(Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Hillary Clinton accused Democrats of not taking her warnings on abortion and Donald Trump seriously before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Clinton spoke with Lisa Lerner and Elizabeth Diaz for the forthcoming book The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America in late February, and the comments were published by The New York Times on Saturday.
“We didn’t take it seriously, and we didn’t understand the threat. Most Democrats, most Americans, did not realize we are in an existential struggle for the future of this country,” she said, adding, “We could have done more to fight.”
Clinton described the GOP as better organized than the Democratic Party and “relentless” on issues like abortion. Democrats were “complacent,” according to the former secretary of state.
“They slowly, surely, and very effectively got what they wanted. Our side was complacent and kind of taking it for granted and thinking it would never go away,” Clinton said.
Lerner and Diaz wrote that Clinton felt her warnings on abortion were dismissed as “alarmist” by voters in 2016 when she lost to Trump.
They wrote:
Mrs. Clinton did not express regret for any inaction herself. Rather, she said her efforts to raise alarms during her 2016 campaign went unheeded and were dismissed as “alarmist” by voters, politicians and members of her own party. In that race, she had talked about the threats to abortion rights on the campaign trail and most memorably in the third presidential debate, vowing to protect Roe when Mr. Trump promised to appoint judges who would overturn it.
Clinton said she feared her warnings today about the 2024 presidential election being “existential” will be similarly dismissed.
“Oh, my God, there she goes again,” she said about the expected reaction. “I mean, she’s just so, you know, so out there.”
Clinton recalled in March 2024 predicting that Trump could “demolish pillars of the progressive movement” during a campaign speech that people “kind of rolled their eyes at me.”
Clinton believes it is women voters who abandoned her.
“They left me because they just couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect,” she said. “They were willing to take a risk on Trump — who had a long list of, let’s call them flaws, to illustrate his imperfection — because he was a man, and they could envision a man as president and commander in chief.”
Check out the entire interview here.
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