Hillary: Trump’s ‘Looking Backwards’ Reality TV Style Worked in Less Sophisticated, Less Diverse Red States

Over the weekend in Mumbai at India Today’s Conclave, 2016 Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said less sophisticated and diverse red state voters were drawn to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant “looking backwards” realty TV campaign.

Clinton said, “You know, if people were looking for the reality TV campaign, maybe I should have given them more entrainment. You know, I’m the mother who says eat your spinach so you grow up strong and somebody else is saying eat all the fast food and ice cream you can possibly stick in your mouth. And all of a sudden I’m thinking wait a minute, maybe I’m running a  campaign like all the other campaigns I have been a part of and he is doing something entirely different, which is this reality TV campaign. Fascinating and it’s something that will come to a democracy near you at some point. And voters have to be prepared to say, ‘OK that was entertaining. Wow, couldn’t take my eyes off him, but what is he really going to do and what has he ever done that convinces me he could actually accomplish any of it?’ So it’s going to require a lot more—a much more sophisticated analysis by voters if this trend goes from our 2016 campaign.”

She continued, “If you remember, Trump started his campaign attacking immigrants because he knew that in many parts of the country—and let me just hasten to add, in many parts of the country where there aren’t many immigrants—he was able to scapegoat immigrants. If you have problems like you are not happy with your job, you probably don’t think you have gotten enough advancement, you working for a woman now and you don’t like it—whatever the reason was, he stirred that up. And anti-immigrant feeling became so virulent thanks to his rhetoric that it was a big motivator in a lot of the votes in certain parts of the country.”‘

She added,”If you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle where Trump won. I won in the coasts, I won in Illinois, in Minnesota, places like that. But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward, and his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You know you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are. Whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

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