When President-elect Donald Trump replaces Barack Obama on January 20, the Democratic Party will find itself more removed from power than at almost any point since the party’s creation.
Scorned by the same voters who once embraced the New Deal, built the Great Society, and put their hope in the nation’s first black president, Democrats are now locked out of power in Washington and out of two-thirds of state legislative chambers across the country.
Simply put, Democrats’ once vaunted coalition of the ascendant — younger, multiethnic, educated, and urban — failed them in 2016, and in 2014 and 2010 before that. That coalition proved to have major handicaps, part demographic and part geographic, that have been hollowing out the party for years.
Democrats may find cold comfort in Hillary Clinton’s ... popular vote lead and ... more people call themselves “liberal” than ever polled. And they ... protest a system ... unrepresentative of the popular vote. But it will be up to Democrats to solve their own problem within the current rules. -snip-
Countless autopsies will be written of the 2016 election. Most will focus on the strategy and tactics of the Clinton campaign. But to understand how Democrats arrived in this mess to begin with, it helps to go back to the party’s founding over 150 years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
