Author Dan Kauffman on Thursday argued that Hillary Clinton’s loss in Wisconsin during the 2016 presidential race was reflective of the Democratic Party’s abandoning the labor movement and the working class.
“It’s quite well known, she [Clinton] never campaigned during the general election in Wisconsin, which was a shock to many people,” Kauffman, who wrote “The Fall of Wisconsin,” told Hill.TV’s Krystal Ball on “Rising.”
“It’s emblematic of the abandonment of the national Democratic Party for things like the labor movement. The real core, the grass roots, the rank-and-file people, the foot soldiers in elections, they have been abandoned,” he continued.
“It wasn’t just Hillary Clinton. During the recall election against Scott Walker in 2012, President Barack Obama did not come to Wisconsin to show any kind of support for the protesters or the Democratic candidate,” he said.
Kauffman went on to explain how the Democratic Party establishment used to be more aligned with working-class interests. He claimed that changed during former President Clinton’s tenure in the White House.
“The donors and the funding has moved more toward professional, managerial class, and that was shown in Wisconsin,” he said. “They [the Democratic Party] didn’t really do that much if anything to help, and these were teachers, corrections officers, I mean really just the bedrock of citizens that formed the bulk of their voters.”
President Trump garnered 47.2 percent of the vote in Wisconsin in 2016, while Clinton got 46.5 percent.
Clinton last year addressed her loss in traditionally Democratic states such as Wisconsin in her book “What Happened.”
“If just 40,000 people across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had changed their minds, I would have won,” Clinton wrote. “With a margin like that, everyone can have a pet theory about why I lost. It’s difficult to rule anything out. But every theory needs to be tested against the evidence that I was winning until October 28, when [former FBI Director] Jim Comey injected emails back into the election.”
— Julia Manchester
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