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Former President Bill Clinton said Wednesday that President-elect Donald Trump had won the 2024 race “fair and square,” in contrast to what he still feels was an illegitimate result in 2016.
“This time, Donald Trump won the race, fair and square,” Clinton told “The View,” adding, “I think.”
In an appearance on the ABC talk show, the ex-president was reminded by co-host Joy Behar that he wrote in his memoir he was so outraged over his wife Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 that he couldn’t sleep.
“How are you sleeping now?” Behar asked, referring to Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris. “What’s going to happen now?”
“I’m sleeping better now because I did everything I could for the alternative,” he said. “But I also think it’s important for everybody to just take a deep breath and say, unlike in 2016, there was no outside influence like the FBI Director interfering at the last moment in violation of 70 years of policy, and it changed 5% [in polling] overnight.”
The Clintons have repeatedly assigned blame to then-FBI Director James Comey’s late October 2016 letter re-opening the investigation into her use of a private email server as a critical factor in her narrow loss to Trump.
President Clinton said Wednesday that in his lifetime, he’d never seen such a rapid polling shift. Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton was widely favored by experts going into the election that year to defeat Trump, in spite of Comey’s letter to Congress about the investigation.
“Anybody that says that he didn’t give Trump the election needs to –” he said Monday, trailing off.
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In this year’s election, though, Clinton said Trump had won fairly, or so he thought.
“I’m not like [Trump]. I have to have some evidence to make a charge, so as far as I know, he won it, and there’re a lot of reasons why,” he said.
The former president called on the party to observe a peaceful transfer of power and work with Trump and Republicans when possible.
“I do not think we should just be jamming them, even though they do that to us a lot,” he said. “I think it’s a mistake.”
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Clinton was governor of Arkansas before his successful run for the presidency in 1992, building a coalition of both rural and urban voters. A generation later, rural, working-class voters have fled the Democratic Party in droves.
Asked about winning back that section of the voting base on the show, Clinton said Democrats had a tendency to write off certain groups based on demographics and likelihood of support.
“We need to quit screaming at each other and listen to each other,” he said.
