Democrats keep wondering why the Trump era turned into a political buzzsaw for them, and last week Scott Jennings finally said the quiet part out loud on CNN. It happened during a Friday night panel moderated by Abby Phillip, which already tells you the ideological balance of the room before anyone opens their mouth. The topic was the upcoming testimony of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton related to the Epstein Files, testimony they only agreed to after James Comer pushed forward with criminal contempt proceedings through the Oversight Committee.
Phillip rolled a clip of President Trump reacting to the situation. He said he was “bothered” by the idea of Bill Clinton testifying, while also noting that he still likes the former president despite their long history of political disagreements and personal sniping. That comment alone short circuited the panel. The left cannot process Trump taking the high road with someone they’ve spent decades portraying as either a saint or a victim, depending on the day.
Phillip went around the table asking why President Trump sometimes shows restraint with Slick Willie. When it got to Scott Jennings, he delivered a reality check that landed like a brick through a stained glass window.
“One thing Trump’s got in common with Bill Clinton: We got all of his voters now,” Jennings said.
That single sentence explains almost everything Democrats pretend not to understand. Jennings kept going, spelling it out slowly for anyone still clinging to a 1990s electoral map.
“All the good ol’ boy union Dems that voted for Bill Clinton in middle America, they now vote for Donald Trump,” he said. “That is one connection in history that you will never be able to shake.”
He talked about West Kentucky and similar places across middle America, places he knows personally, where blue collar, non college, working class guys were once the backbone of the Clinton coalition. These were the people who put Democrats over the top in state after state. Today, those same voters wear red hats and vote Republican without a second thought.
Jennings explained why the shift happened, and it had nothing to do with mean tweets or media hysteria. President Trump spoke directly to their economic and cultural concerns. Jobs, trade, national pride, and not being lectured by coastal elites mattered. Democrats, meanwhile, sprinted headfirst into woke, far left politics and told these voters to either clap or get out of the way.
The result is political exile. Jennings pointed out that it will likely take at least a generation for Democrats to even have a chance of winning these voters back, if they ever do. That is not trash talk, it is math. Once a party tells working class Americans they are the problem, those voters tend to listen, and then they leave.
That is why President Trump can talk about Bill Clinton with a strange mix of criticism and respect. He understands the old coalition better than the party that built it. Democrats lost those voters, and CNN panels are not going to bring them home.
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