Hillary Clinton was right: The parts of America that support Trump are stuck in the past

[Tom Rinaldo]

12. There's a poll up now on DU that last time I checked showed

100% of us happy that Lamb just won the special election in PA. Right now it appears he won by less than 700 votes, less than a third of one percent of votes cast. Statistics also reveal that a much lower percentage of registered Republicans bothered to vote in the special election than did Democrats. A lot of Democrats were motivated by anger at Trump, Republicans it seems had much less motivating them. So a Democrat won the district.

Hillary made her comments in India over the weekend and it took a little while for reporting on them to spread. They did not seem to make the list of closing arguments made by the candidates in that race. They weren't known when Trump showed up to hold his rally in that district.

The question is, had Hillary made those comments a week earlier, would the Republicans have been able to weaponize them against Lamb directly? The outcome of his race was razor thin. Less than 700 votes, but actually it only would have taken 350 people switching their votes to make the results dead even. And while most Lamb voters were solidly in his camp, some who had voted for Trump before were conflicted until the end.

There are choices beyond saying the truth about something that is highly charged unprompted and having to lie about it. Winning an election is a lot more significant than winning a football game. In sports sometimes it is better to forfeit a game than not kneel down on principle. Lives, however, literally rest in the valence during elections. Skilled politicians are usually very careful about what they say in public for good reasons. Hillary is a skilled politician but no one plays politics perfectly. In this case I believe she didn't.