Perhaps the left does care more(who knows their hearts), but their messaging is terrible. "Learn to code", "Deplorables", etc. Were you not paying attention when Hillary lost previously blue states based on her not "caring" about the working class there?
When taken in context, which parts of Clinton's 'deplorables' speech do you disagree with?
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?
They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that "other" basket of people are people who feel 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. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but — he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
I agree that Democrats lost the messaging war on this one . . . but largely because Republicans flat out lied by taking what was said radically out of context.
She said half his supporters are racist, sexist, homophobic, no-good-evil-bad-people. What is there to take out of context?
She did say the first half of what you posted . . . but not the second. She also admitted her mistake and apologized for saying 'half' the next day:
“Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong” -
https://time.com/4486601/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-basket-of-deplorables-half/It sounds like you agree with Clinton that she should not have said 'half'.
But do you disagree that there are a large number of Trump supporters who are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic?
"The most important finding of the analysis, however, is that racism—regardless of how it was measured—appears to have been an important motive in voting for Trump. As such, this is not a new finding because we know that, indeed, in 2008 Barack Obama suffered from a lack of support among racist voters (LewisBeck, Tien, and Nadeau 2010). The 2016 campaign, however, demonstrated that the effect of racism is not only present when voters have a choice among candidates with different ethnic backgrounds. The ideological positions and the rhetoric of the candidate clearly matter as well. In this specific election, negative attitudes toward ethnic minorities and immigrants swayed independents and some Democrats to opt for candidate Trump, thereby considerably strengthening his electoral-support base." -
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/537A8ABA46783791BFF4E2E36B90C0BE/S1049096518000367a.pdf/explaining_the_trump_vote_the_effect_of_racist_resentment_and_antiimmigrant_sentiments.pdf58% of Trump supporters hold a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Muslims.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-muslims-idUSKCN0ZV20C"The 2016 campaign witnessed a dramatic polarization in the vote choices of whites based on education. In this article, we have demonstrated that very little of this gap can be explained by the economic difficulties faced by less educated whites. Rather, most of the divide appears to be associated with sexism and denial of racism, especially among whites without college degrees. Attitudes on race and gender were powerful forces in structuring the 2016 presidential vote, even after controlling for partisanship and ideology. Of course, it would be misguided to seek an understanding of Trump's success in the 2016 presidential election through any single lens. Yet in a campaign that was marked by exceptionally explicit rhetoric on race and gender, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that voters’ attitudes on race and sex were so strongly associated with their vote choices. Indeed, our findings are consistent with those unearthed by Michael Tesler and John Sides using other data sources to study these relationships in the 2016 election.26
How might have racism and sexism mattered for affecting the final outcome? One way to approach this question is to consider how the vote might have differed if whites without college degrees had the same average levels on the racism denial and hostile sexism scales as whites with college degrees. If we make such an adjustment in our data, we find that Trump's total two‐party vote share would have declined by two points. In other words, if non‐college‐educated whites became somewhat more progressive in their attitudes toward racism and sexism so that they matched those of college educated whites, Clinton would have won the popular vote by 4 points instead of two points. Given the narrowness with which Clinton lost states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida, such a shift could have had a dramatic effect in terms of the Electoral College outcome.
Whether the 2016 election will simply be an aberration or the beginning of a trend remains to be seen. However, there is reason to think that Trump's strategy of using explicitly racist and sexist appeals to win over white voters may be followed by candidates in future elections. After all, Valentino, Neuner, and Vandenborek show that there is no longer a price to be paid by politicians who make such explicit appeals.27 Explicit racist and sexist appeals appeared to cost Trump some votes from more educated whites, but it may have won him even more support among whites with less education. If Republicans see little prospect of winning over racial or ethnic minorities in the near future, they have two choices—moderate their appeals in order to restore their advantage among more educated white voters (even if it costs them some votes among less educated whites) or repeat the Trump strategy to maximize their support among less educated whites (even at the expense of winning large margins among college‐educated whites). As the norms governing political rhetoric appear to have largely been shattered in 2016, the latter strategy is at least as plausible as the former, and that may have significant consequences for the stability of American democracy." -
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/polq.12737
