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Politico
Democrats: We
ran into an unstoppable wave
By Darren Samuelsohn
Democrats had looked forward to a smooth handoff of power from a
successful two-term president to a successor of his own party – with a
Democratic-led Senate to ease the way.
What they got was an existential shock.
In interviews Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, while Clinton’s
path to victory narrowed to the point of near-nothing, Democratic
leaders said they were at a loss for how to accept what comes next.
“I’m more sick than I am shocked,” former Wisconsin Democratic Rep.
Dave Obey told POLITICO. “It’s amazing to me that for the next four
years this country is going to be led by a man who has been the most
destructive to the process than any man I’ve seen since Joe McCarthy.”
Sizing up the prospects of a Clinton loss, Democrats offered up a
number of places to point the blame: Pollsters, FBI Director James
Comey, an out-of-touch message on globalization and trade, angry white
people, Trump’s lightning-in-a-bottle candidacy, and even what could
have been with Bernie Sanders.
“It was a wave you couldn’t stop,” said Tad Devine, a longtime
Democratic operative who helped run the Vermont senator’s surprise 2016
primary campaign. “That’s the only explanation.”
Asked if Democrats should be second guessing their nomination of
Clinton, Devine cited a number of built-in obstacles to Sanders’
candidacy but insisted there was “no second guessing” to those results.
“I do think he was a candidate very much in sync with the mood of the
country and that would have been reflected if he would have been the
nominee,” Devine said of Sanders.
Of the Democrats interviewed, all expressed a degree of shock with the
Election Day results they were watching on television. Several reported
receiving panicked text messages and email from friends, family and
colleagues. They concurred there’d be plenty of soul searching for
their party in the days, weeks and even months ahead as they brace for
life in the political minority, and with Trump seemingly headed to
Washington with a “drain the swamp” mandate.
The party that was hoping to be led by another Clinton is going to have
to spend time studying “why they lost where they lost,” said Emily
Pierce, a former Obama Justice Department spokeswoman.
She cited exit polling that showed union households breaking evenly
between the two parties, a harsh reality for Democrats long affiliated
with organized labor. “That’s because Trump spoke to them and the trade
message was more powerful than I think Democrats realized,” she said.
Rodell Mollineau, a former senior aide to Sen. Harry Reid, insisted in
an interview that he wasn’t giving up hope yet on a comeback Clinton
win. “I’m not bed wetting,” he told POLITICO, noting he had been
getting panicked messages from friends asking him to “tell me it’s
going to be OK.”
As for what did the Democrats in, Mollineua argued, “That’s going to be
a question for tomorrow.”
But he also conceded, “This party needs to do a better job reaching out
to white working class.”
Pete D’Alessandro, Sanders’ 2016 Iowa campaign director, said he
entered Election Day expecting a much different outcome from the one he
was absorbing after a day working to get out the Democratic vote around
Waterloo, Iowa.
“I thought it wouldn’t be a blowout by any stretch of the imagination,
but I didn’t think they’d be fighting so hard,” he said.
While D’Alessandro insisted Clinton had the better policies for working
class Americans, he admitted it was Trump who may have closed the deal.
“Obviously there was a disconnect somewhere,” he said.
“For over 20 years I’ve been warning about what was happening to family
income and income disparity,” Obey added. “It’s ironic that the
Republican who stood in the way of virtually every effort to do
something on the issue now are the beneficiary of it. I guess it shows
if there’s enough obstruction for long enough that you can get by with
murder, or something close to it.”
Many Democrats insisted Clinton wasn’t to blame for the loss.
Former Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, for example, said the bulk of
the fault fell on the head of the FBI. “I think the unprecedented Comey
announcement of a new Clinton inquiry just nine days before the
presidential election has had a significant impact on the vote,” he
said.
Obey too insisted Clinton and the Democrats weren’t the only ones who
got the 2016 presidential race wrong. “All of the pollsters got it
wrong,” he said.
And as much as Obey supported Clinton, he said the former first lady,
senator and secretary of State had an uphill climb to be the country’s
first female president because of the negative campaigning she’s long
faced.
“They have pounded her for 30 years,” he said. “She has been a
handicapped messenger. Nobody can take the kind of pounding for 30
years without it having a serious impact.”
Read this and other articles at Politico
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