Four years later, Hillary Clinton made a similar mistake, saying: “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.”
Like Romney, she played to the crowd and exaggerated the numbers of Americans she could write off. And like Romney’s “47 percent” line, there was some element of truth in there, too.
The other thing they had in common? They both lost.
Unlike Romney and Clinton, Biden isn’t running for president (not now, at least), and it may be that midterm voters “are not factoring Biden into their down-ballot calculations,” as the conservative writer Matthew Continetti hypothesizes.
Still, Biden just opened himself up to the same criticism that proved so lethal in 2012 and 2016—even if he did add the weasel-word “semi” in front of the F-bomb.
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