LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — At the 10th anniversary celebration of his presidential center, Bill Clinton said that Democrats may have suffered a "little bit of a loss of the Hispanic vote" in the midterms because President Obama delayed executive actions to ease deportations of undocumented immigrants until after the election.
Clinton discussed the results of the midterms — in which Democrats lost far more seats than expected in the Senate and the House — in detail for the first time since Election Day at an event on Saturday in Little Rock hosted by Politico.
The event was part of a four-day celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Clinton Presidential Center. The gathering is as much a retrospective of the White House years as it is a political and family reunion for the Clintons and their friends and former staffers.
Obama is expected to announce the executive actions soon, and details of the planned actions have been reported. But after saying he would take action before the end of the summer, the president decided to hold off on the plans until after the election, fearing the order would damage Democrats' chances in conservative-leaning states this year. Clinton sympathized with the president, but suggested the delay hurt Democrats more than not.
Polls leading up to the election were as high as 14 points off, noted Clinton. "There was a collapse of the youth vote. The African-American vote held fairly steady," he added, "and was remarkable given that we had a little bit of a loss of the Hispanic vote, perhaps because the president didn't issue the immigration order."
"But it was a tough call for him, because had he done so, a lot of the others would have lost by even more," Clinton said. "It was a difficult call."
Clinton, whose comments made clear he had pored over exit poll data after Democrats losses on Election Day, campaigned for more than 47 candidates this year, according to a list of his events provided by his office. Hillary Clinton campaigned for more than 26. In total, the Clintons headlined 75 events.
This year, immigration activists associated with the organization, United We Dream, crashed a handful of Hillary Clinton's campaign rallies, causing mostly minor disturbances before being escorted out by security. The protesters said they hoped to pressure Clinton, who is considering another run for president, to say whether she supported Obama's planned executive actions to slow deportations.
At one event last month, a rally for Democrats' gubernatorial candidate in Maryland, the protesters staged a particularly jarring and effective protest. "Immigration is an important issue in this state," Clinton told the protesters from the lectern.
Bill Clinton, answering a question by the moderator of the event, Politico's Mike Allen, said part of the reason Democrats lost by such wide margins was because the party wasn't able to broadcast a cohesive economic message to voters.
"People who were for us just, in all the din, couldn't hear what was actually a fairly coherent economic message coming out," he said.
Exit polls, he added, showed that Democrats wished their candidates had "talked about student-loan reform or equal pay or creating jobs through infrastructure projects. And almost 100% of the Democrats I campaign with talked about all that, but we didn't have, again, a national advertising campaign."
"That might have made all the difference in a couple of close races," Clinton said, "but it would not have changed the larger outcome."
Even Republicans were taken aback by the degree to which they won, said Clinton.
"I have talked to several of them. And a lot of them were surprised by their victory margins."