You would think it’s a no-brainer in politics to never insult the people you want to vote for you. I well remember a local federal political candidate who failed in his first bid to unseat the incumbent. On losing, he fronted the cameras in the tally room and berated his would-be constituents for being too stupid to know what was good for them (him, of course).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was never given another chance to run.
Hillary Clinton isn’t even waiting to lose (another) election before insulting voters.
Hillary Clinton has been accused of another politically costly “deplorables” moment after suggesting American voters were not smart enough to understand how critical it was to vote Democrat in next Tuesday’s midterm elections, as a new poll showed white women flocking to the GOP.
This isn’t Hillary’s first colossal political faux pas, of course. Who can forget the “basket of deplorables” speech: what a way to win voters over, that was.
The former US Secretary of State and presidential candidate, who in 2016 said “half” of Donald Trump’s supporters were “deplorable” because of their alleged racism and sexism, told MSNBC on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) voters “didn’t really understand” the threat to democracy from voting Republican next week.
“I’m not sure they really understand the threats to their way of life,” Mrs Clinton, wife of the former Democrat president Bill Clinton, said speaking to far-left firebrand Joy Reid, host of the ReidOut.
At least in 2016, Clinton had the poor excuse of being well ahead in the opinion polls. The Democrats have no such excuse, this time around.
Separately, the Wall Street Journal released a horror poll for Democrats on Wednesday that suggested white women, traditional Democrat supporters who make up 20 per cent of the electorate, now backed Republicans by a 15-percentage point margin, a 27 percentage point turnaround since August.
“We’re talking about a collapse, if you will, in that group on the perceptions of the economy,” Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, who conducted the poll with Democratic pollster John Anzalone, told the Wall Street Journal.
Polls in the final few weeks of campaign, in contrast to much of the northern summer, when Democrats had the edge, increasingly pointed to an emerging red wave that would return both chambers of congress to Republican control in January.
According to PredictIt, a widely quoted political betting agency, the GOP has a 73 per cent chance of winning the Senate, up from 45 per cent a month ago, and a 91 per cent chance of retaking the House of Representatives.
That doesn’t mean the elections are in the bag, for anyone. Which is why both sides are throwing everything they have into the final week before the midterms.
Political stars from the both the major parties have been crisscrossing the country in the final week of the campaign to hoover up critical undecided voters.
Donald Trump will campaign in Sioux City, Iowa, on 3rd November ahead of a 5th November rally outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Saturday night.
Former president Barack Obama has announced he will join Joe Biden for a rally to help the state’s Democrat senate candidate John Fetterman in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest city, on the same night.
The Australian
I’m sure Biden would thank Clinton for her intervention (if he could remember who she was).
Hubris, as independent journalist Tim Poole warned Trump voters in 2020, will be your downfall. Republicans should never take the polls for granted – and neither should Democrats.
As someone remarked to me, “Do they want to lose?”
The answer, of course, is: of course they don’t. The problem is that occasionally the political class make the mistake of saying what they really think.
And that’s what Hillary really thinks about American voters: that they’re stupid and deplorable.
For their part, a great many Americans could be excused for thinking that in fact at least one of those was true of Hillary.
