re: #596 KGxvi

One of the major failings of the Obama Era Democratic Party is that they failed to build much of a bench.* Republicans dominated gubernatorial and senate elections, and since that’s where most presidential candidates come from, there just wasn’t anyone available to challenge Clinton in 2016 the way Obama did in 2008.

*I’m not blaming Obama, per se. It was a party wide failure. And that probably includes Jerry Brown deciding he wanted to be governor again in 2010; or Rory Reid in Nevada the same year (I don’t know enough about Nevada politics, but it always felt like they cleared the field for him in a way that never seems to work for Democrats).

After the reaction I’ve seen since Trump took office, where we’ve finally got people running everywhere, I think a big portion of that is many Democratic constituents thought someone else would take care of it. I think lots of people thought we were doing OK, and we’d reached a point where nothing could happen to the progress.