You might want to take a look at Karen Tumulty’s after action report of the 2016 presidential election in the Washington Post:
The 2016 election has brought a moment of reckoning — and a new era to the party.
Democrats have been shut out of power in Washington, with the White House and both chambers of Congress in GOP control starting in January. In state houses across the country, their ranks have been decimated.
And for the first time in a quarter-century, there will be no one named Clinton in the Oval Office or on deck. Obama and Vice President Biden are also moving offstage.
That is certain to set off a struggle for the soul and direction of the party — and give an opening for other leaders to fill the void in a party with a thin bench.
It’s as much a post-mortem of President Obama’s term of office. Here’s the most telling passage:
Meanwhile, the party has also been hollowed out in state capitals across the country. Where Democrats held 29 governorships when Obama was inaugurated, they can count only 15 in the wake of Tuesday’s election. In 2017, Republicans could tie the record for controlling governorships, which is 34, set in 1922 when Warren Harding was president. (One governor is an independent, and a recount is possible in North Carolina, where the Democrat has a narrow lead.)
During the Obama presidency, more than 900 Democratic state legislators were defeated.
That is not an accident. It is the foreseeable outcome of a strategy.
Hillary Clinton won in the majority of the most populous counties in the United States. She lost most other places. Her supporters are presently complaining that she got more votes than Donald Trump did (by .2%). A majority of voters voted against her as they did for Donald Trump.
Focusing your efforts on a tiny handful of counties can possibly be a formula for winning an election. In this particular election that turned out not to have been so. There were just too many headwinds for Hillary Clinton.
In the absence of any commitment to persuasion or conciliation, it is incompatible with republican government. That’s the identify crisis that Democrats need to face head-on. Either they need to re-think their electoral strategy and build strength in many, many more places or double down on their strategy, becoming increasingly authoritarian in the process. I don’t think that’s a winning formula, either.
I don’t want to let the Republicans off the hook on this. Their problems are at least as deep as the Democrats’. They’re just in power.
Republicans are losing the most populous counties in the country and blaming the people in those counties for it. They’ve got to adapt, persuade, and compromise, too.
Change is hard. Small-r republican government is hard. Ours is the longest-lived republic in any major country. Let’s try to keep it.
