yeah, 50 million, 60 million trump voters, but you have that small group that is angry, that is hostile. you have to be able to talk about both them and the broader phenomenon. that small group, isn t that group small enough that that isn t what tipped the election for them? in other words, the people who you think are racist, how big of a voting block do you think that is? it is hard to know, but i ve got to tell you, if you have a group out there who s trying to kill white guys and the obama s retweeting them, that becomes a very source of a lot of alarm for that community. right. at the end of the day they think about their pocketbooks first so you had white people there who it wasn t about race, it was about am i is it us or is it them? which side are you on? why do we call it the messy truth? it s messy. yes, the majority of people were willing to overlook the toxic crap voting on pocketbooks. there are a group of people excited about the toxic crap. it s messy.
so did it change your opinion. you should know, you didn t do it because it was an assignment. you did it because it was a listening tour. the idea of whitelash. now that you ve gotten to talk to them about what it was for them, what do you feel? i still feel i said the whole time it was a whitelash in part. i was trying to talk about that alt right white supremacist, you know, element that frankly donald trump kept retweeting. that after you had what happened in south carolina where a young white supremacist went and killed nine african-americans and then you have donald trump retweeting people who think that way, that was terrifying for a lot of us. so i was saying, listen, there was a whitelash element. i said even that night in part, people took it. it became what it became. what did you mean by whitelash. explain what whitelash means. what whitelash means when you have a part of white working class that gets fired up in race and they begin to vote in that direction. it s
were mad at, some of it was jobs, some of it they just didn t feel that hillary understood them and that she was there for them, that she was speaking their language and it left them open to at least trump was trying. it s kind of like, you know, you re sitting at home waiting for a date and the phone never rings. the guy that comes by, at least he shows up with flowers, you re going to go with that person. it almost felt that way. that he was change. maybe not have been change the way you liked it, may not have been the best kind of change that might have been available, but in this race, how many people like that did you hearsay either i can t go with her, she s not on the right side of us versus them or i m thinking of voting for her but i m not crazy about her. more than change. what struck me was he seemed to care. see, underneath the rage and the lock her up and all sort of stuff, if you talk long enough, you get down to the pain and nobody cares about me, they didn t reach
two-time obama voters in a county that had been blue since i think 72 or 76 and that county flipped and that family flipped and, you know, so i needed to sit down and talk with them. they didn t like some of those inflammatory comments that trump made. they called them crap. they didn t like them. but even though they were distasteful comments on race, they weren t disqualifying for them because they had other issues that weren t being addressed. there are some trump voters, i don t care what anybody says, who were delighted by those kind of racially provocative terms you saw at the rallies, but at the same time i think there s a much, much, much bigger set of voters for whom this was a much more complicated decision. and i think those voters have not been heard from well enough yet. that s why we re doing a special tonight. was obamacare the tipping point for them tonight? that was a part of it. i think it all adds up. it was the obamacare struggles, some of which i couldn t fig
all right, so cnn is going to explore the messy truth about the 2016 race tonight in a special hosted by our friend van jones. van takes to the hustings and talks to people across the political spectrum about how they are feeling following this certainly divisive and unprecedented presidential race. here s a look. then you have trump. help me understand how even if you don t like the health care, you like trump. i just don t understand the trump part. you know, hillary s message was this, i m with her. trump s message was, i m with you. i m with you. and that kind of stuck with us. trump has not necessarily