ABC Anchor Asks Joaquin Castro if Hillary is ‘Sensitive Enough’ to White Trump Voters

Politics never sleeps, not even in the wake of a string of tragedies, and on Sunday morning’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) whose brother is on the shortlist  for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton‘s ticket, fielded questions from fill-in host Martha Raddatz, including several involving the politics of police shootings of black citizens and the shootings of police in Dallas, Texas. On that score, Raddatz seemed to acknowledge Donald Trump’s supporters as almost exclusively white, and asked if Hillary Clinton is “sensitive enough” to the needs of those voters, whatever those needs are:

RADDATZ: You know, it seems like the country truly is at a boiling point. You’ve seen your state here and what’s gone — what’s happened in the past few days. There’s so much anger and so much division. Secretary Clinton, like Donald Trump, is a divisive politician. In our latest polling, 55 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of her. How can someone with those unfavorability ratings bring this country together?

CASTRO: Well, the fact is she’s trying. In every single thing that she’s done during her public service career, she’s tried. She’s not making comments about people’s ethnicity or calling people racists or murderers. She’s not threatening to ban people based on religion. She’s somebody who’s seeking very hard to earn the trust of the American people and to bring all of us together.

RADDATZ: She made the point Friday — and General Flynn pointed out — pointed this out, that white Americans need to better understand black Americans. That can be very off-putting to some white voters.

CASTRO: Well —

RADDATZ: And she isn’t doing so well with large segments of white voters.

CASTRO: That also marks —

RADDATZ: Is she sensitive enough to their needs, to Trump voters? How do you bring those people together? How do you reach out to white voters like that?

CASTRO: No, absolutely, and what Hillary is saying is that each of us lives a different experience in the United States. And I was heartened to see somebody like Newt Gingrich acknowledge that if you’re black in this country, or a person of color, you may have a different experience with police. Conservative writers and RedState — I read a great article on RedState — and also the conservative writer Matt Lewis who wrote about the fact that what we’ve seen on video with, you know, Tamir Rice in Cleveland and New York and Baltimore has been eye-opening for many Americans. And it’s something that is very thorny that makes us uncomfortable but something that we have to deal with and come to terms with.

In the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Hillary Clinton has called for more responsiveness to the concerns of black citizens, while Donald Trump’s campaign has accused her of “encouraging” the killings of police officers in Dallas.

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