Diane Hessan worked the Hillary Clinton campaign, and she followed a few hundred undecided voters for the months before the election.

She went back through her notes, and discovered what the turning point was, and interestingly enough, it was when Hillary was at her most authentic and honest:

………

Last week, I reread all of my notes. There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice. It wasn’t FBI Director James Comey, Part One or Part Two; it wasn’t Benghazi or the e-mails or Bill Clinton’s visit with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac. No, the conversation shifted the most during the weekend of Sept. 9, after Clinton said, “You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”

All hell broke loose.

George told me that his neighborhood was outraged, that many of his hard-working, church-going, family-loving friends resented being called that name. He told me that he looked up the word in the dictionary, and that it meant something so bad that there is no hope, like the aftermath of a tsunami. You know, he said, Clinton ended up being the biggest bully of them all. Whereas Trump bullied her, she bullied Wilkes Barre.

She told something like half the country that she loathed them, and for once they believed her.

She is an avatar of the that right-wing subset of the Democratic Party that believes that if your life is tough, it’s because you were too lazy to get into Yale, and any issues that might have arisen from the increasing of multinational labor arbitrage, the assault on unions, deregulation, and the financialization of the economy is your own damn fault.

You can call it the DLC wing of the party, or the New Dem wing of the party, or the Blue Dog wing of the party, or the Bob Rubin part of the party, of Republican Lite.

I just call them a part of the problem.