Hillary Clinton is making more excuses for why she lost the 2016 election in an upcoming book — this time pinning it on her fellow women who abandoned her for not being “perfect.”
The former Secretary of State claimed she lost female voters after an investigation was launched into her private email server, according to a Friday report by the New York Times.
Clinton’s comments were adapted from an interview she gave in February for the forthcoming book “The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America.”
In it, the former First Lady claimed that Democrats underestimated the growing strength of anti-abortion forces that would ultimately dismantle the landmark Dobbs decision in 2022.
“I just think that most of us who support the rights of women and privacy and the right to make these difficult decisions yourself, you know, we just couldn’t believe what was happening. And as a result, they slowly, surely and very effectively got what they wanted,” Clinton said.
“Our side was complacent and kind of taking it for granted and thinking it would never go away.”
Clinton noted that, had she still been in the Senate, she would have worked to block the confirmation of Trump-appointed justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, all of whom overturned the ruling.
“Overhanging the interview was the understanding that had she won the White House, Roe most likely would have remained a bedrock feature of American life,” the book authors wrote.
Clinton reflected on the role that sexism played in the 2016 campaign, claiming that FBI director James Comey re-opened a last-minute investigation into her private email to raise questions about her judgment, calling her “extremely careless.”
That widely-covered move cost her the race — and the female vote, she speculated.
“But once he did that to me, the people, the voters who left me, were women,” she told the Times.
“They left me because they just couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect. 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.”
On the flip side, Trump’s infamous accusations of sexual misconduct and assault did little to sway his voter base.
He pushed on a promise to reverse Roe if elected, which helped him win the election.
“Politically, he threw his lot in with the right on abortion and was richly rewarded,” Clinton said.
