In the aftermath of the 2016 and as the nation begins to turn its attention to the 2018 midterms both parties are undergoing a shift in their respective constituencies. In this two-part series of blog posts, I intend to analyze the shifts and the current battles that are taking place in the two major political parties of our nation.
The 2016 election was obviously a tough blow for Democrats around the country. The Democrats not only lost the presidency but, in the short span of 8 years, had lost over 1,000 seats nationwide, and were left with control over only 16 governorships and 32 state legislatures. After this onslaught of losses and the retirement of its leader, Barack Obama, the party began to fracture and, after the raucous 2016 Democratic Primary and the loss of Hillary Clinton, lost all sense of party unity.
Currently, the party is fractured down many lines. With the Left, made up primarily of Bernie Sanders and younger Americans, fighting with the older guard of the Democratic which preach moderation. This fight is currently playing out all across the nation in the Democratic Primaries. These battles are not only about who is the blame for the epic collapse in the past 8 years but over the future of the Democratic party.
The progressives want to take the party in a far more left-leaning direction adopting policies such as single-payer health care, a large expansion of the federal government and a mandated minimum salary for all Americans. They believe that party was swayed too far from its New Deal roots that gave the party political domination for nearly a half-century. If the party returns to its liberal foundation, they argue, it will be able to rise again to dominate American politics.
This is in contrast to the Moderates, or, as I like to call them, the Clinton Wing of the Democratic Party. I call them this because of the direction that they want to take the party. During the 2016 election, Clinton campaign thought that they could move the party one step to the right in an attempt to win over conservative moderates that had abandoned the Republican party after the election of Donald Trump. The hope was to be able to expand the Democratic party's reach into suburban regions of the country and to combine that reach with cosmopolitan globalist elites on the Coasts. This plan failed at some level but there is some evidence to suggest that the reason the plan failed was not that it was a bad idea but because it had Hillary Clinton's name on it. This is because Hillary Clinton is the most unpopular politician in America. Many current Democratic party strategists believe that if they continue to employ this strategy they should be able to expand the size of the party. In fact, they have been able to secure some victories following this method, most notably through Doug Jones (D-S-Alabama) and Conor Lamb (D-Pa-18).
Over the next few months, as these two wings battle it out in the Democratic Primaries, I suspect that we will begin to see the future Democratic Party. My personal opinion is that we will see something of a combination of the two wings. A coalition of progressive activists combined with suburban women and coastal cosmopolitan elites.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/11/why-democrats-should-abandon-angry-working-class-whites/
I was curious about why Hillary Clinton is such a hated politician after reading this post because I already knew she wasn't exactly hugely popular but not the reasons behind it. She has been called crooked for a long time and has not widely been considered as a trustworthy person. Her links to Wall Street and her missing emails were big reasons she became so untrustworthy to many durng the 2016 election. As well as her supposed responsibility for the security failures that contributed to the attack on the Benghazi consulate. The attacks on the consulate were against two United States government facilities in Benghazi, which is in Libya, by members of the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Sharia.
ReplyDeleteSource: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/18/hillary-clinton-why-hate-unlikeable-us-election
This is such an interesting take on the election! I completely agree with you that it did not help that Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee, and I do think that overall, parties are starting to shift further towards extremes that make it near impossible to come up with compromise. Barack Obama unfortunately was a progressive president amongst a part that in itself was in conflict, and with a united conservative front, pushed his agenda backwards following the 2010 midterms. It was not so much as conservatives were able to run such strong campaigns, although they did, but liberals appeared more fractured and began to stray too far to the left, pushing more conservative moderates to the Republican party.
ReplyDeleteSource: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/barack-obama-won-the-white-house-but-democrats-lost-the-country/