A vast swath of the nation remains stunned at Hillary Clinton’s election loss after all polls pointed towards her victory. Even Donald Trump looked a little surprised as he met with President Obama at the White House, and Clinton is also reacting to the results. According to the New York Times, Hillary is pointing a finger squarely at FBI Director James Comey, who reopened the investigation into her email server less than two weeks before the election. This could have affected what was already known to be a close race, and Comey was widely criticized for his public announcement, which was seen by many as an attempt to sway the election in the GOP’s favor.
The Times reveals how Clinton told a group of donors that she holds Comey responsible for putting the brakes on her campaign’s momentum. This is the first time Clinton spoke even semi-publicly on the matter after an emotional concession speech, which was focused on the future. One of the donors who was present on a conference call relayed her remarks:
“There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful,” Mrs. Clinton said, according to a donor who relayed the remarks. But, she added, “our analysis is that Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum.”
After leading in polls in many battleground states, Mrs. Clinton told the donors on Saturday, “we dropped, and we had to keep really pushing to regain our advantage, which going into last weekend we had.”
“We were once again up in all but two of the battleground states, and we were up considerably in some that we ended up losing,” Mrs. Clinton said. “And we were feeling like we had to put it back together.”
Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election for many reasons, and chief among them would be low Democratic voter turnout. And inside of that overarching reason would be Clinton’s failure to connect with many voters along with how she generally ignored large swaths of the Midwest. Of course, one can also throw in the fact that plenty of Trump voters shared his anti-immigrant sentiments and were not deterred by his misogynistic ways. Comey’s ill-timed letter did not help matters, and maybe it tipped the scale.
With all those reasons considered, perhaps folks will eventually realize that a Clinton loss shouldn’t have been so unexpected, and Democrats should consider listening to Michael Moore if they want to win in 2020.
(Via New York Times)