The weeks after this election have left most life long Democrats scarred, numb and scared. I knew there was always going to be a reaction from those hard core Clinton supporters and that they would be tempted to vent their rage at their own kind, progressive Democrats that voted for Sanders in the primary. Once the turnout numbers came in and they showed a lack of enthusiasm from blacks, latinos and the young voting on election day, the Democratic Party had a choice. They could learn from their mistake, or they could seek out a scapegoat. Guess what’s happening? Let the scapegoating commence.
I had the misfortune of stumbling on Sasha Stone and Ryan Adam’s blog in Medium, “It’s Time for Bernie Sanders to Apologize to his Supporters, and to President Obama”. In it Stone and Adams vent their rage at the left, refusing to take credit for the electoral disaster that allowed Trump to win the 2016 election. Now, granted, most Democrats have not taken that line, but as the struggle for the Democratic party leadership goes forward, be prepared for more such outbursts, especially as the true consequences of Trump’s victory become apparent.
So let’s put this lie to bed right now. The Clinton loss in 2016 will go down as the single largest sign that the Democratic party had lost touch with it’s base and that it, rather than the GOP, may be knocking on the door to future irrelevance. The Democratic party and the media it had cultivated showed themselves to be completely isolated from the voters that should have voted for them. Let’s look at the campaign…
During the Primary, Sanders tapped into the populist urge amongst voters in a big way. Polls and articles showed him trouncing Trump in key “rust belt” battleground states. While Clinton held fair leads, Bernie destroyed Trump in Wisconsin (by 19 points), Michigan (by 19-20 points) and Pennsylvania (12-20 points). He also showed a very high possibility of taking Republican votes in a general election as detailed in the Atlantic Monthly in 2015. These truths were largely ignored during a nasty primary that consisted of the Democratic National Leadership dismissing this evidence and throwing its weight behind Hillary. The DNC waged an active campaign of dirty tricks on Bernie Sanders that would later come back to haunt the Clinton campaign in the form of Russian hacks of DNC e-mails released by Julian Assange.
The bitter divisions of the Primary were somewhat papered over, but many Sanders supporters still had memories of the Nevada Caucuses in their heads, where the DNC pointlessly demonised and silenced Sanders volunteers in a video that stayed on you tube for months. This was compounded by the fact that soon before and after the convention Hillary’s people decided to tack to the right, feeling they had successfully put down the Bernie revolution and no longer had to maintain the cover of Progressive positions they had embraced so publicly in the Primary Campaign. Soon the news was full of Hillary surrogates going after Jeb Bush’s donor lists which included Wall Street donors and Fossil Fuel Interests...which were red flags to Progressive voters in 2016. The Clinton campaign started measuring the drapes for the oval office in October when articles and video appeared from everywhere about who would be on the Clinton cabinet.
The crowning touch of hubris was provided by this simple fact….Clinton did not campaign in Wisconsin once. She never appeared. She neglected places like Michigan (destroyed by bad water and unemployment) and Wisconsin (a state Bernie trounced her in during the Primary). She made the cynical assumption that the base would come out in those states because of the old Democratic adage forever hurled at the Left...”who else are you going to vote for?”.
In the effort to understand this effect on base voters in the rust belt...imagine you’re working two jobs with a kid in school. You are living pay check to pay check. You are desperate. You are drowning in debt and utterly exhausted. You voted for Bernie in the Primary but you are considering Hillary. Then you turn on TMZ and you see this…
The “optics” as they say...were horrible. Hillary Clinton partying with Paul McCartney. However Clinton didn’t even show up in your state. Not once.
The person who watched this would have had serious doubts when fellow Bernie voters tried to get them to come out for Hillary. And they would have had good reason to. They felt insulted.
So in the end, they either voted for Trump or stayed home.
Now the powers that be in the Democratic party are trying desperately to hold on to control over it even after losing Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Michigan in one of the worst showings in a national election of all time.
If the Democratic Party wants to win again, it has to learn from it’s terrible lesson. To put it bluntly, the neoliberal, “almost Republican” policies of the past must be tossed aside. We need to take back the base of our party. That means NOT to fall into the childish trap of blaming the people who could have saved you.