Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reflects on the 2016 presidential election: Recent Interviews She said that women voters abandoned her in the final days of the campaign because she “wasn’t perfect.”
“They dumped me because they couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman I’m supposed to be perfect,” Clinton told New Times in an interview published Saturday. “They were going to take a risk on me. [former President Trump] He had a long list of flaws, so to speak, that showed his imperfections, because he was a human being, and people could imagine a man being president and commander in chief.”
Clinton, the former first lady who lost to Trump during the 2016 election, was not alone in sharing those sentiments. Several of her allies said there was a sexist double standard during the campaign, and that she fielded questions and criticism that male candidates did not face.
“Is there a double standard? 100% 100%,” Tracy Sefull, a Democratic consultant and Clinton surrogate, said at the time. “If she coughs, it’s bad.”
More recently, former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley also faced sexist attacks and suspended her campaign in March. During a Republican primary debate in Miami last year, fellow candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who dropped out of the race in January and endorsed Trump, called Haley “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels.”
In her interview with The Times, Clinton criticized members of her party for its long-term failure to strengthen abortion rights. Democrats, she argued, didn’t fully appreciate the power of anti-abortion forces until they were “stunned” by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the federal right to abortion access.
“We didn’t take it seriously, we didn’t understand the threat,” Clinton said. “Most Democrats, most Americans didn’t realize that we were facing a battle for the future of this country.”
“We could have done more to fight,” she added in an interview originally conducted by the magazine in February.
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