Oct. 31, 2016
George Packer wrote the cover story for the October 31 issue of the New Yorker on how the Democratic party lost the white working class vote to the Republicans:
The basement of a hotel on Capitol Hill. A meeting room with beige walls and headachy light, cavernous enough to accommodate three hundred occupants but empty, except for Hillary Clinton. She sat at a small round table with a cloth draped to the carpet. Her eyes were narrower than usual—fatigue—and she wore a knee-length dress jacket of steel-blue leather, buttoned to the lapels; its metallic shine gave an impression of armor, as if she’d just descended from the battlefield to take a breather in this underground hideout. Politics, at times so thrilling, is generally a dismal business, and Clinton’s acceptance of this is key to her power. She’s the officer who keeps on marching in mud.
I sat down across from her. With only a few weeks left until the election, I wanted to ask her about the voters she’s had the most trouble winning. Why were so many downwardly mobile white Americans supporting Donald Trump?