On a recent visit to India, defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton added a new riff on the “Deplorables” theme much to the consternation of Democrats running for office in states like Kansas and Missouri that Donald Trump carried.
Clinton’s comment on the women who voted for Donald Trump has arguably and understandably gotten the most attention. Clinton claimed that Democrats “do not do well with white men, and we don’t do well with married, white women. And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”
Tanya Tay Posobiec countered on Twitter, “My husband didn’t convince me to vote for Trump. Yours did.”
Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill is among the red-state Democrats running for re-election while having to pull the Hillary baggage train behind her. When asked by reporters on Capitol Hill about the comments made by Hillary, McCaskill said, “Oh, come on. You’re killing me here.” When McCaskill sees the ads already being run by the Josh Hawley campaign, she will feel the pain even more.
According to Hillary, McCaskill represents a state in which citizens are “looking backwards.” These are people who voted for Trump because they “didn’t like black people getting rights” or “don’t like women, you know, getting jobs” or “don’t want to, you know, see that Indian-American succeeding” more than they are.
By contrast, Hillary “won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”
In metropolitan Kansas City, those “optimistic, diverse, dynamic” places did not include the three most prosperous counties in the Kansas-Western Missouri region: Platte and Clay in Missouri and Johnson in Kansas.
Those “optimistic, diverse, dynamic” places did include the poorest, most government-dependent zip codes on both sides of the state line.
The local media have been celebrating those Democrats like failed senatorial candidate Jason Kander who believe that an aggressively leftist message is the route to victory. Veteran pols like McCaskill, however, know that the only road to victory in a state like Missouri is the tried and true one: bury one’s liberalism and accuse the opposition of wanting to take old people’s social security away.
