(2/2) There’s the Michael Moore speech, but I’m not sure what (if anything) he was advocating there. There was also Obama’s thing, but that was at a Clinton rally with Clinton supporters, not an outreach event. Can you point to some examples of Clinton supporters trying to convey understanding to Trump supporters?
I’m thinking mostly of the deluge of articles like these:
This is who votes for Donald Trump
What a liberal sociologist learned from spending five years in Trump’s America
Who are Donald Trump’s supporters and what do they want?
Understanding the undecided voters
I feel like this was much much more of a genre in the media I was consuming this election compared to any previous election. Of course, maybe all of these attempts at credible empathy were just really bad, because they failed to capture what Trump voters actually cared about or just seeded their characterization with enough “but of course Trump’s still terrible” that it couldn’t resonate with the people it was supposed to describe, but I definitely saw a lot of ‘let’s understand Trump supporters!’
The Trump supporters don’t trust the Left/Globalists. Globalist types held power, and future Trump supporters’ jobs got outsourced, and it wasn’t as easy as economists abstractly imagine it as to get new jobs that paid enough.
In order to get through to them, those against Trump would have had to sacrifice something big and expensive to signal that yes, they really do care, and aren’t just going to throw the Trump supporter-types under the bus the moment they get power, in favor of Multiculturalism, Diversity™ and Globalism. Hilary Clinton could not credibly send that signal.
Bernie might have, perhaps, but it wasn’t his “turn.”