Hillary Clinton’s Silent Majority

by Adam Lee on October 17, 2016

WashingtonMonument

With the 2016 presidential election less than a month away, Hillary Clinton has a commanding lead in the polls and in most swing states. In fact, she’s been consistently in the lead this entire campaign. Barring some almost unimaginable last-minute change in the race, she’s set to become the next president.

Especially since decision day is so near, you’d think the media would find it worthwhile to delve into her base of support. Who’s voting for Clinton and and why? What are their hopes and dreams? What are they worried about? What do they aspire to? What do they want to see the country become? What are their thoughts on this historic moment, on the possibility of the first female commander in chief?

Yet very little attention has been paid to these questions. Inexplicably, the media has virtually zero interest in interviewing her supporters, profiling them, or analyzing their motives and concerns. We know they’re out there – Clinton got almost 17 million votes in the primaries, more than any other candidate of either party. But to judge by the scanty media coverage, you’d think they were some impersonal force like weather or tides, rather than tens of millions of human beings who presumably have reasons for choosing as they did.

By comparison, rivers of ink have been spilled describing, interviewing, and psychoanalyzing Trump voters, whether sympathetically or critically or some mixture of both. Here’s just a small sampling:

The list goes on and on. The media is endlessly fascinated with Trump voters, but they seem completely incurious about Hillary supporters. Why is this?

One easy answer is that Trump’s campaign is a spectacle, that the outrageous behavior of him and his supporters rivets people’s attention, and that media organizations are just doing it for the clicks. But even if that’s true, it might explain why Trump voters would get disproportionate coverage, but not why Clinton voters get virtually no coverage. Besides, if these stories don’t exist, there’s no way to know how popular or interesting they’d be.

You also might argue that, since Clinton is the frontrunner, her voters are “the normal ones” and therefore uninteresting, whereas Trump represents a new current in American politics that deserves to be explored. But I couldn’t disagree more. There are genuinely interesting trends in who’s supporting her.

For example, there’s the gender gap. There’s always been one, but this year, it’s colossal. Women are flocking to the Clinton campaign (see FiveThirtyEight’s map of how big the landslide would be if only women voted), including defectors from traditionally Republican demographics like suburban white women. If this change lasts, it could herald a permanent realignment in American politics. Shouldn’t we be more interested in what female voters are thinking?

A second example: Hillary won the black vote by enormous margins, especially in the South, which largely explains her victory over Bernie Sanders. Why have black voters supported her so staunchly? Do they hold her in similar esteem to Barack Obama, and if so, how did she connect with them? Do they see her carrying on his legacy, or succeeding where he failed to bring change, or for different reasons entirely?

Here’s another one: Asian voters. They’re a small but critical part of the electorate in some swing states, and Hillary Clinton has an enormous 49-point lead among them. “Asian” is obviously an umbrella term that encompasses a broad range of diversity, so why is it that people from so many different cultural backgrounds are all inclined toward one candidate?

Compared to the landslide of Trump coverage, I’ve found only a scant few pieces profiling any Hillary supporters at all, and even fewer that attempt to answer these questions. Most of them are cases of the exception that proves the rule.

For example, the New Republic in March asked “Who Is the Hillary Voter?“, raising many of the same points I’ve made here. But if it’s revisited the question since then, I’ve been unable to find it.

More recently, there was a New York Times article that profiles some of Hillary’s… white male supporters. This feels like a deliberately spiteful gesture.

Lastly, I found an NPR article that acknowledges the coverage gap and suggests a reason for it, “Why Some Clinton Supporters Are Not ‘Really Ready To Go Public’“. It suggests that going public as a Hillary supporter draws fierce reactions from people who hate her, both on the left and on the right, and many of her voters are keeping their heads down just so they don’t have to deal with it.

However, the lack of coverage makes this a self-perpetuating problem. If little or nothing is written about who’s supporting Clinton, the people who do support her may all feel like they’re the only one, making each of them less likely to speak up. And when they’re harder to find, it’s even less likely that journalists will write about them. (It also feeds Trumpistas’ dangerous delusion that the election is rigged: “How could she be winning? I don’t know anyone who’s voting for her!”)

Even though the election is almost here, I’d like to do what I can to counter this trend. If you’re voting for Hillary Clinton in November, tell us why. What do you hope your vote will achieve?

Image credit: Room237, via Wikimedia Commons; released under CC BY-SA 3.0 license