I haven’t posted here in a long time. But, I feel I need to express something that I’m not seeing in the blogosphere or Twitter or anywhere else. This will be brief and simple.
Donald Trump won the election because voters are ILLOGICAL. And, that’s because people are ILLOGICAL. Journalists and pundits can’t write enough articles fast enough explaining what the Democrats did wrong and what they need to better in the future, but no one is addressing this.
You simply can’t run a campaign or create a platform that will effectively reach the many, many people who voted Bush-Obama-Obama-Trump. Those people have no unified political philosophy nor do they give much deliberative thought to the policies presented to them.
There are many great, thought provoking arguments for why Hillary lost. And, there is truth in parts of all of them. But, as a progressive, my main concern is that the Democratic Party will try to find an answer to a riddle that doesn’t exist. That they will try to tailor a specific message to reach certain voters who no one can predict how they will vote. The mistake that was made was thinking that voters are rational or predictable.
No organization can effectively unlock mass psychology with any degree of certainty. There will always be uncertainty. For those of you baseball fans out there (yeah, Cubs!), there is a stat called BABIP (batting avg for balls in play). Sometimes a hitter can hit a ball very, very hard, but it ends up being caught because of where it was hit. A hitter’s success isn’t necessarily determined by all things he/she can control. But, what is reassuring, is that over the long haul (a season or a career), balls that are hit hard will eventually start landing for hits.
Hillary will end up with 1-2 million more votes than Donald. Unfortunately, those votes were “hit” in the wrong places. It happens. It SUCKS and this lunatic administration needs to be resisted at every turn. But, chance or “bad luck” had more to do with it than I’ve seen discussed. I believe this is an important point to make because defeatism is tempting, especially after this loss.
Let’s continue to hit the ball hard and passionately push for progressive ideas and candidates. Democracy isn’t finite. Those hard hit balls will eventually land for the hits our country needs.
