The Democratic Party Is in Worse Shape Than You Thought

[BlueStateSaint]

This comes from the pages of that noted Reich-wing source, the New York Times . . . Yes, you read that right.

The Democratic Party Is in Worse Shape Than You Thought

Thomas B. Edsall   JUNE 8, 2017

Sifting through the wreckage of the 2016 election, Democratic pollsters, strategists and sympathetic academics have reached some unnerving conclusions.

What the autopsy reveals is that Democratic losses among working class voters were not limited to whites; that crucial constituencies within the party see its leaders as alien; and that unity over economic populism may not be able to turn back the conservative tide.

Equally disturbing, winning back former party loyalists who switched to Trump will be tough: these white voters’ views on immigration and race are in direct conflict with fundamental Democratic tenets.

Some of these post-mortem conclusions are based on polling and focus groups conducted by the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA; others are drawn from a collection of 13 essays published by The American Prospect.

A consistent theme is that the focus on white defections from the Democratic Party masks an even more threatening trend: declining turnout among key elements of the so-called Rising American Electorate — minority, young and single voters. Turnout among African-Americans, for example, fell by 7 points, from 66.6 percent in 2012 to 59.6 percent in 2016.

Hey--it's all good!  The question is this:  Will they learn from their mistakes?  Probably not . . .

The rest of this is here:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/opinion/the-democratic-party-is-in-worse-shape-than-you-thought.html?_r=0

[J P Sousa]

I worked for a Republican County Commissioner who could schmooze almost anyone.

He had a saying, "Republicans know how to win elections BUT they don't know how to govern."

Unfortunately, they always proved him correct. 


The democrats only have one issue at this time, throw mud at Trump. The republicans, they are conducting what we used to call "a Chinese fire drill", tripping over themselves looking for an exit.

[SVPete]

"Worse Shape Than You Thought" may be true of MSM folk and D insiders, but not for me.

It takes very little intelligence to realize that job-killing enviro-regs and other economic policies will alienate working people - of all ethnic backgrounds. Similarly, people of all ethnic backgrounds are affected negatively in entry-level and lower rung jobs by illegal immigration.

While it is true that black voter participation was down from 2012, as the first chart on this webpage, black voter participation in 2008 and 2012 was much higher than previous Presidential elections. IMO, black voter participation in 2008 and 2012 reflected a significant number of people who voted for Obama because of his skin color, but who were not captured and held by the results of Obama's Administration and/or by Hillary Clinton.

A corollary of the 2016 black voter participation rate trending downward toward historical averages, MSM polling based their sample models on the 2012 turn-out. While this might seem appropriate, a glance at historical data, such as I linked, should have suggested that 2012 and 2016 black voter participation rate was anomalous compared to historical averages and suggested that Hillary, being white, might not inspire the same turn-out among blacks as Obama, and that she might not receive as high a percentage of the black vote as did Obama, As this graph indicates, Obama received a higher percentage of black votes than did previous D candidates:



So, superficially, a large percentage of the fault for MSM polling being so wrong is in the polling models. But the MSM's failure - or conscious rejection - to take into account what might be termed The Obama Effect on 2008 and 2012 black voter participation and vote percentages reflects, at the least, MSM confirmation bias, if not conscious bias.