Michelle Obama Still Upset by Low ’16 Voter Turnout in New Doc: ‘A Lot of Our Folks Didn’t Vote… Almost Like a Slap in the Face’

Former First Lady Michelle Obama remains upset that the winning coalition her husband put together in the 2008 and 2012 elections did not turn out in sufficient numbers to help Hillary Clinton defeat Donald Trump in 2016.
According to a first look of Obama’s new documentary, Becoming, in the The Daily Beast, the former First Lady revisits the painful loss and the disappointment she felt during Trump’s inauguration. In the doc, which premieres on Netflix on Wednesday, Obama references her famous 2016 campaign line and ties it to how the Trump victory felt like a rebuke of Barack Obama’s administration.
“It takes some energy to go high, and we were exhausted from it. Because when you are the first black anything…” she said. “So the day I left the White House and I write about how painful it was to sit on that [inauguration] stage. A lot of our folks didn’t vote. It was almost like a slap in the face.”
Clinton saw noticeable dips in voter support among African-Americans, Hispanics, and voters under 30 compared to Obama in 2012. And African-American turnout fell by seven percentage points between 2012 and 2016, its first drop in 20 years.
“I understand the people who voted for Trump,” Obama added, specifically calling out of the key constituencies that failed to turn out for both Clinton and her husband in the 2010 and 2014 Congressional elections. “The people who didn’t vote at all, the young people, the women, that’s when you think, man, people think this is a game,” she said. “It wasn’t just in this election. Every midterm. Every time Barack didn’t get the Congress he needed, that was because our folks didn’t show up. After all that work, they just couldn’t be bothered to vote at all. That’s my trauma.”
from Mediaite https://ift.tt/2Wqj2CR

0 comments