Hillary Clinton didn’t win over white women in the 2016 election and she’s blaming them for caving to pressure from the men in their lives to vote for Trump instead.
Clinton, the first woman to win a major party nomination for president of the United States, has been heralded as a feminist icon, but lately she has been spreading the blame around for her monumental loss in the 2016 presidential election, pointing fingers at everyone from primary opponent Bernie Sanders to ex-FBI Director James Comey to the news media.
Last week she released her memoir, What Happened, detailing her experience on the campaign trail and offering insight into how she lost the presidency, and this time she’s blaming women. Clinton said women didn’t buy into the gender as a motivating force, suggesting women aren’t sophisticated enough to make their own decisions in the ballot box.
“You spent time in the book talking about the forces you feel were working against you. You also say sexism was one of them, but you yourself, in the book, acknowledged that a good number of young women didn’t vote for you, which is presumably not a sexist choice. They just weren’t inspired by your message,” NPR’s Rachel Martin said during an interview with Clinton.
Clinton said it was “more complicated than that,” though. The former secretary of state said she did win the women’s vote overall, but faltered when it came to white women for a variety of reasons. She recounted a conversation she’d had about women in leadership with Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg.
“And Sheryl ended this really sobering conversation by saying that women will have no empathy for you, because they will be under tremendous pressure — and I’m talking principally about white women — they will be under tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for ‘the girl,’” Clinton said. “And we saw a lot of that during the primaries from Sanders supporters, really quite vile attacks online against women who spoke out for me, as I say, one of my biggest support groups, Pantsuit Nation, literally had to become a private site because there was so much sexism directed their way.”
