2016 Postmortem

is not looking at why a Clinton happened in 1992 (with the birth of the DLC in the late '80s). And that was because "traditional" liberal stalwarts Carter/Mondale lost in 1980 (amidst an internal squabble with Ted Kennedy) -



Mondale/Ferraro lost in 1984 -



and Dukakis/Bentsen lost in 1988 -



http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/elections.php

The prevailing thought was to attempt to bring the "Reagan Democrats" back into the fold (and counter the Lee Atwater "Southern Strategy&quot .

The home region of both Clinton and Gore was "the south" (Arkansas and Tennessee), and that helped to harvest a demographic of voters who had been Democrats (Dixicrats) but who had voted for Reagan. But the unfortunate result was to also bow down to the corporations to garner additional financial support and help to pick off additional demographics of Reaganites, in order to barely tip the scale to the D column.

One can "Monday Morning Quarterback" the past but it then goes into the soul searching of what the party represents and unfortunately there are constituencies within the current Democratic party that are the subject of abject hatred by large swaths of the American population.

The bigger problem is being able to keep the focus on common issues and adequately respond/retort to a guaranteed GOP invoking of the usual divisive "culture wars", which continually derails conversations that focus on "shared interests". But doing this must acknowledge the fact that there will always be a segment of the population (who were very much present under Reagan as well) who are "single issue" voters ("single" actually a collective noun for "cultural issues" that come out of religious beliefs). These "single (culture) issue" folks were actually "bilked" by the previous 3 GOP Presidents, out of having their agendas enacted, after being heavily courted by the GOP (i.e., the GOP had to pivot away from them to deal with the rest of the nation and the courts due to the unconstitutional "culture issue" demands).

This go-around, Drumpf dog-whistled to a new group - a group that had actually never been as overtly courted by Reagan or either Bush as was done this election cycle. And this was in order to not only bolster the "religious right" demographic, but to counter the newly empowered Democratic demographics who had propelled an Obama to office TWICE. I.e., they had to expand their voting demographic to include the deplorables in order to counter a new "blue wave" of Hispanics.