re: #146 stpaulbear

I’m finding that I’m not on board with all of the DNC bashing going on here. From everything I saw it seemed like GOTV was strong for this election (especially when compared to the zero effort that was coming out of the Trump campaign).

Agreed. I’ve never seen better GOTV and I have been intimately involved with it since Kerry. I know we all want to find A Thing that went wrong that we can fix. Pick a charismatic candidate! Rework the DNC from the ground up! Listen to red-stater’s concerns and nod understandingly! Stop taking about guns or abortion or race!

There is no magic bullet here, and Democrats have got to stop thinking there is. Republicans win, not because they have a perfect candidate or the RNC is awesome or people love their positions. They win because their voters vote for Republicans every time in every election and they work on this stuff all the time, not every four years. It is boring and hard and I would love to believe that picking the right DNC chair would spare us all that work, but it isn’t true.

I am particularly frustrated by people who think we should have “picked” a “better” candidate than Clinton. That isn’t how it works. People who want to be president run a primary campaign and the party choses from among them. I have seen no evidence that a better candidate than Clinton exists (given that Obama can’t run again) but even if they do - they didn’t want it. They didn’t run. Besides, Republicans run shitty candidates all the time and win. We want to blame it on the candidate because then we don’t have to change anything else.