If Bernie thinks the only way to win is to win white working class voters at the expense of

[alarimer]

207. Many of the places voting for Trump voted for Obama twice.

Many of the same voters, in fact. And also the average Trump voter was richer than the average Clinton voters. Most voters who made less than 50K voted for her. So there is that. These numbers can be sliced and diced many ways (to prop up almost any argument you care to have about the reasons for this). And it wasn't entirely anti-establishment or more incumbents would have lost.

They wanted change with Obama, didn't get it (not his fault for the most part) and so voted for change again. It's nonsensical because the kind of change they will end up getting will be far worse than anything they would have gotten under anyone else.

The fact is that the Democratic Party has sold itself to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, to the well-off. It is the party of the upper middle class and limousine liberals who go all "NIMBY" when someone wants to build a wind farm off Martha's Vineyard or put mixed-income housing down the block, who care more about poor neglected animals than they do about poor people. The party of people who look down their noses at folks in the south or "flyover country." And I think that disdain shows in the vote. Those chickens come home to roost eventually.

But I also think it is more complicated as well, having to do with the sense that things have really gone south for this country. Some seem to think it's a zero-sum game, that whatever is gained by others means that you yourself lose out. It isn't true, but it can appear that way. And there has been a concerted effort on the part of the Republican party to get people to blame others for their own difficulties (or more likely, to avoid blaming the Republicans, who are really the ones at fault). They get so angry at the "other" that they don't noticed it's their own pockets being picked (to mangle LBJ).

Couple this with a really screwed-up notion that people shouldn't be dependent on anyone else ever, on neither the government or the community. I think it is this lack of communitarian values that has really screwed us up as a country. This idea of "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" is corrosive nonsense because it also means that people who are unable to do that are abject failures. That's why the Republicans say welfare creates a culture of dependency and that is supposed to be a bad thing.

I think Clinton was the wrong candidate to try to deal with all of these forces. This type of change is going on all over the world, not just here. It is a retreat from liberal values and she just got caught up in it. Would someone else have fared better? Maybe, maybe not. We'll never know now.

Moving forward, though, I think the Democratic Party needs to retool. Get rid of the scripted, focus-grouped messaging (it's phony, baloney nonsense and everybody knows it). Get rid of the pollster-driven ads and position papers and come up with a full-throated defense of progressive values. Of inclusion, of economic fairness, of Social Security and Medicare, of Turn towards those progressive, enlightenment values rather than retreat to become "Republican-lite." Work at all levels. Get a group of elder statesmen and women to work on the gerrymandering and voter suppression issues, which are critical to making changes.