Press: Dems need a shake-up

Especially because nobody expected it to end the way it did, there will be hundreds of books written about the 2016 election. Everybody will be trying to answer the question we’ve all been asking ourselves since Nov. 8: “What the hell happened?”

Looking back, that’ll take a long time to sort out. But there’s no doubt what challenges lie ahead for both major political parties. For Republicans, the challenge is to build an entire new administration, ready to take over the reins of government in just two months. For Democrats, the challenge is to build an entire new party, ready to mount a strong challenge and retake control in just four years.

{mosads}Neither challenge will be easy. But the Democratic challenge is the tougher of the two, because the Democratic Party needs a total shake-up, from top to bottom. That’s one lesson we can already learn from 2016: the Democratic Party lost an election that shouldn’t even have been close.

After all, who decided this election? White working-class voters across the Rust Belt, which is the classic Democratic Party base. The very people Bernie Sanders appealed to during the primary with his message of economic populism, his focus on jobs, his promise to take on Wall Street, and his opposition to deadly trade deals. But the Democratic establishment rejected Sanders. And, meanwhile, what was the Democratic Party doing for those disaffected voters? Nothing. Except pass more trade deals, which meant losing even more jobs.

Indeed, after the primaries, the party and the Clinton campaign ignored its middle-class base. In the closing weeks, the Clinton campaign and PAC’s bought more TV ads in Omaha, seeking to win Nebraska’s one contested electoral vote than in Wisconsin and Michigan combined, with their 26 electoral votes. Secretary Clinton didn’t even campaign once in Wisconsin, the first presidential candidate since 1972 to ignore the state. And that lack of attention hurt Clinton among what used to be core Democratic supporters. According to exit polls, Trump won 43 percent of union households, the best any Republican has done among union voters since 1984.

True, Democrats did prove good at one thing: raising money in record amounts, both through the campaign itself and Clinton super PACs. But not even all that cash could overcome the enthusiasm generated by the Trump campaign. Not only that, it reinforced the image of a party that had become, instead, as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich complains, just like the Republican Party, “a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests.”

The same haughty impression of the party’s elites ignoring the needs and wants of average Americans was created by the party’s stubborn clinging to super delegates, 355 of whom had pledged for Hillary Clinton before the first primary votes were cast. So much for democracy.

Funny how things have changed. One week ago, we were all wondering whether the Republican Party would survive. Now the questions is: Can the Democratic Party survive? Not without a complete change in leadership, message, strategy, and priorities.

Press is host of “The Bill Press Show” on Free Speech TV and author of “Buyer’s Remorse: How Obama Let Progressives Down.”