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Since the election, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I failed to connect with more working-class whites. Many commentators talk as if my poor showing with that group was a new problem that stemmed mostly from my own weaknesses and Trump’s unique populist appeal. They point to the white voters who switched from Obama to Trump as evidence. West Virginia, a heavily white working-class state, tells a different story. From Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 to Bill’s reelection in 1996, Democrats won fourteen out of seventeen presidential elections there. Since 2000, however, we’ve lost every time, by increasingly bigger margins. In 2012 Obama lost to Mitt Romney by nearly two to one. It’s hard to look at that trend and conclude that it is all about me or about Trump.

The most prominent explanation, though an insufficient one on its own, is the so-called war on coal. Democrats’ long-standing support for environmental regulations that protect clean air and water and seek to limit carbon emissions has been an easy scapegoat for the misfortunes of the coal industry and the communities that have depended on it. The backlash reached a fevered pitch during the Obama administration, despite strong evidence that government regulation is not the primary cause for the industry’s decline.

The Obama administration was slow to take on this false narrative. When it was getting ready to announce the sweeping new Clean Power Plan, which was seen as the most anti-coal policy yet, I thought the President should consider making the announcement in Coal Country and couple it with a big effort to help miners and their families by attracting new investments and jobs. That might have softened the blow a little.

In the end, President Obama announced the new regulations in the White House alongside his administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That was seen by many folks in West Virginia as another signal that Democrats didn’t care about them. Once that perception takes hold, it’s hard to dislodge.

That said, Democrats’ problems with white working-class voters started long before Obama and go far beyond coal.

After John Kerry lost to George W. Bush in 2004, the writer Thomas Frank popularized the theory that Republicans persuaded whites in places like West Virginia to vote against their economic interests by appealing to them on cultural issues—in other words, “gays, guns, and God.” There’s definitely merit in that explanation. Remember my earlier description of the man in Arkansas who said Democrats wanted to take his gun and force him to go to a gay wedding?

Then there’s race. For decades, Republicans have used coded racial appeals on issues such as school busing, crime, and welfare. It was no accident that Ronald Reagan launched his general election campaign in 1980 with a speech about “states’ rights” near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. In 2005 the chairman of the Republican National Committee formally apologized for what’s been called the southern strategy. But in 2016 it was back with a vengeance. Politics was reduced to its most tribal, “us” versus “them,” and “them” grew into a big list: blacks, Latinos, immigrants, liberals, city dwellers, you name it. Like so many demagogues before him, Trump encouraged a zero-sum view of life where if someone else is gaining, you must be losing. You can hear the resentment in the words of that protestor in Williamson: “We’re tired of all the darn handouts; nobody takes care of us.”

It’s hard to compete against demagoguery when the answers you can offer are all unsatisfying. And years of economic pain provided fertile ground for Republicans’ cultural and racial appeals. Union membership, once a bulwark for Democrats in states like West Virginia, declined. Being part of a union is an important part of someone’s personal identity. It helps shape the way you view the world and think about politics. When that’s gone, it means a lot of people stop identifying primarily as workers—and voting accordingly—and start identifying and voting more as white, male, rural, or all of the above.

Just look at Don Blankenship, the coal boss who joined the protest against me on his way to prison. In recent years, even as the coal industry has struggled and workers have been laid off, top executives like him have pocketed huge pay increases, with compensation rising 60 percent between 2004 and 2016. Blankenship endangered his workers, undermined their union, and polluted their rivers and streams, all while making big profits and contributing millions to Republican candidates. He should have been the least popular man in West Virginia even before he was convicted in the wake of the death of twenty-nine miners. Instead, he was welcomed by the pro-Trump protesters in Williamson. One of them told a reporter that he’d vote for Blankenship for President if he ran. Meanwhile, I pledged to strengthen the laws to protect workers and hold bosses like Blankenship accountable—the fact that he received a jail sentence of just one year was appalling—yet I was the one being protested.

Some on the left, including Bernie Sanders, argue that working-class whites have turned away from Democrats because the party became beholden to Wall Street donors and lost touch with its populist roots. It’s hard to believe that voters who embrace Don Blankenship are looking for progressive economics. After all, by nearly every measure, the Democratic Party has moved to the left over the past fifteen years, not to the right. Mitt Romney was certainly not more populist than Barack Obama when he demolished him in West Virginia. And Republicans are unabashedly allied with powerful corporate interests, including the coal companies trying to take away health care and pensions from retired miners. Yet they keep winning elections. During my visit, the Republican Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, was blocking West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s legislation to protect coal miners’ pensions. Why? Senator Brown said it was “because he doesn’t like the United Mine Workers Union,” which endorsed his Democratic opponent in 2014. Yet there was virtually no anti-Republican backlash, and to date, no political consequences for one of the most callous displays of disregard for the needs of coal miners I can remember.

Now, I’ve met a lot of open-minded, big-hearted men and women who live and work in poor, rural communities. It’s hard to fault them for wanting to shake things up politically after so many years of disappointment. But anger and resentment do run deep. As Appalachian natives such as author J. D. Vance have pointed out, a culture of grievance, victimhood, and scapegoating has taken root as traditional values of self-reliance and hard work have withered. There’s a tendency toward seeing every problem as someone else’s fault, whether it’s Obama, liberal elites in the big cities, undocumented immigrants taking jobs, minorities soaking up government assistance—or me. It’s no accident that this list sounds exactly like Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

But just because a situation can be exploited for political gain doesn’t mean there’s not a problem. The pain—and panic—that many blue-collar whites feel is real. The old world they talk wistfully about, when men were men and jobs were jobs, really is gone.

Don’t underestimate the role of gender in this. In an economy where most women don’t have any choice but to work and few men earn enough to support a family on their own, traditional gender roles get redefined. Under the right circumstances, that can be liberating for women, good for kids, and even good for men, who now have a partner in shouldering the economic burden. But if the changes are caused by the inability of men to make a decent living when they want to work and can’t find a job, the toll on their sense of self-worth can be devastating.

It all adds up to a complex dynamic. There’s both too much change and not enough change, all at the same time.

When people feel left out, left behind, and left without options, the deep void will be filled by anger and resentment or depression and despair about those who supposedly took away their livelihoods or cut in line.

Trump brilliantly tapped into all these feelings, especially with his slogan: Make America Great Again. Along with that were two other powerful messages: “What have you got to lose?” and “She’s been there for thirty years and never did anything.” What he meant was: “You can have the old America back once I vanquish the immigrants, especially Mexicans and Muslims, send the Chinese products back, repeal Obamacare, demolish political correctness, ignore inconvenient facts, and pillory Hillary along with all the other liberal elites. I hate all the same people you do, and, unlike the other Republicans, I’ll do something to make your life better.”

When my husband was a little boy, his uncle Buddy in Hope, Arkansas, liked to say: “Anybody who tries to make you mad and stop you from thinking is not your friend. There’s a lot to be said for thinking.” Like so much wisdom I’ve heard in my life, it’s easier to say than to live by. The far easier choice is to play the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey blame game—which is what has happened to Democrats in too many places.

One of the most important but least recognized facts in American politics is that Republicans tend to win in places where more people are pessimistic or uncertain about the future, while Democrats tend to win where people are more optimistic. Those sentiments don’t track neatly with the overhyped dichotomy between the coasts and the heartland. There are plenty of thriving communities in both blue and red states that have figured out how to educate their workforces, harness their talents, and participate in the twenty-first-century economy. And some of the most doom-and-gloom Americans are relatively affluent middle-aged and retired whites—the very viewers Fox News prizes—while many poor immigrants, people of color, and young people are burning with energy, ambition, and optimism.

As an example, in 2016 I got whacked in Arkansas as a whole, but I won Pulaski County, home of Little Rock, the state’s vibrant capital city, by 18 points. I lost Pennsylvania, but I won Pittsburgh with 75 percent of the vote. Trump may think of that city as an emblem of the industrial past—he contrasted it with Paris when he pulled out of the global climate agreement in 2017—but the reality is that Pittsburgh has reinvented itself as a hub of clean energy, education, and biomedical research. As I saw when I campaigned there many times, people in Pittsburgh are determined and optimistic about the future.

So I can’t say what was in the hearts and minds of those men and women standing in the rain in Williamson chanting “Go home Hillary!” Did they despise me because they’d heard on Fox that I wanted to put coal miners out of business? Did some think I turned my back on them after they’d voted for me in the Democratic primary in 2008? Did they turn against me because I served as Obama’s Secretary of State and believed climate change was a real threat to our future? Or did their rage flow from deeper tribal politics? All I knew for certain was they were angry, they were loud, and they hated my guts. I gave them a big smile, waved, and went inside.