I want to thank everyone on this site, the people who put it together every day, and especially the people who put together the HNV threads.
I’m sorry for everyone this didn’t work out. I am sorry my various poll postings and diaries turned out to be wrong. I was pretty confident in my predictions based on the available data. But when every poll has us winning in WI by 6+ points and we lose by about that much, I just think we had a lot of bad data in the system.
I can’t think of one poll that had Trump ahead in places like WI, PA, NH, MN. There were only about 2 polls that had him ahead in NC. Very few polls had anything less than a 5 point lead for us in VA. There was a serious polling miss here, and it seems that the Clinton pollsters had the biggest misses of them all. If WI and MI were in trouble on e-day, that potential should have been detectible 3 months ago and we should’ve spent more time there than in useless North Carolina. I think if we had better regional polling, we would’ve seen this and addressed it properly.
We also learned that GOTV has a minimal effect. We’ll still win the popular vote because of our GOTV efforts, but we lost too many votes to third parties and to Trump in spite of it. Ads have minimal impact. The appeal of a candidate’s personality and message mean more in politics than GOTV, advertising or campaign machinery.
The job of being a President or elected leader is a salesperson’s role. It is not a role for a thoughtful problem solver. After all, you can look at the counties and see where Trump improved over Romney and Clinton underperformed Obama, and they’re mostly in counties that neither candidate ever really visited or targeted.
In addition, the 3rd party vote killed us again, in our 3rd attempt to earn a 3rd term in the last 50 years (1968/2000/2016). The Wayward Berners screwed everyone and ultimately plotted their own coup against the Democratic establishment. They won that battle. It’s now a Berner party. The Obama-Clinton era, for all its thoughtfulness and achievements, is over. We’re going to have a more visceral Democratic party that is frankly not as intellectually rigorous or capable as the leadership we had for 16 of the past 24 years, and they will start deep in the hole because Trump and the GOP now have a white nationalist formula which they will use effectively to maintain the loyalty of their coalition no matter how badly they run the country.
We are now in the first day of neo-fascist Republic. I hope younger folks will take over the Democratic Party and identify a more visceral way to stay connected to its voters. America has dumbed itself down to the point where problem solvers and policy solutions don’t matter. We will also have to face the reality that we will need younger, white men to emerge in our party. White America now views itself not as a majority but as a crystallized minority group. This has been a reality of political life in the South for years, but it has now extended into the midwest. We will need people who speak and connect to that demographic, and while another Barack Obama may emerge, it might be less disruptive to the national fabric to have it be someone like a Gavin Newsom, Sherrod Brown or someone like that.
I’m very sorry for the country and the world. I don’t really know the way forward, but I think my days being active as a follower of national politics are probably over. It’s time for others to take over.