Kim McKinney Cohen was a Democratic Party precinct captain who supported Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primaries, but on election day she voted for Donald Trump instead of her party’s nominee, Hillary Clinton.
“It was my primal scream,” Cohen told Politico Magazine about her protest vote. “I wasn’t gonna take it anymore.”
Cohen should have been a reliable Clinton voter, but, like thousands of other liberals across the country, she decided it was better to bring down her party than hand it over to the former secretary of state solely in the name of having a woman in the oval office.
“I need a job more than I need a woman in the White House,” said Cohen, who Politico described as a “proud feminist.”
Trump’s victory shocked the political establishment, most of whom thought Clinton was a shoe-in for president. Most assumed the Obama coalition would turn out in droves to support Clinton. That didn’t happen.
Cohen’s home state of Colorado went for Clinton in November, but she was one of thousands of traditional Democrats who got so fed up with their own party that they pulled the lever for Trump, a Republican.
Democrats are now frantically trying to explain how Clinton lost so many voters in key states, like Michigan, and Cohen’s story may give them an insight into how even party loyalists can turn against them.
Politico notes Cohen is “African-American, environmentally conscious, pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-gun control,” but this year “she was angrier at her own party’s leaders than she was appalled by a man who cozied up to white nationalist and anti-Semitic groups. She wanted to throw it back in the face of her party.”
Her son even got her to watch Fox News. It’s when Trump appeared on Fox and asked black voters what they had to lose by voting for him. That got her thinking. The final straw came, according to Politico, when Clinton called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.”
“I went all in for Bernie,” Cohen told Politico. “But the DNC burned him, so I went off the plantation to become a deplorable.”
“I hope I never have to vote for a Republican ever again,” said Cohen, who’s never been a fan of Clinton — going back all the way to the 1990s when her husband, Bill, was president.
Cohen was among the 8 percent of blacks who voted for Trump. She voted for President Obama twice, but couldn’t bring herself to support a party that trashed Sanders so badly in the primaries.
Trump actually outperformed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign among minority voters.
Cohen doesn’t even like Trump. Politico reports she’s “sickened, too, by the hate-mongering she has seen surrounding the Trump campaign.”
Though Cohen “doubts things will get much worse than they are already for people of color just because Trump is in the White House,” Politico reports.
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