2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: When I was a "millennial," I never expected candidates to "inspire" me [View all]EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)They didn't vote for Donald Trump because they had anything in common with him or because they understood his life experiences. Most of those people were exactly the people that Donald Trump has spent his life laughing at and staying as far away from as possible. So I am not going to let them off the hook for their choice by blaming Hillary for failing to connect with people who had much more in common with her than with Trump.
It's interesting that you are criticizing Hillary for not doing a good enough job playing "identity politics," assuming that people who share her age, gender and ethnicity should vote for her - the classic definition of identity politics - and if they don't vote for her based on their shared identity, it's HER fault. But maybe many people who share her age, gender and ethnicity are still bigots and misogynists (yes, women can be misogynistic) or are chillingly comfortable in their midst and rejected her because she was too closely aligned with people of color (aka "race traitor) and liberal women and consciously decided to join forces with Donald Trump and white working class men, even if it meant also lining up with the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis. Apparently, they felt they had more in common with that cabal than with the woman who has spent her life fighting for them. That is their fault, not hers.
I stand by my point. These people voted for Trump because he appealed to something in them that they feel won't be satisfied by the Democratic Party. And it's not economics. It's a social construct that they either are fully on board with or are very comfortable perpetuating to the detriment of people like me. It's a social construct that their predecessors, the Dixiecrats, took with them to the Republican Party when they stormed out of the Democratic Party 60 years ago - and good riddance. They can keep that social construct over there with them. We don't need it and don't want it over here.