One of the worst mistakes a politician can make is to come across as smug — dismissing or disrespecting voters.
The conventional wisdom holds that Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” line in 2016 and Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remark in 2012 were fatal missteps.
But if that’s true, how does Donald Trump get away with far worse?
After all, no modern politician has spoken more contemptuously about broad swaths of the electorate.
It’s worth looking back at what Clinton and Romney actually said.
Clinton’s full comments were more nuanced than the soundbite suggested. She distinguished between “deplorables” — racists, xenophobes, and others she called “irredeemable” — and a second group of voters she described as disillusioned, desperate for change, and worthy of empathy.
Romney’s remarks were also more complex in context. He argued that nearly half the country would never support him because they were dependent on government, and said his focus had to be persuading swing voters in the middle.
Both statements today read much less harshly in full than in the headlines at the time.
And in fact, they had a common thread: an acknowledgment that many Americans were struggling and that while some could not be reached, others deserved understanding and attention.
So why did these comments prove so damaging?
They resonated — or at least snippets of them did — because they seemed to confirm a narrative already forming about both Clinton and Romney: that they were out-of-touch elitists who looked down on ordinary voters.
Trump, by contrast, doesn’t suffer from that problem. Voters already know he’s not very “nice” — and many actually like him for it. His contempt for others doesn’t undercut his brand — it’s central to it.
