As it now stands, Hillary has a popular-vote majority of more than 672k votes out of some 121 million cast. The Democratic candidate for President has now won the popular vote in every election since 1992 other than 2004; that includes 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012 and 2016. That’s six out of seven elections. Trump got more than a half-million fewer votes than Romney did four years ago.
Of course it’s all about the Electoral College. But Hillary lost the EC relatively narrowly. A shift of only 268k votes - just over half of Trump’s winning margin in Ohio alone, which was 454k - in four states, Mich., Penna., Ariz. and Fla., would have made Hillary President-elect.
Taking on an incumbent President in four years will not be easy. But our next nominee will almost certainly not have a quarter-century of highly-motivated GOP hatred to overcome, or have an FBI Director declaring he or she is under investigation just 11 days before Election Day. Our next nominee will also not be trying to succeed a two-term President of his or her own party, which is rare in the modern era (Nixon in 1960, Humphrey in 1968 and McCain in 2008 all couldn’t do it).
We made small net gains in both the Senate and the House this year. On issue after issue, most Americans favor policies advocated by Democrats. We need to do a better job next time of finding an appealing and trustworthy candidate who can carry our message to the American people (and especially blue-collar voters). I’m confident that we can.
The 2016 election is now behind us. Let us support the new President in his policies when we’re able to do so in good conscience, and firmly oppose him when he goes astray.
Keep your chin up, don’t lose hope, and keep fighting for a better day in the country we love.
It would take a lot fewer than 268K votes to shift to a Hillary victory – I think the closest path would have been WI, MI, and PA, which add up to about a 114K margin.
That’s of course assuming the Trump presidency will be a disaster. The simple path to a democrat victory is to get those people who sat out this year to vote.
I’ve got a three point plan for Democratic win in 2020.
Refine the message. Right now you’re seeing the start of the usual infighting that comes in the wake of a loss, particularly a devastating one, as the Clinton corporatists and the Sanders semi-socialists jockey for position. We need to find a new approach, an internal “third way” that combines and somehow transcends them both. A little bit of (Bill) Clinton “triangulation” would seem to be in order. Better than a protracted intra-party civil war.
Pick a better messenger. The real story, lost in Mrs. Clinton’s popular vote victory, is not the “Trump Triumph”, but rather the “Clinton collapse”. Trump, in terms of raw votes, didn’t do any better than McCain or Romney. But Clinton did far worse than Obama pretty much everywhere. You can complain, and I have, about the unjustness of the “crooked Hillary” meme, about the Comey letter which did far more to reinforce that perception than his subsequent retraction did to dispel it, but the reality remains that we nominated a candidate who was uniquely vulnerable to those kinds of ambushes and we did so knowingly.
Combat the lies. They say that the Democratic party doesn’t know the heartland. As Joe Biden might say: Malarkey. We know the heartland, it’s just that the heartland doesn’t know us. What they do know and don’t like is that carefully crafted caricature that I’ll call, for convenience sake, “the Democrat party”. The “Democrat party” is created from half-truths, distortions, and outright lies perpetrated by AM radio, Fox news, and everybody’s drunk uncle forwarding all-caps emails that they believe but which were actually created by clever liars who weave in just enough authentic sounding verbiage to give the whole thing that air of, in Steven Colbert’s phrase, “truthiness”. They party needs to establish a full time operation dedicated exclusively to making the half-truths whole, clarifying the distortions, and refuting the lies everywhere, every time, at every turn. And if, after this has been done sufficiently to get the message out to even the most fact-resistant resident of middle America, they still want to vote against us, fine. At least, they’ll actually be voting against us and not against the “Democrat Party”. Hey, it’s a free country, at least for the time being.
So that’s basically it.
Refine the message.
Get a better messenger.
Combat the lies.
Nicely summarized E-DUB, at least in regards to your 2 and 3. I’m not convinced the message needs refining though. You nailed the problem in number 3; voters don’t like that “Democrat party” and that’s the one they hear about. When they get the actual Democratic party policies they like them, and they’d have liked even the comparatively more progressive policies HRC ran on.
Rather than aggressively hunting down lies and truth-squadding them, maybe we need to just articulate the truth about what we propose and why we propose it over and over and over. We should have operatives talking every day on every news show, infotainment show, comedy show and opinion show we can get them onto. The Democratic party needs to become its own reporting venue devoted exclusively to policy, because media journalism will continue to cover scandal and controversy.
If all Democrats do is react to right wing lies and try and repackage or refine our message, then he said/she said will be the only way issues are covered, and middle America will have no reason to change who they trust.
Trump exploited the angry and the fearful. But he can’t deliver. He can cause lots of pain, some of it to the same people who think he is their savior. They were mad when they voted for him, only question is how long it takes them to catch on, and whether he can blame it on us, somehow.
Its not like he can just unlock the doors on all those factories, and hang out a sign says “Hiring!”. Lot of people going to suffer for this.
The most important thing to do is to constantly explain to the masses why they are wrong — to listen patiently to their plaints and then preach to them like an old-time Jesuit missionary. Show them the depths of their depravity; point out how vile they, poor trembling souls before your throne, are in every wretched opinion. Take no backchat: call out their innate racism and sexism; point out your superior education and understanding; drain them of the very will to live.
Explain the New Order that is surely coming - a genderless, raceless paradise of deservedly Rich and Poor, with endless war for endless peace - inevitable if only they fulfil their side of the contract and give over their votes, then shut up until next called again.
And then cajole them with the final argument if they are poor and white: that they are dying out and will be obliterated from History. Because they’re Bad People.
The only good to come out of this is that perhaps the media will start to require more investigative journalism, and lose some of the arrogance that was partly responsible for this debacle.
xenophon41. I wasn’t advocating that the “truth squad” be the only body dedicated to getting the message out, just that with all the misinformation and disinformation out there (oh, and I left out right wing websites) but that a group with no other purpose was needed to do so.
First two parts aren’t far from the mark. The third doesn’t get there. Yes there are some lies, but the Democratic party doesn’t have the heart and soul of the working stiff anymore. They’ve been overly concerned with total economic growth ignoring the mass of people who aren’t getting anywhere or falling behind. They don’t grasp that many people still managing to do well have friends and family and neighbors that are stagnated in the economy or falling behind. There were plenty of conservative useful idiots who believe the utter nonsense and voted for Trump but there were also plenty of sensible people who wanted change. They can see that the system isn’t working for them, they don’t want to hear that it will be better for everyone some day. And they don’t care about the Democratic party just because it isn’t AS BAD as the GOP. The Democrats need to be a better party that actually represents everyone if they want to win again.
It wasn’t until I recently chatted with a family member, a Hillary supporter, that I pinpointed something I hadn’t quite realized yet: that some liberals have a “It hurts, but it’s right” mindset.
On the issue of Obamacare, for instance, some liberals have the attitude of: “Yes, the insurance premiums are expensive and a painful burden on a family’s finances, but it’s the right thing to do because it makes poor people or the less-well off better off now,” and kind of hand-wave away the financial burden. Such a viewpoint could be applied to theoretical single-payer in America, too: “It hurts that you have to pay 8% of your income every year into this system, but it’s the right thing to do because it makes healthcare affordable for much of America that couldn’t afford it previously.”
Or affirmative action: “It hurts that you were turned down by the university you wanted admission to in favor of other minority students, but it’s the right thing to do because it helps correct past racial injustices.”
Serious question: when was the Democratic party last in a position to do that? By my reckoning it was the 111th Congress of Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid. I seem to remember some significant accomplishments in those two years, and then I remember government shutdowns and credit rating downgrades after the great 2010 “Let’s all stay home and send a message” midterms.
I don’t agree that Dems have fundamental or structural problems with cultural elitism or spreadsheet fiscal management which glosses over whole economic sectors. Certainly some progressive spokespeople exhibit both, in spades, but if the GOP doesn’t have to own its own pundits in the minds of these economically disadvantaged people, the Dems ought to be able to divorce ourselves from our own loudmouths. I think the real problem is that we can’t get effective legislation through Congress unless we have overwhelming majorities. Most of what Obama accomplished after the first two years of his presidency he did on his own, and that’s a limited proposition. Because the other major party will not compromise. They don’t have to as a majority and still don’t have to as a bare minority. So if we aren’t demonstrating a better way, voters aren’t seeing a better way.
We are already a better party that tries to represent everyone. But we run away from our own best policies in campaigns because we’re afraid they might not ‘message’ well. So we end up spending more time critiquing our opponents, which Republicans inherently do more effectively than we do.