In the latest round of the longest running flamewar/piefight in left-wing blogospheric history, Tom Perez won the chairmanship of the DNC last night. Arguments, predictably, have ensued.
In all seriousness, in all this mutual recrimination and finger pointing between both Hillary and Bernie supporters, has there been any serious, number crunching attempt to understand WHY Hillary lost?
All that seems to have been happening over the past few months is that Bernie supporters keep screaming "Bernie woulda won", "triangulation", "DNC shenanigans", and "hippy punching" and Hillary supporters keep screaming some combination of "Russia", "FBI shenanigans", "Misogyny", and "Ungrateful Bernie Bros". All of these arguments are facile.
My question above is a serious one. Wisconsin was gerrymandered, yes, in 2011. But, it went for Obama in 2012, by a reasonably comfortable margin, and still it went for Trump in 2016 while Virginia, as just one example, similarly gerrymandered, did not. Stephen Wolf here at DKos has done an analysis of changes in turnout by congressional district, but I think it doesn't really address the question at hand, due in no small part to gerrymandering.
We need to roll up our sleeves and figure out what needs to be done, because I strongly suspect that we don't know, on either side of this debate, and are running the risk of turning what could potentially have been a turning point in the fortunes of the Democratic Party up and down the ballot into a steamy turd sandwich, all because of GIGO.
This all relates to the current leadership fight in the sense that, if Perez is going to simply keep doing what the DNC leadership has done pretty much sense Howard Dean left the building, which is a lot of what I think the Bernie supporters are afraid of, then the Democrats will continue to lose and be ever further marginalized.
Right now, the Cheeto Gibbon enjoys about 40% support. That 40% is not his ceiling, it's his FLOOR (look at the crosstabs on his latest approval polls). While the progressives and the Establishment wing have been spending the last 4 months blaming each other for what happened in November, his little coup has continued apace. Everything he's been doing has had one primary goal: to solidify his base of support. Only then can he, or rather, President Bannon, safely expand outward and really enact his agenda. If HE keeps his base united, and WE stay divided and, most importantly, misdirected, he can take that 40% base and use it to control everything.
