I am tired of hearing how Hillary blew it

[onyxw]

117. Agree

oh absolutely agree. I don't mean to lay everything at Clinton's feet. There's plenty of soul searching to go around.

Some of the losses we've seen is a result of having the presidency and there's some natural attrition/people that vote to have GOP congress while there's a Dem president. Some is us getting complacent with having the presidency, and dividing focus to that whereas GOP could focus on making Congressional & state level gains. Some of that's normal. But I'd say we hemorrhaged seats. 2010 redistricting was huge impact on House and likely some at the state level that will endure through at least 2020. Beyond that impact, 2 things I think we haven't done so well: 1) Abandoning 50 state strategy and ceding where we'd compete was a bad call. 2) I know this isn't a new insight, but Democrats' tendency toward voting every four years rather than every two years vs Republicans reliably voting every 2 yr cycle is also a big hamstring.

I also think we massively screwed up optics in 2008 in doing healthcare reform while we were bleeding jobs. I thought it was a bad call at the time to not do a full throated jobs bill out of the gate. I've come to realize I was wrong and it was the right call in that Dems realized Obama only had enough political capital to get one and healthcare was the once in 30 years issue and we somewhat banked on that if the economy worsened there'd be more support later to do jobs/more stimulus if needed. But the optics were terribly bad and a lot of folks have held that fact and compounded with no banker prosecutions as Democrats being tone deaf and we did a poor job addressing those optics.

Then in 2010 we didn't do a good job defending Obamacare in re-election campaigns. We spent a year and did the heavy lifting to get it passed, then everybody pretty much abandoned it which allowed Republicans to whipsaw us by attacking all the flaws with nobody defending the good points. Add to it that we spent so much time to get Obamacare through that if you weren't willing to defend that, you were basically running on a bunch of post office namings. I think those two things have lingered as to why we have been less successful than we should be given what we've accomplished, economy improving etc.

Unfortunately I don't know that there's an easy answer to reverse the trend. The 2010 redistricting slants things against us, making it tougher, and '18 Senate isn't favorable so we're going to have to grind it out in '18 and '20. Some of it may be us capitalizing on GOP being drunk on power and overstepping and we need to fiercely defend SS, Medicare, Medicaid and ACA from being cut/gutted. DNC chair being full time role going forward would also be good.

I think at the Gov level we ought to be highlighting that when KY went from DEM to GOP, GOP gutted Kynect, when it went from GOP to DEM in Louisiana and NC the first actions were to expand Medicaid. I'm not sure at the state legislature level what's broadly driven those losses, but 50 state strategy and working to make sure we run candidates and don't leave races unopposed ought to be an initial step.