Hillary Clinton is her own worst enemy.
Her “deplorables” quip, which reportedly did the most damage to her chances with undecided voters, was the product of campaign strategy sessions, according to the New York Times’ Amy Chozick.
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The story behind how her team landed on this particularly disastrous message is wild. (You can read more about it here from Washington Examiner’s Phil Wegmann.) The only thing crazier than the “deplorables” backstory is its overall arc, from birth, to life, to death.
The line was message-tested first on like-minded supporters from wealthy coastal enclaves. It always got laughs, according to Chozick. Clinton took the line on the road. On Sept. 8, 2016, she said in an interview with an Israeli television station, “You could put Trump’s supporters in two big baskets. They’re what I call the deplorables.”
But it wasn’t until Sep. 9, 2016, that Clinton’s laugh line caught national attention.
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” she said at a high-dollar fundraiser in Manhattan.
As expected, her supporters cheered. The rest of the voting population, however, took a dimmer view when it got out. As it turns out, Silicon Valley and Manhattan are not the best test audiences for assessing a winning campaign message. The backlash was fierce and immediate, scaring Clinton and her team into issuing quasi-apologies.
“Obviously not everyone supporting Trump is part of the alt right, but alt right leaders are with Trump,” said traveling press secretary Nick Merrill. “And their supporters appear to make up half his crowd when you observe the tone of his events.”
Clinton herself said in a statement Sept. 10, “Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ – that was wrong.”
The pseudo-mea culpas didn’t work. The damage was already done, and Clinton never really recovered from it. In fact, it hurt her in the polls more than any single issue, according to a consultant who was hired by the Democratic nominee’s team to track undecided voters.
“[A]ll hell broke loose,” Diane Hessan recalled in an op-ed published by the Boston Globe just days after the 2016 election.
“There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice,” she added. “It wasn’t FBI Director James Comey, Part One or Part Two; it wasn’t Benghazi or the e-mails or Bill Clinton’s visit with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac. No, the conversation shifted the most during the weekend of Sept. 9, after Clinton said, ‘You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.'”
To this day, Clinton refuses to concede that the line was a very, very bad idea, even after being shown that the message-tested remark badly hurt her campaign.
“[Y]ou offended some people who didn’t personally feel ‘deplorable’ at all,” “CBS Sunday Morning” anchor Jane Pauley told her in a September 2017 interview.
Clinton responded, “I don’t buy that. I don’t buy that. I’m sorry I gave him a political gift of any kind, but I don’t think that was determinative.”
Playing it off as a gaffe while also refusing to concede it damaged her campaign, makes sense. After all, it’s less embarrassing than admitting she thought it was a good idea in the first place.
