Jonathan Turley – The Clinton supporters have been campaigning hard to convince electors to switch their votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. It was a remarkably hypocritical stance for Clinton who repeatedly called Trump’s failure to promise to abide by the election results “horrifying” and unAmerican. [link]
Clinton maintained that shocked demeanor all the way up to election night when she found herself the loser. She then broke from tradition and refused to concede that night before her supporters. Her campaign then supported challenges in various states and actively sought to convince electors to switch their votes. Well the results are in and it is rather surprising: Of the 10 electors who did not vote for their designated candidate, eight were actually Clinton electors who refused to vote for her. Only two Trump electors switched and neither voted for Clinton.
Four of the electors who were set to vote for Clinton were in Washington state. Of those, three voted for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the fourth voted for Native American tribal leader Faith Spotted Eagle. They each will face $1,000 fines.
The two electors who did not cast their votes voted for Kentucky Sen. Ron Paul and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
In the meantime, Bill Clinton went public with an interview to continue the spin that his wife lost because of FBI Director James Comey and “fake news.” Once again, he did not point to the fake news that was so decisive in the election since the Wikileaks emails were not fake but real news. However, Clinton added that Trump won because “he does know is how to get angry white men to vote for him.” It is the same identity politics that was pushed by Clinton during the campaign — only now it is the nemesis of white males being blamed for her loss.
The problem is that white males could not and did not secure the election for Trump. According to the New York Times, Clinton carried only 54 percent of the female vote against Donald Trump. However, nearly twice as many white women without college degrees voted for Trump than for Hillary and she basically broke almost even on college-educated white women (with Hillary taking 51 percent). Trump won the majority of white women at 53 percent.
Other Clinton supporters have explained the results by denouncing women as slaves to their “internalized misogyny. So it is either “angry white males” or self-hating women who toppled Hillary Clinton. Of course, there could be a more obvious answer: people really did not like Hillary as a leader regardless of her gender. It may be that the large numbers of women refused to vote for Hillary simply because she was a woman. Clinton and Trump were the most unpopular politicians ever to be nominated for president and over 60 percent of voters viewed Clinton as fundamentally dishonest.
None of that stopped the DNC from engineering her victory over Bernie Sanders who presented precisely the populist campaign that many voters were looking for. Clinton had the Democratic establishment and many allies in the media — everyone agreed except the public. That was enough . . . until the voters had their say on November 8th.
What is striking about this story is how leading Democrats still refuse to acknowledge that the party was seriously out of touch with the electorate. Indeed, after securing her own reelection as minority leader, Nancy Pelosi promptly announced that voters really do not “want a new direction.” Yet, after a huge effort to get electors to move against Trump, most moved against Clinton. The Mae sentiments are not likely to pass despite the coordinated effort to blame Comey or white males or self-loathing women. Few people outside of the Clinton core supporters are buying the spin. The question is how steep this learning curve will be for a party that has continued the same leaders on the same course after the electoral defeat.
SF Source Jonathan Turley Dec. 2016
[widget id=”text 44″]