Dear Commons Community,
There have been an endless number of analyses as to why Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election to Donald Trump. Yesterday, President Obama weighed in with his opinion. As reported by Business Insider:
“President Barack Obama on Monday offered one of the most blunt assessments of the Democratic party’s failure to win the White House in 2016, arguing that the party needs to reframe its debates for suburban and rural voters.
In an interview on NPR posted Monday morning, the outgoing president chalked up Hillary Clinton’s popular vote win, but failure to woo voters in more rural states like Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan, to structural hurdles based on where Democrats live, as well as the party’s failure to frame the debate for voters.
“We have a scrambled political landscape right now. There are some things that we know are a challenge for Democrats — structural problems. For example, population distribution, oftentimes younger voters, minority voters, Democratic voters, are clustered in urban areas,” Obama said.
The president continued: “As a consequence, you’ve got a situation where there are not only entire states but also big chunks of states where, if we’re not showing up, if we’re not in there making an argument, then we’re going to lose. And we can lose badly, and that’s what happened in this election.”
While he denied that there was anything wrong with the “core argument” of the Democratic message around issues like raising the minimum wage, he admitted that there were “failures on our part to give people in rural areas or in exurban areas, a sense day-to-day that we’re fighting for them or connected to them.”
“Some of it is the prism through which they’re seeing the political debate take place. They may know less about the work that my administration did on trying to promote collective bargaining or overtime rules. But they know a lot about the controversy around transgender bathrooms because it’s more controversial, it attracts more attention,” Obama said.
“I think that on something like the Affordable Care Act, you have people who are benefiting right now from Obamacare who either don’t know it’s Obamacare or consider that as a given and then end up voting on Second Amendment rights. So part of the reason it’s important to show up, and when I say show up, I don’t just mean during election time, but to be in there engaging and listening and being with people, is because it then builds trust and it gives you a better sense of how should you talk about issues in a way that feel salient and feel meaningful to people.”
Obama reflected on his own path to the presidency, noting that he embarked on a conscious effort to connect with suburban and rural voters starting during his election to the US Senate in 2004.
“Even during my low points in the presidency, when, you know, poll numbers were bad and news cycle was critical, people always felt as if I still cared about them — which meant that in 2012, I might still lose the overall vote and some of these counties or some of these voting districts, but I might lose 55-45 or 60-40 rather than 80-20,” Obama said.
The president added: “That’s as a consequence of not only them seeing me in these places but it’s also a consequence of me actually being there and hearing them.”
Obama’s comments on Monday came as Democrats and many on the left continue their autopsy of Clinton’s upset loss to President-elect Donald Trump.”
There is a lot of wisdom and practical advice in the President’s words. The Democrats took for granted too many suburban and rural voters especially in battleground states.
Tony
