The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class [View all]

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/hillary-clinton-working-class/509477/

Perhaps the clearest takeaway from the November election for many liberals is that Hillary Clinton lost because she ignored the working class.

In the days after her shocking loss, Democrats complained that Clinton had no jobs agenda. A widely shared essay in The Nation blamed Clinton's "neoliberalism" for abandoning the voters who swung the election. “I come from the white working class,” Bernie Sanders said on CBS This Morning, “and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from.”

But here is the troubling reality for civically minded liberals looking to justify their preferred strategies: Hillary Clinton talked about the working class, middle class jobs, and the dignity of work constantly. And she still lost.

She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs, and the Obama administration’s record of creating private-sector jobs for a record-breaking number of consecutive months. She said the word “job” more in the Democratic National Convention speech than Trump did in the RNC acceptance speech; she mentioned the word “jobs” more during the first presidential debate than Trump did. She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.

I think it's important to get the right lesson from this election... I think this article shows pretty clearly that the election wasn't lost simply on the issue of jobs for the working class.

It was obviously a complex freaky election, and I think the biggest factors for Hillary losing were 1) decades of right-wing smears on Hillary, 2) the overblown email scandal and Comey, and 3) wikileaks and Russian interference.

IMHO.