2016 Postmortem

The problem with alot of these numerical analyses is that Clinton overwhelmingly won the popular vote. So on a national level she did "well" with almost any group you want to analyze. Her problem was a very small group of people in a few states.

However, in the larger picture, it never should have been this "close". We lost in states that were formerly solid democratic states. But the reality is that those trends have been shifting for years. We've been losing all over the country. And we lost against the most "beatable" candidate one can imagine. In a real sense this is probably a good example of a "fluke". Move a few people around and the election is completely different. None the less, we should have been concerned about alot of these results even if we have won. We were losing voters that should have been "tried and true".

There are alot of reasons this has happened. Some of them are long term trends of the democratic party, and some were more immediate choices we made leading into this race. All of them contributed. And we're going to have to address alot of them if we expect to improve. We can't always depend on having a candidate with the charisma of a Bill or Barack. We have to be able to win with Gores of the world.