What went wrong with the Democrats in 2016?

So, a month after the election, there has been a lot of blame and reasoning going around for why Hillary lost the election (even with a large popular vote win). What do you think was the reason, or something that wasn't done right? The Democrats had lots of people who could hold rally's around the country, they had a perfect convention, and the debates went well. Yet they are only a few state legislature seats in 4 states before the far right Republicans will be able to pass all the Constitutional amendments they want. And I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have a list of those written down and ready to go. Yet, the leaders of the DNC and the leadership in the Democrats continue to stay in power. I don't think that Keith Ellison is any better, and is too busy to do it. They should have 5 to 10 regional leaders that knows about the local elections, can follow the local issues, can get on local news and can meet local groups.
CBS' Face The Nation: As We Enter The Trump Era, Democrats Have Been 'Hollowed Out'

This article was written back in April, and besides thinking that Trump wouldn't win the GOP nomination, it got everything else right.
The Democrats Are Flawlessly Executing a 10-Point Plan to Lose the 2016 Presidential Election | The Huffington Post

My current opinion is it's the following 10 things:

1. Democrats moved to the coasts and forgot how to campaign in the Midwest. It might be jobs, college, laws, culture or weather, but I have a feeling that more liberal minded people have moved to California and New York than Kansas and Iowa. The census is supposed to balance it out, but each state gets 2 votes regardless of population size.

2. Hillary had too much baggage, was hated by the right wing media, and needed better speech writers to be halfway inspiring. She had closed door dinners with rich donors, but never met with poor people and students. She didn't just release the transcripts of the Wall St. speeches. Was she on the Sunday morning talk shows and on the national talk show circuit? She didn't have a big plan like "Build A Wall" or "Free College". She needed to have a large rally with 100,000 people. She had the music acts and movie stars that could have gotten people out.

3. 24/7 Right wing media and Trump's campaign manager was able to spin the news and events effectively.

4. Sanders wasn't picked as VP, or Bernie didn't come out and say he rejected it to continue his Senate campaign. Maybe even having Clinton say that she wanted Sanders to be the Senate majority leader if enough voters would have come out to vote for the Democratic senate candidates would have brought the party together. But she did nothing to work with progressive groups and activists. Even the Trump team thought it was a mistake.
Kellyanne Conway: Race would have been tougher if Sanders was VP pick - CNNPolitics.com

4.5 Trump picked Pence for VP, that got him the evangelical vote and was the best choice he could have made.

5. Stupid e-mails begging for money and didn't get people involved, even if it was just liking pages on Facebook and explaining why the issue they care about would get advanced when Democrats get elected. And showing examples of this in the past 8 years. Explain away people's concerns if things haven't been completely fixed too.

6. Knocking on doors and calling people doesn't sway people on the issues they really care about. Facebook and forums along with misinformation and memes were much more effective. Facts didn't matter, it was more on where people and their friends stood on a few big issues. Religion, gun control, gay marriage, blue collar jobs...

7. Way too much focus on the national election and not enough on getting state and local candidates elected. Along with helping them run halfway decent campaigns. They are the ones who need to go door to door and call people.

8. Her damn e-mails. Was there anything over the confidential classification level? I doubt even Top Secret level stuff would have been anything interesting. The congress investigation didn't seem to find anything.

9.#BernieOrBust and unenthusiastic Democrats who nitpicked Hillary and didn't show up to support her like the other side did for Trump. 100 million didn't vote for one reason or another.

10. The way ObamaCare was passed, gay marriage was passed, and the national debt increases of the past 8 years. The Democrats don't have a good plan for what should be done in the future, and pissed off a lot of people with the what they did do.

11. The DNC didn't have a true 50 state plan, even if it was to run candidates that would say far-left things and get the media to debate the far-left and central-left positions on the issues. Instead they just let the Green Party tempt Sanders supporters and millennials who want big change and see the corporations, military intervention, and fossil fuel industry as the biggest reasons the country has problems. And the DNC was really corrupt in the primary and then Hillary hired Debbie Wasserman-Schultz after that came out for some stupid reason. Hillary Clinton Hires Debbie Wasserman Schultz

12. There are too many left wing groups and they aren't working together. And they didn't push detailed plans for candidates to campaign on. There was no plan to fix poverty, environmental issues, race relations, housing prices, education, job/infrastructure plans, etc...

A few more reasons I read:
Things I Blame For Hillary Clinton's Loss, Ranked | The Huffington Post

The race shouldn't have been close enough for Jill Stein or Comey to swing the result.
Blaming Jill Stein and James Comey for Hillary Clinton’s Loss Is a Waste of Time

This article came up with these reasons:
These 15 Startling Election Takeaways Reveal the Surprising Electorate That Resulted in President-Elect Trump

I re-read my earlier post I made in March 2015 about the Democrats before this election started and the problems they had, and it wasn't too far off.
The Donkey in the room...the Democrats today

 

The minority-elect managed to perform as competitively as he did simply because his profoundly ignorant and hate-mongering rhetoric received so much exposure. In debunking his continual lies, the news media continually made the mistake of repeating the lies and then negating them, which has the unintended effect of activating the cognitive frame used to tell lie and strengthening its salience in the mind. To better achieve debunking's intended effect, one must avoid any mention of the lie and solely advance a competing narrative of truth more loudly than the lie is shouted.

But in favor of ratings and profits, the news media far from avoided repeating his lies. They aired his campaign speeches in full and interviewed their pundits daily on the subject of his latest offhand Tweets. Last February, Les Moonves (the CEO, president, and chairman of CBS) said of the free airtime his network was giving the increasingly popular Republican candidate "It may not be good for America, but it’s good for CBS".

The Clinton campaign contributed to this just the same. Their television ads replaying his hateful rhetoric ad nauseam told Americans "Don't think of an elephant!"
Those attack ads reached a lot of voters to whom that insensitive elephant was appealing and thus may have promoted him far more than they benefited her.

This is the answer that I've distilled from cognitive linguist George Lakoff's insightful and very long blog post on this subject. Nevertheless, I highly recommend reading the post at least for his explanatory background on frame semantics and the metaphorical understanding of governance as parenting.

 

How Clinton lost Michigan — and blew the election

Here is a good article about how the campaign was too overconfident in their numbers and didn't get people motivated in the "leans Democrat" swing states. They failed to have a message about what they would do for people, what regulations they would support, which taxes they would try to reduce, where they stood on energy and environmental policy, and on and on. Trying to get big campaign donations from the powerful and connected corporate leaders, instead of being concerned what image that sends to ordinary Americans.

One thing I hope whoever writes a left-wing analysis of what happened in this election looks into is what the DNC knew from their surveys and focus groups about what percentage of voters believed in the misinformation that is all over the internet. And why they didn't ask the volunteers or people who get flooded by the donation begging emails to help their on-line message effort?

There is also the trust issue. Obama never came for people's guns, Obamacare would setup death panels, and on and on. But that was the fake media message from the right wing that made people fear what could happen, or what they would desire to happen, from what was going to happen. And the Democrats did a poor job at debating it and selling their vision of the ideal America.

 

I agree with this assessment:

"...while progressives were fighting against police brutality, against the Dakota Access Pipeline, against TPP, against fracking and for a $15 minimum wage, Clinton was consistently on the wrong side of each of those issues."

Call it what you will, they were out of touch, willfully ignorant, tone-deaf, it all adds up to the same result.
SOURCE:
KING: Obama and the Clintons still have no earthly idea why the Democratic Party lost the presidential election

 

I think they had the right idea towards the end with the "A Bitch Who Gets Shit Done" angle.
Running on the idea that you might not like her but she knew how to handle the tough problems and could deal with the assholes of this world because she had been doing it for frelling ever was a good move but it was too late by that point.
They should have started with that.
Admit that she could be cold and hard.
Take her negatives and make them positives.
She's a bitch but she is our bitch and she will do the job better than any man ever could.

It would have worked.

 

Trump knew how to lie, and wanted to win at any cost. Clinton either was fearful of being labeled a flip-flopper like Kerry in 2004 or something, because a $15 min wage, criminal justice reform, even basic Medicare for all who are paying into it should have been put out there. She could have dealt with not doing any of them in 2020 in the next election.

But why she picked Kaine, when she knew that Trump had picked Pence doesn't make sense to me. Either pick someone who will get people on your side. Pick someone that would help in the Midwest. Pick someone who will excite the base...

And while I don't mind her having high dollar fundraisers. I think that for every one she had, she should have had one with average people that didn't donate to her.

 

Apparently they lost the election by a combination of three states:

She lost Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes
She lost Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes
She lost Pennsylvania by about 44,000 votes.

78,000 votes (more or less) between winning the Electoral College and not.

She won the popular vote by about 2.8 million.

This wasn't the rout that some people have described. It was very close.

 

1 word.

hillary

 

So why did you dislike Hillary? Would you have voted for another Democrat?

 

my personal opinion is that she should be indicted. and in jail. and no I wouldn't have voted for another democrat

 

If you don't mind me asking, who did you vote for and who would you have preferred to vote for? And why?

 

And if these pollsters want to be relevant again, try and track how many people have fled from those states to California and New York in the past 6 years. And ask if it was due to the political climate. Find out how many 18 year olds would rather go to college where you can't be arrested for weed and birth control is easily accessible... I know 3 people who moved from Michigan personally.

 

Those states are dying--have been for decades. Add Arizona to your count of states where people have "fled" from dying states. I was completely unsurprised to read this:
Americans aren't having as many kids: 8 states post population loss
which names Illinois as the state that lost the most population last year and Arizona as one of the highest gaining population states. Me and 2 family members exited Illinois for Arizona last year specifically because of Illinois' stagnant economy.

Arizona is a red state in the process of turning blue. My bet is Illinois, like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will flip and turn red, too.
Though I'm not thrilled that Arizona is historically Republican, the Phoenix mayor is Democrat and Phoenix accounts for 65% or the entire state's economy.
The Dems have some major lifting to do.

 

Blows my mind that Illinois has finally gotten a Republican
governor which reinforces my belief that the state of Illinois will continue to turn Republican. Illinois' stagnant economy is mimicking the other historically blue states that turned red.

 

This shows trends as well:

Where are Americans Moving? According to New Census Data, Utah.

Salt Lake City , in the heart of Mormon Utah, now has a liberal Democrat lesbian mayor. Utah, particularly SLC, is becoming a new tech center in the West replacing the more costly Silicon Valley. Boise, Idaho, is also attracting and building a tech industry and will attract young liberal techies.