Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist who lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton, has led the calls for soul-searching on the left after the crushing election defeat by Republican Donald Trump and the loss of long-time party supporters.
Sanders, an independent who became a Democrat in his run for the presidency, tapped much of the same anger that Trump harnessed on his vault into the White House but from the left: the fury of working Americans frustrated at wealthy and political elites, Wall Street and a costly healthcare system.
"There needs to be a profound change in the way the Democratic Party does business. It is not good enough to have a liberal elite," Sanders told the CBS This Morning programme on Monday.
“I come from the white working class and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party can’t talk to the people where I came from.”
There is growing support to have Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress and a Sanders supporter during the party's primary, become chairman of the Democratic national committee.
"I think it's a healthy thing for the Democratic Party to go through some reflection," President Barack Obama said on Monday in his first press conference since the election in which the Democrats not only lost the White House but failed to regain control of the US House of Representatives or the Senate.
Sanders has posed the question that many Democrats have been left asking since Trump’s shock win: why did millions of white working class people who voted for Obama turn their backs on the party?
While Trump’s victory was decisive in the electoral college – no single state would have swung it for Clinton – it masked a far closer race, reflected in Clinton taking more of the popular vote, by almost 700,000 votes.
The Democrat lost where it counted most – in three states – by a little over 106,000 votes. That was the difference between her winning and losing Pennsylvania (68,236), Wisconsin (27,257) and Michigan (11,423), states that were part of her "firewall" that had not been won by Republicans since the 1980s.
Waning black enthusiasm
Looking deeper, she lost Pennsylvania in Luzerne County, a traditional Democratic county with an aging white, working-class population that voted for Barack Obama twice, and in the rural counties in the western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh where she under-performed and Trump over-performed.
“You go to the places in the state where the white working-class voters are larger in numbers than in other parts of the state and you can see how it begins to make up that 68,000-vote edge,” said Dr Terry Madonna, a politics professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
“With Trump, we did not anticipate the size of the turnout among those people, we did not anticipate how change-oriented they were. We did not fully appreciate their anger and their angst.”
Michigan turned red for the first time since 1988 because Clinton received 108,830 fewer votes in Detroit and its suburban counties, coming up short against Trump's strong support in conservative areas. It exposed the waning black enthusiasm for her candidacy. In Genesee County – home to Flint, the majority-black town affected by the water contamination crisis – Clinton received 26,000 fewer votes than Obama.
In Wisconsin, Clinton became the first Democrat to lose the state since 1984 by underperforming – compared to Barack Obama – with black voters in Milwaukee and its suburban counties, receiving 57,000 fewer votes. One Wisconsin state, Pepin, voted Republican for the first time since Richard Nixon in 1972.
Clinton should have seen the warning signs in Wisconsin and Michigan. Both states votes for Sanders in the Democratic primary.
Trump had performed poorly in Wisconsin’s Republican primary and usually reliable polls showed her with a comfortable lead. She decided not to campaign in the state when Trump and his surrogates were visiting multiple times.
“That was a mistake. The time for her to come would have been right after Trump’s tape cam e out with his bad language and he tanked in the polls,” said Tim Cullen, a former Democratic Wisconsin state senator who is considering running for governor in 2018.
“It wasn’t just that she didn’t come but that the press kept accurately reporting over and over again that she didn’t come.”
National media pundits poured scorn on Trump’s decision to hold a rally in Minneapolis two days before the election. Minnesota is a traditional Democratic state but the local media attention gave the Republican much-needed profile on the eve of the election in western parts of Wisconsin that helped him win the state. In the end, Clinton won Minnesota by just 44,000 votes or 1.5 points. Obama won the state by 226,000 votes or 7.7 points in 2012.
Email server
The president appeared to question Clinton’s decision to avoid heavy campaigning in Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania when he spoke to reporters during his press conference on Monday.
“Good ideas don’t matter if people don’t hear them,” Obama said. “We have to compete everywhere. We have to show up everywhere.”
Campaigning aside, the election was a firm rejection of Obama’s policies and their continuation under Clinton. Of almost 700 counties that voted for Obama twice, 209 backed Trump. The businessman proved less divisive than expected: of 2,200 counties that never supported Obama, Clinton won just six.
At the weekend, Clinton blamed FBI director James Comey’s letters over her personal email server for costing her the election and while it certainly tightened the race, exit polls showed that three in four voters made up their mind in September or before, weeks before Comey’s intervention.
This finding alone should encourage Democrats to look deeper into their stunning defeat.