Rep. Debbie Dingell: “I Said Donald Trump Could Win MI And They Called Me Crazy”
“We have to come together as Americans,” says Dingell.
Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (D-Dearborn) says she doesn’t want to be right — but she was.
Dingell had been telling voters and fellow Democrats for months that Donald Trump could win Michigan’s 16 electoral votes. And he did, by the narrowest margin in Michigan history.
Dingell says she thinks prominent Democrats and prognosticators in the media suppressed votes for Hillary Clinton by overestimating her chances of winning.
She says she heard too much about economic anxiety, fear, and frustration in union halls and other gathering places in her district to think Clinton was a shoe-in to win Michigan.
“People here are still scared,” says Dingell, “That fear from 2008 hasn’t gone away”, despite successful efforts to save the American auto industry.
But Dingell says she did not expect to see Trump do so well in other industrial Midwest states, and that those states would deliver him the election.
“I knew it was going on in Michigan,” says Dingell. “What I missed — and shouldn’t have — is that the same thing that was happening here was happening in other states like us.”
Click on the audio player above to hear the full conversation.
