Hillary Clinton’s characterization of some Donald Trump voters as a “basket of deplorables” will cost the Democratic nominee votes, but she shouldn’t apologize for it, according to her running mate.
“There are supporters we’re not going to get,” Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, told the Washington Post. But he defended the substance of the comment, which reinforced the Clinton campaign’s long-running allegation that Trump is bringing racism into the political mainstream.
“I was just seeing this morning there’s some press event in D.C. today by a white nationalist group that’s talking about how they’ve received a higher profile because of the Trump campaign,” he said. “We’ve seen [former Ku Klux Klan leader] David Duke do robo-calls encouraging people to vote for Donald Trump last week. So there is an odd way in which [Trump’s] campaign has elevated the profile of some of these groups that are very, I think, dangerous.”
Nevertheless, Clinton walked back the remarks on Saturday, saying it wasn’t “a good idea” to generalize about voters.
“Many of Trump’s supporters are hard-working Americans who just don’t feel like the economy or our political system are working for them,” she said.
Clinton made that point in her original statement as well. “To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” she said in New York City at a fundraiser on Friday. “But that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.”
