If you ask Hillary Clinton and her campaign team why she lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump, she’ll supply you with a nearly-limitless list of answers, none of them having anything to do with her own failings. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” was at work against her. The Russians, in deep, treasonous collusion with Trump, hijacked the election. Bernie Sanders and his damn populist base crippled the final months of her campaign, when she should have been sailing breezily to the nomination. And don’t forget Benghazi, the email scandal, and her temporary illness, all of which were turned from molehills to mountains by the evil Trumpers. Finally, the biggest culprit of all: FBI Director James Comey and his dastardly letter to Congress two weeks before the election.
Once you get out from under the Hillary Clinton Umbrella of Excuses, though, you typically hear Democrats explaining the November results in one simple, easily-digestible soundbite: She failed to excite the liberal base, Trump did just the opposite on the Republican side, abracadabra, ye olde glass ceiling remained unbroken.
But according to a new analysis of the 2016 election, Clinton’s biggest problem wasn’t that the Democrat base stayed home, it was that Barack Obama’s voters moseyed out to the polls…and voted for Donald Trump.
From McClatchy DC:
Those Obama-Trump voters, in fact, effectively accounted for more than two-thirds of the reason Clinton lost, according to Matt Canter, a senior vice president of the Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group. In his group’s analysis, about 70 percent of Clinton’s failure to reach Obama’s vote total in 2012 was because she lost these voters.
[…]
The findings are significant for a Democratic Party, at a historic low point, that’s trying to figure out how it can win back power. Much of the debate over how to move forward has centered on whether the party should try to win back working-class white voters – who make up the bulk of Obama-Trump voters – or focus instead on mobilizing its base.
And yet, you can look at the current machinations within the Democratic Party and see that they’re concentrating on exactly the wrong thing. Instead of learning from this historic rejection of their agenda, they are doubling down on the radical left-wing ideas that appeal to the Sanders Nation – ideas that couldn’t even make Sanders the nominee. Ideas that are a huge turnoff for many mainstream Democrats, who already feel the party has drifted too far to the left for their liking.
If they keep ignoring what’s right under their noses, they’re going to protest, protest, protest their way to another embarrassing failure in 2018.
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