Again with the deplorables

Gaffes matter! For some candidates! Sometimes! This isn't much of a theory!

(Photo from Paul Sakuma, AP)

Thanks, in part, to the recent Ezra Klein / Ta-Nehisi Coates conversation (which I really need to stop writing about), Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “basket of deplorables” gaffe is back in the public conversation. I want to comment on that and related gaffes, and the assumptions we seem to cling to about what drives elections.

First, I want to focus on three fairly similar gaffes in modern presidential elections: Clinton’s “deplorables” line, Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” quote from 2012, and Barack Obama’s “bitter clingers” comment from 2008. When these quotes are discussed in the political media or by politicians, they’re almost never quoted in their entirety, and sometimes they’re just summarized in a mocking way. But let’s hear what these candidates actually had to say.

Here’s what Hillary Clinton actually said in that September 2016 fundraiser (emphasis added):

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, Islamophobic — 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 offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

But the other basket, the other basket, and I know 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 basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are 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 heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

Here’s what Mitt Romney had to say at his September 2012 fundraiser (emphasis added):

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like.

Here’s what Barack Obama said at an April 2008 fundraiser:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

These quotes look at lot less damning when viewed in their full context. (Clinton’s second paragraph is almost never quoted, nor is Romney’s last line.) And they’re all saying roughly the same thing: There are people really struggling out there who haven’t been treated well by our leadership. We’ll never reach many of them, but there are those who are receptive and deserve our empathy and attention.

That is not a bad thing to say! Yes, these politicians should have remembered two important things: 1) Even in private events there is likely someone with a recorder; 2) Long statements are rarely quoted but short provocative quips are, and they can become campaign nightmares out of context. Now, candidates say a lot during a campaign and there’s pretty much no way to avoid gaffe coverage, but obviously you should not hand people easy targets.

But this brings me to my next point: Pundits, candidates, and voters tend to treat these gaffes as the things that determine the outcomes of elections. A non-trivial number of people remain convinced that Clinton lost in 2016 because she appeared smug and disrespectful of Republican voters. (In fact, her polling numbers dipped by half a percentage point right after the deplorables speech and then shot up by two points a few days later.) Quite a few people believe Romney’s 47% comments cost him the 2012 election. (As John Sides shows, that did not happen.) Obama’s numbers rose after he gave the bitter clinger comment and he went on to win that election by 7 points.

And let’s talk about another important data point: Donald Trump. If being smug and disrespecting voters in the other party is costly to a campaign, how has Trump done that literally every day since 2016 and managed to win two out of three elections since then? I just don’t buy the idea that Hillary Clinton lost because she was the candidate who was more smug and disrespectful of the other party in 2016. Just yesterday Trump called Democrats “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.” Does anyone think his numbers will drop because of that?

Not that anyone’s asking me for advice, but I’d generally discourage candidates from saying things that are cruel or disrespectful about large swathes of the electorate, or can be interpreted that way. But the idea that elections turn on such quotes just does not hold up. In the four candidates I named above, two won the election after a gaffe and two lost. If your general theory of campaigning only applies to some candidates some of the time, it’s time to workshop that theory.