Hillary Clinton Calls Many Trump Backers Deplorables, and G.O...

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1 ELECTION 2016 Who Will Win? Senate Forecast Latest Polls Get the Podcast Primary Results Hillary Clinton Calls Many Trump Backers Deplorables, and G.O.P. Pounces By AMY CHOZICK SEPT. 10, 2016 Republicans from the presidential ticket on down pounced Saturday on Hillary Clinton s remarks that half of Donald J. Trump s supporters fit into a basket of deplorables, saying it showed she was out of touch with an economically hard-hit electorate. Mrs. Clinton s comments Friday night, which were a variation of a sentiment she has expressed in other settings recently, came at a fund-raiser in Manhattan. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? she said to applause and laughter. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. By Saturday morning, #BasketofDeplorables was trending on Twitter as Mr. Trump s campaign demanded an apology. His supporters hoped to use the remark as evidence that Mrs. Clinton cannot connect to the voters she hopes to represent as president. Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of 1 of 6 9/16/16, 12:17 PM

2 amazing, hard working people. I think it will cost her at the polls! Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. Speaking at the Values Voter Summit, a gathering of Christian conservatives in Washington on Saturday, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, Mr. Trump s running mate, said: Hillary, they are not a basket of anything. They are Americans and they deserve your respect. By Saturday afternoon, Mrs. Clinton had acknowledged her stumble. Last night I was grossly generalistic, and that s never a good idea, she said in a statement. I regret saying half that was wrong. She then used the opportunity to double down on her criticism of her opponent. It s deplorable that Trump has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia, she said, and given a national platform to hateful views and voices, including by retweeting fringe bigots with a few dozen followers and spreading their message to 11 million people. Mrs. Clinton s remarks flipped, for a day at least, the familiar script of the 2016 campaign, in which Mr. Trump slights a large group of people and she quickly rebukes him. They were also out of character given her usual studied care in choosing words. Her campaign slogan is Stronger Together, and she has built her message around inclusiveness, in contrast to denigrating comments Mr. Trump has made about Mexicans, Muslims, women and other groups. Much of her ad campaign is built around using Mr. Trump s comments to portray him as an unsuitable leader. But for all the policies she says would lift middle-class wages and alleviate income inequality, Mrs. Clinton has struggled with the perception by many voters that she is not on their side. Asked whether they thought Mrs. Clinton understands the needs and problems of people like themselves, 53 percent of registered voters said she did not, according to a CBS News poll from June. The Democratic National Convention in July and a bus tour in Pennsylvania and Ohio laser-focused on kitchen-table issues seemed to help Mrs. Clinton. In an 2 of 6 9/16/16, 12:17 PM

3 August ABC News/Washington Post poll, 55 percent of Americans said Mrs. Clinton understood the problems of people like them better than Mr. Trump, compared with 35 percent who named him. But Mrs. Clinton devoted much of August to fund-raising in the moneyed enclaves of the Hamptons and Martha s Vineyard. At some of these events, which were closed to the press, she uses the baskets characterization of Trump voters. After barring the press from most fund-raisers, the Clinton campaign has tried to be more open in the post-labor Day sprint. Aides allowed a small group of reporters in Mrs. Clinton s regular press corps to cover the Friday event, which took place at Cipriani on Wall Street and for a contribution of $1,200 to $10,000 included performances by Barbra Streisand and Rufus Wainwright. A spokesman for the Trump campaign, Jason Miller, said what made Mrs. Clinton s comments particularly off-putting was that she made them in front of wealthy donors and that the setting and statement, revealed just how little she thinks of the hard-working men and women of America. Mrs. Clinton made a similar remark on Israeli television on Thursday, saying We ve always had a kind of paranoiac, prejudicial element within our politic. But she did not specify how many of Mr. Trump s supporters fit into that category. It was the characterization of half of Trump s supporters on Friday that struck some Republicans as similar to the damning 47 percent remark made by their own nominee, Mitt Romney, in his 2012 campaign against President Obama. At a private fund-raiser Mr. Romney, who Democrats had already sought to portray as a cold corporate titan, said 47 percent of voters were dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims and who pay no income tax. Romney s 47% comment was bad. Hillary calling tens of millions of American men & women deplorable is inexcusable and disqualifying, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, an adviser to Mr. Trump and the daughter of Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, wrote on Twitter. Mrs. Clinton s remark, which she delivered lightheartedly, also harked back to 3 of 6 9/16/16, 12:17 PM

4 Mr. Obama s gaffe at a San Francisco fund-raiser in 2008 that economically struggling Americans get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren t like them. That time, it was Mrs. Clinton who seized on her opponent s comment to paint him as elitist as the two Democrats battled before the Pennsylvania primary, which she went on to win by nine percentage points. Her remarks on Friday were a more pointed version of her earlier criticisms of the movement her opponent has spurred. Last month in a speech in Reno, Nev., Mrs. Clinton devoted an address to criticizing Mr. Trump for taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party. She gave an entire speech about how the alt-right is using his campaign to advance its hate movement, Nick Merrill, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, wrote on Twitter, using a loosely defined term that is often used to describe white nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment. Other aides and supporters jumped to Mrs. Clinton s defense, noting that after describing the deplorables, Mrs. Clinton went on to sympathetically weave another rhetorical basket of Trump voters: People who feel that 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. Those are the people, she said, we have to understand and empathize with. In talking points given to surrogates on Saturday, and obtained by The New York Times, the campaign advised anyone speaking about the deplorable issue in the news media to reiterate that while Mrs. Clinton intended to say some instead of half, Mr. Trump, as she had pointed out in the past, has clearly brought the alt-right s hate into his campaign and into the mainstream. The talking points advised that anyone who is pressed on the deplorable remarks should assert that the news media was holding Mrs. Clinton to a different 4 of 6 9/16/16, 12:17 PM

5 standard than Mr. Trump, with this suggested rejoinder: Are they going to make more out of this story than they made out of the racist, misogynistic Trump comments that got us here in the first place? Prof. Jennifer Mercieca, an expert in American political discourse at Texas A&M University, said in an that the deplorable comment sounds bad on the face of it and compared it to Mr. Romney s 47 percent gaffe. The comment demonstrates that she (like Romney) lacks empathy for that group, Professor Mercieca said. To be fair, she has characterized the group as homophobic, xenophobic, racist, and etc., and those qualities are not ones that we celebrate in America. It sounded, Professor Mercieca said, as if Mrs. Clinton had written off a large chunk of Trump voters as ones who would never vote for her, a view that might be accurate. It likely won t help her likability with undecideds, but it may help her to mobilize Clinton supporters to more actively participate in her campaign, she said. I think that was the goal. An excerpt from Mrs. Clinton s remarks Friday night: I know there are only 60 days left to make our case and don t get complacent, don t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think well he s done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic 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 and I know this because I see friends from all over America here I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas as well as, you know, New York and California but that other 5 of 6 9/16/16, 12:17 PM

6 basket of people are people who feel that 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. Find out what you need to know about the 2016 presidential race today, and get politics news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the First Draft newsletter. A version of this article appears in print on September 11, 2016, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Republicans Pounce as Clinton Denigrates Many of Trump s Backers The New York Times Company 6 of 6 9/16/16, 12:17 PM