Also, the Democratic Party fails to govern itself competently.
The obvious winnable election to discuss is the 2016 election for President of the United States. The Democrats were drubbed downballot too, so it wasn't like the problem was entirely Hillary Clinton & her campaign.
The Democrats have underperformed in many elections for a long time. You've probably heard that gerrymandering is why Democrats can't win a majority in US House of Representatives. Republicans controlled state legislatures after the 2010 Census and drew the US House districts.
But in Illinois, the Democrats drew an eighteen district map. President Obama & Speaker Madigan had access to smart people & sophisticated software. There were six Dem districts in Chicago & extending into the suburbs designed to be hard D districts (IL-01 (Rush), IL-02 (Kelly), IL-04 (Gutierrez), IL-05 (Quigley), IL-07 (Danny Davis) & IL-09 (Schawkowsky). There are five GOP districts, two hard GOP (IL-15 (Shimkus) & IL-18 (LaHood)) with three being solid GOP (IL-06 (Roskam), IL-14 (Hultgren) & IL-16 (Kinzinger)). These eleven districts have not switched party affiliation on the current map.
This leaves seven districts that were drawn to be lean Democrat (IL-03 (Lipinski), IL-08 (Krishnamoorthi), IL-10 (Schneider), IL-11 (Foster), IL-12 (Bost), IL-13 (Rodney Davis) & IL-17 (Bustos)). Two of these districts are currently represented by Republicans, IL-12 & IL-13. Two have not been represented by a Republican since the remap, IL-03 & IL-11. But the other three have all elected Republicans since the remap, which first applied to the 2012 election cycle.
The excuse that Dem Party national leaders are feeding to media--that gerrymandering accounts for Dem Party problems--is at best an evasion of acknowledging deeper problems.
Democrats lose elections on maps drawn by Democrats. Republicans haven't been losing on maps drawn by Republicans.
The Democratic Party has a culture of responding to election losses by lying to itself about the cause of losing the elections.
The party doesn't accurately evaluate what's happening in politics & the only changes in personnel that are allowed are people who won't "rock the boat". One can't be invited into the circles where decisions are made without being sufficiently connected (socially or financially) to the current insiders that its understood that the new people won't change things outside of the parameters approved by insiders.
Democrats don't win elections. They don't change personnel. They don't change policies. This is unhealthy.
Internal governance
After John Kerry lost to George W. Bush for POTUS in 2004, the Democratic Party invited activists into the party. The leading anti-war candidate from Dem Primary, Howard Dean, was made chair of the DNC. Bloggers & online activists were invited into the party in various ways.
But after the 2016 Dem Primary, the Dem Party establishment (Hillary Clinton allies) have become exceedingly hostile to engage in any meaning power sharing.
Bernie Sanders received 46% of the pledged delegates in the 2016 Dem Primary under rules that were explicitly designed to be more friendly to centrist Democrats and be as hostile as possible to a candidate like George McGovern, a Left-leaning US Senator from a small state with large support among young voters, esp. young voters on college campuses.
Not inviting Bernie Sanders supporters to take leadership roles in the Dem Party is weird.
Inviting strong primary challengers into the party is pragmatic politics.
To be frank about the Democratic Party: it has a huge amount of deadwood office holders who do very little to help the Dem Party win elections. And the people who control the party would rather keep this "do nothing" Democrats in office because they are easier to control.
The people in charge of the Dem Party fear losing control. Like many problems in life, not making small adjustments in the short-term leads to larger corrections in the future.
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