Hillary Clinton has certainly been taking it on the chin lately for losing the working-class white voter, particularly in the Upper Midwest. Professional and amateur pundits alike have been quick to pile on, claiming that she failed to sufficiently adopt Bernie Sanders’ pro-worker/anti-Wall Street message and, thus, never connected with their fundamental worries and concerns.
Perhaps - but perhaps it was for other reasons as well, reasons that actually point to her courage in standing up for what is right:
1). Her unwavering support for Black Lives Matter
Painful as it may be for those of us who value equality and social justice to acknowledge, the fact is that many middle-class white people are turned off by BLM, which they see as largely anti-police and anti-law-and-order, two things they hold dear. And that, combined with watching well-paid black athletes kneeling during the National Anthem at football games, may have created a perfect storm of racial resentment among certain segments of the white population. Yet, did Hillary back down from defending the BLM movement? No. In fact, she often appeared prominently beside many of the mothers of the victims of police violence, not allowing them to to fade into the background of a chaotic presidential campaign.
2) Her unwavering support for American Muslims
In the wake of Paris, San Bernardino and Orlando, let alone the rise of ISIS, it would have been easy for Hillary to abandon her principles and join that bloviating orange menace in scare-mongering about terrorism and Syrian refugees. Instead, she did the right thing and stood up for both groups of people, most prominently in her championing of Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim hero killed in Iraq defending his fellow soldiers.
3) Her unwavering defense of the undocumented and the Dreamers
Again, not necessarily an issue guaranteed to win over the hearts of white working-class people in the Midwest, especially in the face of a man who spent much of his time demonizing such people as job-stealers, rapists and murderers.
In short, Hillary never succumbed to the temptation to marginalize “the other” to placate disgruntled white voters. (You’ll note that Hillary actually IMPROVED her margins over Obama in Arizona, Texas and Georgia, something we, oddly, don’t hear too much about these days but can look upon as providing dividends in the future).
4). Her strong stance on gun control.
It’s important to remember that Hillary is the first presidential candidate in a generation to actually run hard against the NRA and in favor of reasonable gun control measures. It’s not for nothing that Obama barely even mentioned gun control in either of his two presidential runs (he only began pushing for it in earnest after the Sandy Hook massacre which occurred shortly after his re-election). And the NRA responded with a well-funded advertising campaign against her.
Look, I’m not saying Hillary shouldn’t have emphasized economic issues more in appealing to the disgruntled white working-class folk of the Rust Belt states. But to attribute her failure to just that one factor fails to acknowledge that there are other issues that matter to voters as well, issues that go to the core of their being and identity. And by refusing to back down on these crucial issues, despite the fact that they were unlikely to garner her much support among working class whites - and indeed may have cost her many of their votes - Hillary deserves at least some points for standing up for what is right.
Update: Thank you everybody for your recommendations and your thoughtful commentary on the subject. I would like to reiterate that my intention here is not to ignore or downplay the economic anxiety of the white working-class voters but to point out what I think are other factors that seem to be largely ignored in the debate so far in the media and elsewhere. Failing to acknowledge the part that racism, xenophobia, Islamaphobia, etc. might have played in this election would be as detrimental to finding a solution as failing to acknowledge the economic aspects. Both are vitally important to getting a full view of the picture.
