The point about some Trump supporters just being scared because of economic conditions and the like was actually made by Secretary Clinton herself in the very same paragraph of the infamous "deplorables" speech in which she defined the deplorables:
I know there are only 60 days left to make our case — and don’t get complacent, don’t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think well he’s done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?
[Laughter/applause]
The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
You are correct, as was Secretary Clinton, that there are those who voted for Trump because they are deplorable, but there are also those who are not deplorable at heart, that voted for him as a result of either ignorance or being misinformed. And as I have emphasized in bold, Secretary Clinton herself went out of her way to make that very distinction.
Those remarks of hers were a mistake politically, in my opinion. Not because the observations she was making were invalid, but because it exposed her to what should have been a predictable manipulation / selective reporting of what she said, and made it too easy to portray her as having painted the opposition with a much more broadly accusatory brush than she was actually trying to.
I've had that very discussion with people for whom the perception that Trump supporter automatically equals deplorable was quite insulting, and pushed them toward Trump. And I could see the recalculation happen when I showed them the full context that their "news" outlets had withheld from them, wherein Secretary Clinton explicitly called for understanding of and empathy for people like them.
I won't try to tell you that you are wrong to not support O'Malley, but I will suggest that your calculation could plausibly change if you evaluate the subject more carefully. The deplorable remarks do not have to have been without merit to have been a political mistake, and as noted, Secretary Clinton herself tried to lead us to recognize
both ends of the Trump supporter spectrum, and to deal with those on either end of the spectrum appropriately.
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