2016 Postmortem

They're tying themselves in knots trying to blame her failure on everyone and anyone BUT the candidate.

In any election, the primary fault ALWAYS lies with the candidate. There are plenty of other ancillary causes that can be identified as well. What is missing from the vast majority of these analysis is:

1) One has to start with the admission that she won a lot of the popular vote.

2) One has to discuss how any of the proposed factors would have affected those 75K voters or so in the critical states that could have shifted the election.

She took a beating in the rust belt because of her connection to NAFTA, TPP, and the bailout. Trump beat her up with all of that and it worked. Bernie would have been more immune to that kind of attack, which might have allowed him to prevail. That presumes he could have gotten anywhere near the minority support that Clinton did.

Two lessons that need to be learned here. Democrats in general need to be more in tune with the rust belt than they have been. They are vulnerable here, and it could get worse. Doesn't mean Clinton was entirely defeated here, just that she needed to do better. The Bernie contingent needs to think hard about what happened with minorities. Minorities believe that social justice and economic justice are two distinct issues, with related effects. They don't see social justice being accomplished through economic means. Bernie was playing catch up here and he isn't the first to find himself there.