which is firmly convinced that it'd be better off drilling down into population groups it thinks are interested in tearing down the system along with them than reaching out to populations it has lost. If Democrats continue with that quest, they'll alienate the very voters who gave Trump victory in 2016.