When Hillary Clinton swept the five major primaries on Tuesday, she lost white men in all of them, and by double-digit margins in Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio, exit polls showed. New York Times examined the sharp turnabout from 2008, when she in contrast won double-digit victories among white male voters in all three states:
“She explicitly appealed to them in 2008, extolling the Second Amendment, mocking Barack Obama’s comment that working-class voters “cling to guns or religion” and even needling him at one point over his difficulties with “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans.”
Today she does the opposite, aggressively campaigning to toughen gun-control laws and especially courting black and Hispanic voters. The white male Democrats, however, expressed an array of misgivings, with some former supporters turning away from her now.
In interviews conducted in neighborhoods across the country, many white males said they did not trust her to overhaul the economy because of her wealth and her ties to Wall Street, or felt her use of private email as secretary of state indicated she had something to hide. Some were of the opinion that a woman should not be commander-in-chief.
Mostly, though, white male Democrats said they simply did not think Hillary Clinton cared about people like them.
One of the people interviewed was Dennis Bertko, 66, a construction project manager in Youngstown, Ohio, who said:
“She’s talking to minorities now, not really to white people, and that’s a mistake […] She could have a broader message. We would have listened.”
Bertko concluded that he rarely crossed party lines, but that he now voted for Donald J. Trump, who is making a strong pitch to disaffected white men by assailing free-trade agreements which Clinton once supported. He also said he know a lot of guys who are open to Trump.
While Clinton’s standing among white men does not necessarily threaten her clinching the Democratic nomination this year nor winning in November (after all, Barack Obama lost the white vote to Clinton and still won the presidency), it’s a cause of concern when white Democrats feel alienated enough to vote for Trump.
Feature image from Pixabay. Permission to use under Creative Commons.
