Hillary and the Non-College, White, Male Vote

On August 2, our reader Angelica wrote, “I am wondering why hildabeast isn’t getting enough coverage here. Everything is pointed towards DT.” We admit that most of our stories this year have been pointing out either pro-Trump or anti-Trump pieces in the media. Why? The answer is. . .frankly. . .Hillary’s boring. She’s not doing much. She’s not making any big, stupid mistakes. She’s just lying low (pun unintended).

There’s just not that much being written about Hillary, because everyone is fascinated by The Donald. But for your benefit, we scoured the Internet for Hillary stories, and here are a few. Fox News says she’s up by ten points now. Oh, wait, that’s not what you want to hear. . .

Ha! We just wrote about Newt Gingrich, Mark Cuban, and WSJ’s William McGurn have been talking football since Donald Trump’s complaint about the NFL games. Hillary’s getting into the act, too.

Hillary Clinton would like to discuss some football.

“My dad played football at Penn State,” she reminded a crowd here during her swing through the Rust Belt. “My brother played football at Penn State.”

The story is actually about Hillary making a play for her toughest audience: white men.

Bill Clinton came along to stand sentinel onstage, adjusting his schedule to linger a day longer than planned among his wife’s chief skeptics: the voters who look like him. . .

There is no group that views Mrs. Clinton with greater antipathy. A New York Times/CBS News poll two weeks ago found that white men preferred her Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, to Mrs. Clinton almost two to one, 55 percent to 29 percent. (White women were split at 40 percent each.). . .

[In] Ohio and Pennsylvania, which Mr. Trump will almost certainly need to win the presidency, Clinton aides sense an opportunity to put him on defense [ed: more football metaphors!]. They need not catch Mr. Trump among white men, or even come particularly close. . .

She appeared with her two top ambassadors to white men: Mr. Clinton and her running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia. . . A sign near the stage carried reason for hope among Clinton partisans: “I am male, white, over 40, Southern Baptist pastor,” it read. “And I’m with her.”. . . Mr. Biden is scheduled to campaign with Mrs. Clinton in Scranton, Pa., his birthplace, on Aug. 15.

However, RealClearPolitics says she has mostly written off blue-collar white males.

The convention, which started on a divisive and dramatic note with leaked emails showing the Democratic National Committee had favored the candidacy of Hillary Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders all along, ended up, by most accounts, a great success. Yet it also illustrated what polling shows – that the ascendant coalition in the Democratic Party of women, young voters and non-whites may no longer find common cause with blue-collar white men. . .

It didn’t help that when asked by PBS, halfway through the convention, about Hillary Clinton’s trouble attracting white working-class males, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said: “I think so many times white, non-college-educated white males have voted Republican. They voted against their own economic interest because of guns, because of gays, and because of God.”. . .trade policy and immigration have become [flash points] for white men who believe Democratic policies are responsible for wage stagnation and job loss. . .

These voters once loved her husband. And in 2008 Hillary Clinton openly questioned Obama’s weak support among “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” insisting she had a “broader base” to win with. She pummeled Obama in the primary contests in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio and Kentucky with large rural populations by winning white men. . .

Not only did Clinton, and her fellow speakers, not focus much on the issues energizing blue-collar white men, but their anti-Trump message – that America is already great – will be interpreted as dismissive of their disaffection. . .

Trump’s new post-convention leads among non-college whites range from 23 to 39 percentage points, and some polls show Clinton’s negative ratings among this group at higher than 70 percent, worse than Trump’s negative ratings with women. . . .Hillary Clinton may win in November, but it’s safe to say she will lose white men badly.

But don’t tell that to “Bubba” (Bill Clinton).

With four months to go until Election Day, the presumptive nominee’s husband is “singularly obsessed” with bringing back to the fold white voters who twice elected him to the Oval Office, according to a source familiar with his thinking. . .

In interviews with more than a dozen party leaders close to the former president or involved in his wife’s campaign, Bill Clinton’s allies discussed his personal connection to the voters who have slowly deserted the Democratic Party — and how that has only increased his personal desire to win them back. “Whoever he thinks he can’t get, he doubles down,” psychoanalyzed one longtime associate. “It’s the Bill Clinton nature. He knows that he connects with those voters. . .”

The article goes on about Bill Clinton’s dedication to winning back white voters, but if you read between the lines, they see non-college white men as a lost cause that “Bubba” couldn’t make worse. On the other hand, letting him focus on them will keep him away from audiences of women and African-Americans, whom he has alienated with some things he has said this year.

The New York Post says Donald Trump can’t lose what the paper lovingly calls the “white trash” vote. Warning: not politically correct!

J.D. and his people are called rednecks, white trash, hillbillies. . . Looking back on his youth, and all he fled, yields a frank, unsentimental, harrowing memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”. .

Though “Hillbilly Elegy” is about people, not politics, it is an eye-opening field guide to an unruly and hard-to-understand group, many of them born and bred Democrats, who could cost Hillary Clinton what looked like an easy election win. White voters without a college degree have favored Republicans for some time — they voted for Mitt Romney by 18 points in 2012 — but they love Donald Trump. In an average of six polls this month, he is beating Clinton by a margin of 58 to 30 among these voters. . .

Trump’s promises to stand up to the Chinese are resonating, as is his message that “the system is rigged” against a proud group of Americans, Americans who built the postwar glory but now feel they’re being ignored or outright mocked. White trash is the one ethnic group it is still OK to make fun of. . .

The anger in hillbilly country is understandable. Vance grew up thinking it was perfectly normal for couples to have screaming matches that frequently turned violent. Neighbors would slide open the window to listen when the folks next door started going at it. . .

In hillbilly country, a code of honor runs so deep that if you casually call a man a son of a bitch, he’ll beat you senseless for the implied insult to his mother. But then you wouldn’t call the police because you figured you deserved to get a licking. Trump’s me-against-everybody combativeness, his refusal to back down, his vows to disrupt Washington deal-making are giving the hillbilly class a feeling they haven’t had in decades: that they’ve got a friend at the top.

So. . .the bottom line is that Hillary probably can’t win the non-college, white, male vote, although Bill Clinton will try to appeal to them anyway—and they’ll end up voting for Trump in record numbers.

Sorry Angelica. We tried to write about Hillary, but without Bubba and The Donald, the story would be just tooooooo boring.