The Winner of the Popular Vote Leaves a Complicated Legacy.
WINNERS GET TO WRITE HISTORY. LOSERS, IF THEY are lucky, get a ballad. Hillary Clinton made history for three decades as an advocate, a First Lady, a Senator, and a Secretary of State, but she will now be remembered as much for what she didn’t do as what she did. A female candidate in an election that didn’t hinge on gender after all, she became a symbol in a fight that was about much more than symbolism. She’s the woman who was almost President, she is what might have been and what will yet be.
In the autopsy of the doomed Clinton campaign, there is no shortage of fatal causes. Expectations certainly missed their target: the race between the first plausible female presidential candidate and a man who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” did not boil down to gender. In interviews across the country in the year leading up to the election, many voters suggested that shattering the glass ceiling wasn’t an urgent priority for them. Some took it as a given that a woman will be President one day, and it wasn’t worth electing someone they believed was the wrong woman just to show it could be done.
To some, other issues—economic anxiety, cultural values, a desire for change—mattered more. Of the 70% of voters who said Donald Trump’s treatment of women bothered them, 29% voted for him anyway. The female coalition was a mirage, splintered by party, race and education: Clinton won 54% of all women, but Trump won 88% of Republican women, 52% of white women and 61% of white women without a college degree. She walked away with a lead of more than 2.5 million votes, but not the White House.
This story is from the December 19,2016 edition of Time.
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This story is from the December 19,2016 edition of Time.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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