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Clinton Blames Her Loss on White Women Listening to Their Husbands

March 12, 2018

Hillary Clinton on Saturday partly blamed her 2016 presidential loss on white women and said that they voted for Donald Trump because their husbands told them to vote that way.

Clinton spoke at the India Today Conclave in Mumbai, India over the weekend, where a journalist introduced her as the "woman who should have been the president of the United States of America."

The event's host, India Today Editor Aroon Purie, asked Clinton how 52 percent of white women could vote for Trump after the "Access Hollywood" tape was released in the final weeks of the campaign, which featured Trump making crude sexual remarks about women.

"Democrats, going back to my husband and even before, but just in recent times going back to Bill and our candidates and then President Obama, have been losing the vote, including white women. We do not do well with white men and we don't do well with married white women," Clinton said.

She went on to say that white women face an "ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should."

Clinton said that she was on the way to winning the white women vote until then-FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to leaders in Congress less than two weeks before the election stating that the FBI reopened its investigation into her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

"All of a sudden white women, who were going to vote for me and frankly standing up to the men in their lives and the men in their workplaces, were being told, 'She's going to jail. You don't want to vote for her. It's terrible, you can't vote for that.' So, it just stopped my momentum and it decreased my vote enough because I was ahead. I was winning, and I thought I had fought my way back in the ten days from that letter until the election. I fell a little bit short," Clinton said.

"I think that it was part of a historical trend that I was bucking and then it collapsed on me," Clinton added.

This is not the first time that Clinton has blamed white women succumbing to male pressures for her 2016 election loss.

In September, Clinton told NPR's Rachel Martin that white women voted for Trump because they were under "tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for 'the girl.'"