"Wall Street Democrats failed us." The establishment Democrats have failed the American people."

[zipplewrath]

45. Yeah, there's a real mix here

One can analyze these races as individual events, unrelated to each other. And since Trump's margin of victory was so slim, it's easy to point to almost any factor and say "that was it". When you step back though and look at the wide range of state and federal elections that we lost, a slightly different picture begins to emerge. The themes that lost this election tended to be independent of the candidate per se. Trump won as he did because of appealing to a very narrow sliver of the minority in a few key states. The margin of victory is so slim, it is hard to point to one thing and suggest that it could have been changed. These were people listening to his schtick and choosing to buy into it, regardless of information to the contrary.

The larger losses point to a distrust of democratic candidates in general. It is difficult to correlate their losses to anything other than that they were democrats. That suggests it is the larger trends over the last several elections. This would tend to suggest that the party has been mismanaged for some considerable period of time. That isn't going to zero in on any single person, policy, or event. One can discuss the participants in those larger trends, but it will never be the single cause of where we are.

None the less, here we are.