Thursday, January 26, 2017

But Clinton Won By 2.86 Million Votes

Democrats who are having trouble moving on from the first stage of grief — denial — over Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump still defend the loss by saying, "but Clinton won by 2,864,974 votes nationwide, even if she did lose the electoral college vote." But a critical look at the numbers reveals a national problem for Clinton, and Democrats in general.

Clinton’s 2.86 million-vote edge came from but 489 of our 3,144 counties. In 2016, 209 of the 676 counties that cast majorities for Obama in both 2008 and 2012 backed Trump, many in the Midwest. The space between is best measured by economics. The 16 percent of counties supporting Clinton account for 65 percent of our GNP, and their median home price is 60 percent higher than in counties carried by Trump.
It was Obama voters who didn't vote in 2016, or who voted for Trump, who “put Trump over the top in Michigan and possibly Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. If Trump produces, they’ll reward him with a second term. If he doesn’t — and he needs to create lots of high-paying jobs in the face of automation and a global economy moving in other directions — then they’ll be ripe to come home to the Democratic Party — if Democrats give them an appealing nominee.”
The state that gave Trump his largest margin of victory was Texas, where he beat Clinton by only 807,179 votes out of 8,969,226 total votes cast. While Trump won 30 states, his margin of victory ranged from less than 100,000 votes up to just over five hundred thousand votes, state by state, except for Texas and his 642,000 vote margin in Tennessee.

Clinton won 21 states, including DC, but her margin of victory in the states she won was not as good as Trump's victory margin, in the states he won.
Ave. margin of victory in winning states:
Trump: 56%
Clinton: 53.5%
Trump: + 2.5 points
Clinton's national vote lead comes from seven states where she won very out-sized victories over Trump. These seven states, topped by California, allowed Clinton to run up her popular vote victory by 2,864,974 votes. In fact, Clinton loses by 1.4 million votes when California's vote tallies aren't included as part of the national aggregate of votes.

State Clinton Trump Win
CA 8,753,788 4,483,810 4,269,978
NY 4,547,218 2,814,346 1,732,872
IL 3,090,729 2,146,015 944,714
MA 1,995,196 1,090,893 904,303
MD 1,677,928 943,169 734,759
NJ 2,148,278 1,601,933 546,345
WA 1,742,718 1,221,747 520,971
California is the only state where Clinton's margin of victory was bigger than President Obama's in 2012 — 61.5% vs. Obama's 60%. Clinton got 6% more votes than Obama did In 2008, but the number of registered Democrats in the state climbed by 13% over those years.


In the U.S House distributed national aggregate of votes, Republicans topped Democrats by more than 2.7 million votes, nearly equaling Hillary Clinton's national popular vote total — not because more people voted Republican, but because fewer Democrats turned out to vote for Clinton, so they didn’t vote for their House, or Senate, Democratic candidates.





This pattern is national. Clinton’s black voter turnout dropped more than 11 percent compared to 2012. The support for Clinton among active black voters was still exceedingly high (87 percent, versus 93 percent for Obama), but the big difference was the turnout. Almost two million black votes cast for Obama in 2012 did not turn out for Clinton. According to one plausible calculation, if in North Carolina blacks had turned out for Clinton as they had for Obama, she would have won the state. I saw a similar downtrend in my own eyes: I voted in a predominantly African American precinct in the south side of Chicago, and I can testify that the lines for early voting at the polling place were much shorter than they were in 2012.



Clinton's 2016 loss culminates a trend of losses for Democrats over multiple election cycles. Democrats lost another net 43 seats in legislatures across the country in 2016, after previously losing 910 seats during Obama's administration. Republicans added to their historic 2014 gains in the nation’s state legislatures with the addition of five state House chambers and two state Senate chambers in 2016.

Democratic Decline Down Ballot

The economically ascendant counties Clinton won, largely urban and suburban, are geographically isolated. Democrats occupy archipelagos — islands of the relatively privileged surrounded by what has become, to them, an unknown largely rural land, in which less educated and more aggrieved voters dog paddle to survive. The counties that switched their votes from voting twice for Obama to Trump were far smaller, whiter, and slower-growing than the rest of the Obama coalition. The population of counties that flipped to Trump was 78% white. But individual voters in those counties that flipped didn't switch from Obama to Trump, for the most part they just didn't vote for Clinton or they voted for a third party presidential candidate.

The growing economic disparity among voters aggravates a growing “despair gap” of in equality. A study by the Center for American Progress found a direct correlation between the percentage of “underwater” homes and counties that voted for Trump. Similarly, a sociology professor at Penn State found Trump fared better in counties where the mortality rates caused by drugs, alcohol, and suicide were highest. What issued from Trump’s America was a desperate and angry cry for economic help.

After the 2016 election, Republicans are now in control of a record 67 (68 percent) of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the nation, more than twice the number (31) in which Democrats have a majority, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Republicans hold more total state legislative seats in the nation, well over 4,100 of the 7,383, than they have since 1920. Democrats now have total control of just 13 state legislatures.

States With Unified Party Control
Republicans dominate state legislatures to gerrymander political power in America.

Republicans gained 2 more states' governor-ships in 2016, after already gaining 12 over the last 8 years, increasing its total to 33, a record high last seen in 1922. Democrats had also lost 69 US House seats and 13 US Senate seats since 2009 and barely managed to stem further losses in 2016, with only a net two seat gain in the U.S. Senate resulting in a 52-48 Republican majority, and net six seat gain in the U.S. House, resulting in a 241-194 Republican majority.

Number of electoral votes won:
Trump: 306
Clinton: 232
Trump: + 68

Popular vote total:
Trump: 62,958,211
Clinton: 65,818,318
Clinton: + 2.8 million

Popular vote total outside California:
Trump: 58,474,401
Clinton: 57,064,530
Trump: + 1.4 million

Some blame James Comey and the FBI. Some blame voter suppressionand racism. Some blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. Some blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: centrist neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party – is no match for right wing extremism. The choice to follow the neoliberal centrist policy strategy is what sealed our fate to losing more than 1,000 elected office seats to Republicans. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?













The Democratic Party has been obliterated. Hillary Clinton's narrow loss to Donald Trump was the shock felt 'round the world, but there's been an even deeper decline in the Democratic Party at the state and local level. The Obama administration has overseen the loss of roughly a tenth of the party's Senate seats, a fifth of its House and state legislative seats, and a third of its governorships, something which hasn't been seen since the repeated routs of Republicans in the 1930s.


In the 1970s, the Democrats gradually embraced the neoliberal ideology of markets and deregulation, setting the stage for later disasters. One under-noticed corollary of this was forgetting the previous generation's economic wisdom. More and more, Democrats embraced the ideas that markets were self-regulating, that unions were not worth defending, that monopolies were nothing to get worked up over, and that large deficits were by definition bad.

A similar process of forgetting had been happening within the profession of economics, and so outside of a small minority of heterodox critics, the 2008 Great Recession struck economists unawares. The ones who hadn't forgotten their Keynes and Minsky, like Paul Krugman, quickly regrouped and presented the Democrats with the policy that solved the Great Depression: huge fiscal and monetary stimulus. When there is a self-fulfilling collapse in spending, the government must step in as the spender of last resort, as it did during the New Deal and World War II.

In the early months of the Obama administration, when it seemed like the world was falling apart, this logic gained much purchase, leading to the passage of the Recovery Act stimulus package. But even then Krugman and company ran headlong into a problem of ideology. Centrist Democratic senators insisted, for no reason other than sticker shock, that the stimulus could only be so big — not even close to the estimated size of the economic hole left by the collapse. Krugman's arguments that it should be massively larger than that estimate — in order to hedge against an underestimation of the size of the collapse, which was prescient indeed — fell on deaf ears.

And after the first stimulus failed to restore full employment, the ideology problem got much worse. The D.C. political and media elite, including President Obama and most other Democratic big shots, became absolutely obsessed with cutting the deficit. The ensuing austerity (much of it caused by post-2010 Republican obstruction, to be fair) dramatically slowed the recovery. It is only in the last year that unemployment has declined to a reasonably good level, and the fraction of prime working-age people with a job is still worse than the bottom of the previous two recessions. What's more, the fruits of the recovery have been highly unequal, with much of the income flowing to the top 1 percent, and most rural places left out. (Sound familiar?)

The problem was that the party never really internalized the logic of Keynesianism, and as a result was incapable of thinking strategically about their political position. Neoliberalism had become hegemonic ideology, which takes serious effort to lever out of someone's head, and nobody was in a position to do it. Practically the whole party — and indeed the "nonpartisan" media as well — had been raised on the idea that deficits are bad for their entire lives (cemented in place by hundreds of millions of dollars in agitprop spending from Wall Street ideologues). Keynesianism — which implies things like "you can fix a recession by printing money and handing it to people" — sounded extreme and suspect. Media budget coverage to this day is usually written with an implicit presumption that deficit cutting is the ultimate good in budget policy.
That's how the party ended up with its most vulnerable members — centrist Blue Dogs in the South — hawking austerity during the worst mass unemployment crisis in 80 years. Almost all of them lost in 2010. That loss, in turn, paved the way for many of the other major problems Democrats are having. That was a census year, and huge Republican victories allowed them to control the subsequent redistricting process, in which they gerrymandered themselves a 7-point handicap in the House of Representatives and in many state legislatures.

That brings me to the foreclosure crisis, the handling of which was even worse. Instead of partially ameliorating it as with employment, the Obama administration helped it happen. As David Dayen writes in Chain of Title, the financial products underpinning the subprime mortgage boom were riddled with errors, and in order to be able to foreclose on people who had defaulted, they had to commit systematic document fraud. This epic crime spree gave the White House tremendous leverage to negotiate a settlement to keep people in their homes, but instead the administration co-opted a lawsuit from state attorneys general and turned it into a slap on the wrist that reinvigorated the foreclosure machine. There was also $75 billion in the Recovery Act to arrest foreclosures, but the administration's effort at this, HAMP, was such a complete disasterthat they only spent about 16 percent of the money and enabled thousands of foreclosures in the process.

As a direct result, the homeownership rate has plummeted to levels not seen since the 1960s.

This disaster is somewhat harder to explain, because it seems so nuts. Why on Earth would anyone do this? Once again I think the problem is ideology. Neoliberal-inspired deregulation hugely empowered the financial sector, and finance — fueled by impressive-sounding and complicated products developed by the some of the smartest people in the country — came to occupy a disproportionate portion of total economic output and an even larger fraction of corporate profits. From thence it became a major source of campaign contributions. As Washington became saturated with the money and ideology of bankers, assisted by partisans of the "self-regulating market" like Alan Greenspan, it came to seem that the main task of banking policy was keeping an increasingly bloated and unstable Wall Street on its feet.



President Obama's spectacular charisma — and his savvy campaign against a filthy rich vulture capitalist in 2012 — papered over these problems to some extent. But for most of his presidency America has basically ceased to function for a huge fraction of the population. Fair or not, the party perceived to be responsible for that situation is going to be punished at the polls.

Hillary Clinton was an extraordinarily terrible candidate for the Democrats to run in 2016.

Donald Trump's approval rating is 38 percent. President Obama's just bumped up to 57 percent. No amount of furious dissembling from humiliated Clinton partisans will convince me that Obama — and very probably Bernie Sanders — wouldn't have beaten Trump handily.

So what gives?

Let me start by noting that the overallpolls were off, but not by that much. They predicted a Clinton victory by about about 3 points. And in the popular vote, that prediction was reasonably close.

What tipped the election was about 100,000 votes spread across just three states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Here's where the polls did seriously botch things. Trump won these states by 1, 0.3, and 1.2 points respectively (assuming the close result in Michigan holds). The poll averages showed Clinton winning these states by roughly 6 points, 3 to 7 points, and 2 to 5 points respectively, depending on who you ask.

Some people did correctly point to this outcome being a possibility. Remarkably, most of them relied heavily on gut-check analysis. Zach Carter and Ryan Grim wrote way back in February that Trump could win by peeling off Rust Belt states, based on little more than intuitions about trade and general voting patterns. Michael Moore hypothesized something similar. Nathan J. Robinson wrote around the same timethat Clinton would lose because she is a wooden, uninspiring campaigner who was almost uniquely vulnerable to Trump-style attacks on character and integrity.

Van Jones was perhaps most prescient of all. In June, he argued that Trump would not gaffe himself out of the election, because outrageous statements help him get attention on social media; that tut-tutting about his lack of realistic policy would not work, because voters neither know nor care about that; and that he could potentially win over Rust Belt whites attracted to Trump's anti-trade messaging, because "we're not paying attention to a big chunk of America that is hurting — that would accept any change, the bigger the better."

With the benefit of hindsight, I think we can add a couple more factors to the pile. First is the self-deception of the Clinton campaign and its media sycophants. She did not visit Wisconsin at all between April and the election, and largely abandoned Obama's working-class message from 2012 in favor of portraying Trump as a dangerous, woman-hating maniac.

They were enabled in this by pro-Clinton publications, which churned out endless slavish portrayals of Clinton as some kind of wizard of politics and policy, whose grasp of fine detail would surely deliver the electoral goods. In fact, it turned out that her vaunted algorithm-driven turnout machine was contacting tons of Trump voters. Paul Romer points to the problem of "mathiness" in economics, where complicated and intimidating theoretical symbolism is built up without establishing clear linkages to the real world. Lots of computers, theories, and datasets might be the most sophisticated way to attack voter turnout, or it might be a way to simply appear sophisticated while dismissing people whose ideas don't come packaged with a science-y veneer. (Something similar seems to have happened to the wonky election-simulator people.)

Then there is the Clintons' omnipresent aura of scandal and corruption, which is about 50 percent unfair double standard and 50 percent totally their fault. The political media has been obsessed with the Clintons for 20 years to a frankly psychotic degree, particularly given how much worse the stories about Trumpwere. On the other hand, the Clintons enable that coverage with a paranoid and secretive attitude, and an obvious hatred of the press. The Clinton Foundation coverage was unfair compared to the much worse Trump Foundation, but then again, there was some genuinely skeezy stuff in there. There's a good chance that FBI Director James Comey's vague letter about emails to congressional Republicans, which led to an extremely ill-timed media firestorm, tipped the election to Trump. But then again, she might have avoided the whole story by following the dang rules in the first place.

I always assumed that if Clinton were nominated for president, the race would be dominated by some weird quasi-scandal that dragged on for month after month. It's not fair, but it is simply the reality of the Clintons. At some point, one simply has to take that into account.

That brings me to a final point: Clinton's general political affect. She is not a great campaigner (by her own admission), a rather robotic speaker, and most of all, a dynasty politician who very obviously got the nomination because the party elite cleared the decks for her. Given how the party has evolved, her political history was filled with devastating indictments of her judgment and priorities. Even after getting a reasonably good party platform (after just barely beating back about the most unlikely primary challenger imaginable), she was a non-credible vehicle for it. Without Obama's mesmerizing charisma and political energy, her image was defined by things like taking millions of dollars for secret speeches to Wall Street banks and refusing to release the transcripts. She simply was not a good fit for the party, and a terrible avatar of the party in a country furious at self-dealing elite institutions of all kinds.

Hillary Clinton was a heavily compromised candidate and bad campaigner who grossly misjudged the political terrain, and thus bled just enough of the Obama coalition to let Trump sneak past. If we ever get to vote again, let's hope the party learns from this epic disaster.

And that, now, is the key question: Where do the Democrats go from here?

The Democratic Party is a smoking crater. Despite winning more votes at the national level, and more votes for the House of Representatives, the party has lost the presidency, Congress, 69 percent of state legislatures, and 33 governorships. Republicans are only a handful of state houses away from being able to amend the Constitution on a party line vote.

What is to be done? A mood of despair permeates the many liberals I know who are talking and writing about the result. Hillary Clinton was a decent candidate running against a deranged, racist maniac who lied constantly and endlessly about everything. Perhaps the thing to do is hope that after four years of Trump looting the country, America will have wised up to the con.

That is a luxury we can't afford, at least if we care about trying to preserve the world biosphere and civilization in anything like its current state. I suggest that the only reasonably promising route forward for the Democrats is full-throated social democracy, with the full complement of race, gender, and LGBT-specific protections. It's the only way to restore enough of the working-class white votes won by Obama without losing margins among black and brown voters.

Clinton's loss was extremely narrow, resting on only a handful of votes in three Rust Belt states. Many factors could have plausibly tipped the balance: FBI Director James Comey's letter, Republican vote suppression, Clinton's stunningly incompetent tactics and uninspiring campaign, and her lack of appeal to the working class of all races. Remove any one of those and Trump probably wouldn't have made it over the top.

Now, I should admit that I did predict a Clinton win. I blindly trusted the poll aggregators, and that made for some really bad calls. Just about everyone in political writing (with a few exceptions) needs to eat some crow, and I'm no exception.

However, back in April 2015, I also argued that Clinton was disastrously misjudging the politics of the presidential race. I suspected she would pitch her campaign largely to the money seats, and run on fiddly little tax credits instead of strong, simple, universal social programs. I thought she would do this out of some combination of not wanting to alienate the donor class and genuine ideological commitment.

That prediction panned out unfortunately well. But in hindsight, the argument against running such a campaign is even stronger than it appeared. Back then, I argued that Clinton might take a hit in fundraising, but that it wouldn't be a big deal because political spending isn't worth nearly as much during presidential campaigns. But Bernie Sanders' campaign shows that with a credible social-democratic agenda, you can raise staggering sums from millions of small donors. He was quite competitive with Clinton money-wise, and indeed surpassed her in some periods.

Conversely, Clinton's insider ties to Big Finance deeply harmed her. Taking millions of dollars to give secret speeches to banks, then refusing to release the transcripts, looks (and probably is) horrendously corrupt. Democrats' coziness with big corporations, especially the Wall Street swindlers who wrecked the economy, is hurting them coming and going.

What Democrats need is a set of policies and personalities that will mobilize a hard core of committed activists. And again, if the Sanders campaign is any indication, strong, universal benefits — tuition-free college for everyone, single-payer coverage (or the nearest thing to it) for everyone, retirement security for everyone, and so on — coupled to an anti-corruption message, cricket-bat regulation of Wall Street, all sold by a credible candidate, inspires fervent enthusiasm.

People like benefits that are simple, guaranteed, and easy to access. Conversely, ObamaCare is disliked in part because its most visible part, the exchange system, is an obnoxious pain in the neck. Means testing is bad policy and worse politics; the way to make sure billionaires don't benefit unduly from social programs is by hiking their taxes.

As part of this, Dems should also shed their preening "wonky" self-presentation. Hillary Clinton had a whole office stuffed full of policy experts churning out papers on everything under the sun, and it was all for naught. Remember that the point of campaigns is to set values and priorities, not lay out hugely complicated policies that do little but flatter the campaign's sense of its own expertise. How many people were swayed by Clinton's last-minute plan to make the Child Tax Credit somewhat more refundable for certain parents? I'd wager it was in the triple digits at best.

That's not to say that realistic ideas are bad, or that one should be deliberately dishonest, but that the time for drilling down on the minute details is after the election is won.

Genuine, credible populism will also help Democrats with some of their other problems. Vote suppression, for example, often works by making voting a huge pain in the neck, not explicitly illegal. Democrats need real enthusiasm and institutional structures like unions (which will be addressed in the final entry in this series) and pro-democracy nonprofits to help people turn out in the face of these headwinds.

Finally, there is the issue of specific concerns around race, gender, religion and so on. I have not dwelt on this much because I take it as axiomatic that Democrats cannot abandon these constituencies. Some have suggested that perhaps Democrats should ditch identity concerns so as to better pursue white voters, like Bill Clinton did when he attacked a black female rapper and oversaw the execution of a mentally disabled black person in 1992. But not only would it be morally monstrous to abandon minorities at this time (Trump surrogates are already defending a proposed registry of Muslim immigrantsby referencing Japanese internment camps during World War II), the country is far more diverse now than it was 24 years ago. Any capitulation to social conservatism risks bleeding off non-white votes the party cannot afford to lose — and besides, all you need to win the presidency at least is a handful of white voters in a few key states. Democrats must abandon neoliberalism, not social justice.

Therefore, the new party leadership, both formally and in the figurehead sense, should be diverse and committed to left populism. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and especially Keith Ellison (who looks to be a lock as chair of the DNC) are excellent choices. They are the most credible populist voices that simultaneously demonstrate that the party has a place for everyone, even white men. Indeed, they are where the party's coalescing center of gravity already is now that the Clintonite wing has completely discredited itself.

The best place to start is by a scorched-earth opposition against the building Republican plan to destroy Medicare and replace it with some sort of voucher system. It's probably impossible to save ObamaCare at this point, but Medicare is immensely popular, and old people vote more than any other age demographic. Trump, by contrast, is already horrendously unpopular. Once it becomes clear that his "Make America Great Again" shtick is a complete fraud, Democrats should be able to do extremely well promising to protect and expand social insurance.

For all her generally terrible electoral performance, Hillary Clinton did do well in some unusual places. Broadly speaking, these were rich areas — like Orange County, California, which went Democratic for the first time since 1936, and the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which is chock-a-block with financiers. Of course, it didn't compensate for Clinton falling far behind Barack Obama's margins with the working class, both black and white.

But one place where Clinton managed to hold on was Nevada, where tremendous effort from unusually strong local unions managed to win her the state — and preserve a Senate seat for the Democrats as well. As Democrats think about how to rebuild their shattered party, there is no way around labor unions.

For decades now, America's few remaining strong unions have been locked in something of a codependent relationship with the Democratic Party. As union density has eroded from a third of all workers down to about a 10th, and a mere 7 percent in the private sector, unions have spent tons and tons of money trying to elect Democrats. As of late October, unions had spent well over $100 million on the 2016 election— an increase of nearly 40 percent compared to 2012.

Unions do this out of fear of Republicans, who loathe unions and smash them whenever possible, and out of a desire to remain influential in the Democratic Party. This latter strategy was particularly noteworthy in the Democratic primary, where most of the big, left-leaning unions lined up behind Hillary Clinton despite the undeniable fact that Bernie Sanders was the more pro-labor candidate. (Just examine who was on the picket lines.) The union leadership judged that Clinton was going to win, and got in line so as to preserve their status among the party elite, particularly the notoriously grudge-prone Clintons.

This is a good example of when operational conservatism slides into mere timidity. Sometimes the less risky move is also the bolder, more aggressive one. It was reasonably clear even by the spring that Clinton was an extraordinarily weak candidate and nominating her was a terrific gamble. Had the big unions thrown their weight behind Sanders, he might have won the primary, and quite possibly would be president-elect now — the greatest political victory for labor in decades. At least he could not have done any worse than Clinton.

But more fundamentally, in terms of positive, pro-labor policy, unions have little to show for their loyalty. Since 1976 Democrats have repeatedly sold out the working class with deliberately vicious recessions, trade deals that led to massive outsourcing and job losses, and weak at best domestic policy. In 2009, when Democrats had super-majorities in both chambers of Congress, they barely even tried to pass a card checklaw which would have made it easier to organize a workplace. Both moderate Democrats and the Obama administration basically gave up on that without a fight.

The calculation seemed to be that since unions can't possibly get behind Republicans, then Democrats can just take them for granted. That way they can cater to big business and Wall Street as well. But they failed to understand that the decline of unions is undermining the party's political strength. Unions are what turn alienated working people into energized political actors and voters.

Both the union leadership and the Democratic Party elites have their priorities skewed. Unions ought to be concentrating almost all their efforts on organizing more people. Spending tens of millions of dollars to elect a candidate who barely cares about unions, who then proceeded to lose to the most unpopular presidential nominee in the history of polling, was a mind-boggling waste of money. They didn't even manage to deliver their own members, who only went to Clinton by 8 points.

In return, Democrats must understand that without unions, there is no prayer of restoring the party's broad competitiveness. Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote, but at the state and local level the party has been virtually annihilated. Without an organized core of support, they simply cannot contest the right-wing advantage in money and their associated army of ideologues. And when it comes to bedrock left-wing institutions, it doesn't get any more foundational than unions. For centuries they have been the signature way the working class makes its political presence felt.

So Democrats should do what unions want without asking. They should understand that unions' job is to organize, and their job is to make it easier for unions to organize, with credible promises to pass card check, repeal Taft-Hartley, and update the labor law framework, when they get the chance. They must become a labor party, and quick, because the hour is late. National anti-union legislation and legal harassment is probably coming, and public sector unions are going to be hit hard. It will take a furious effort to simply keep labor from being rolled back, much less expanded.

But there are few other places to turn for Democrats, and none with the proven track record of labor. This will mean, of course, losing some of the rich votes Clinton rolled up in Orange County and the Acela corridor. But luckily, there aren't that many rich people, and Trump's pose as a defender of the working class looks for all the world to be a complete sham. Trump is already deeply unpopular, and will become even more so when his presidency sinks into corruption. It should be easy enough to win back most of those union voters who did go for Trump. More important but more difficult, if the party and organizers can help each other to create tens of millions of new union members, they can start winning back political power at every level of government.


Daily Kos Federal and State District Returns by State

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