Hillary Clinton has all the charisma of a sack full of angry cats but I don't think she did insult her voter base.
She insulted racists, bigots, sexists, etc... but those people aren't her base. Angry, disenfranchised rural white voters and their embrace of Trump's populism by way of race-culture supremacy/identity as a reaction against America's demographic and cultural shift has been thoroughly documented. Also, her description of the rationale for the rest of Trump voters is one that Trump voters themselves admit to.
What didn't happen is Hillary Clinton calling all Trump supporters (or, by extension, all white people or all working class people) racist and "deplorable."
> She insulted racists, bigots, sexists, etc... but those people aren't her base
She said that "half" of Trump voters are those things.
> What didn't happen is Hillary Clinton calling all Trump supporters (or, by extension, all white people or all working class people) racist and "deplorable."
Trump voters know other Trump voters. They look around themselves and don't see "half" of them being those things - therefore, they infer that Hillary Clinton had misidentified many of their friends as being those things.
>She said that "half" of Trump voters are those things.
Was that bigoted? Yes, and she paid for it. Imprecise, yes, but I don't think she was literally claiming 50% of Trump supporters were those things. But was it entirely untrue?
I lived through the same election cycle as everyone else. I've seen the racist elements of American white supremacism and the alt-right embrace Trump for whatever reason, and I've seen the contempt in which some Trump supporters appear to hold the rest of the country. They voted for a man who has said far, far worse things than Hillary Clinton, yet it's more important for them to form solidarity with racists than to admit that maybe she wasn't entirely wrong. When you're willing to get in bed with swine you won't wake up smelling like roses.
She insulted racists, bigots, sexists, etc... but those people aren't her base. Angry, disenfranchised rural white voters and their embrace of Trump's populism by way of race-culture supremacy/identity as a reaction against America's demographic and cultural shift has been thoroughly documented. Also, her description of the rationale for the rest of Trump voters is one that Trump voters themselves admit to.
What didn't happen is Hillary Clinton calling all Trump supporters (or, by extension, all white people or all working class people) racist and "deplorable."