You have to hand it to Jamelle Bouie, Slate’s chief political correspondent.  What’s that…you don’t know what Slate is?  Who are you, Gary Johnson?

Bouie is not one to realize his candidate has stepped into it, so like any good progressive, he needs to defend Hillary’s obnoxious and condescending comment that half of Donald Trump’s supporters are deplorable (and racist to the core).  One need only listen to Clinton’s voice to realize the utter scorn she has for this group of tens of millions of Americans.

Bouie argues that the views of Trump supporters revealed in opinion polls back him up.  So it must be good campaign strategy to take this approach.  I really do hope the Clinton campaign, a full employment agency for Democrat operatives if there ever were one, might see fit to hire Bouie.  At least people have heard of the Clinton campaign. 

Here are some of the poll results that Bouie suggests prove that Trump supporters are racist and deplorable:

There’s other data too. In June, Reuters measured the racial attitudes of Clinton, Trump, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich supporters. A significant number of supporters for each candidate voiced negative attitudes about black Americans. But Trump backers stood out in their animus. Nearly 50 percent said blacks were “more violent” than whites; almost as many said that blacks were “more criminal than whites.

There is also this: “Trump supporters believe black people are more violent than whites; nearly 50 percent of non-Trump Republicans say this.”

Are Bouie and the researchers he relies on who analyze poll data unaware that blacks commit crime at many times the rate of whites or any other ethnic group in America, especially violent crime?  Black Americans, a bit over 13% of the population, commit as many violent crimes as the other 87% of the population.  Are Asians doing the shooting in Chicago?  In other words, Trump supporters believe something that is true.  Does that make them racist?  It appears that Hillary supporters, if they think crime rates and criminal behavior are an equally shared phenomenon across the races, are deluded.

Bouie might want to look at the Anti-Defamation League's survey on anti-Semitism.  It turns out that black Americans hold much more anti-Semitic views than the nation as a whole, and more than any other group (other than Muslim Americans and foreign-born Hispanics).  And heaven forbid, we don’t want to discuss with Mr. Bouie whether a significant percentage  of black Americans hold racist views toward white people (e.g., they hate them).

The Democrats’ basket of deplorables could be filled pretty quickly by the Hillary and Bouie definitions of who belongs in them – if the Republicans sank to the level of Hillary Clinton.