To Sanders voters: you were right, I was wrong

[All Along The Watchtower]

Trump would in all likelihood have lost against the Bern.

Between the Rust Belt white working class Democrats - including many two-time Obama voters, as it turns out - who defected this year and the fact that Sanders wouldn't have done substantially worse (if any worse) among minorities because in shocking news Trump is a clear menace and threat to them, as well as Sanders obviously having far more support and enthusiasm in the primaries among young people, independents, third-party voters, and people who had never voted before...well, I think it's clear now that Democrats nominated the wrong candidate and that the national Democratic Party is utterly worthless and morally negligent.

I should have listened. All of us Clinton voters should have listened. You can all now accept your accolades.

[All Along The Watchtower]

My question is:  Why did the Democratic Party clear the deck for Hillary Clinton, knowing that she had the baggage she had?  Was the Democratic Party really required to step aside en masse because Hillary made nice with Obama in 2008?  Did the Democratic Party really think that she was that great a candidate?  

I remember the standing Hillary had in the polls in the pre-primary season, and pre-Sanders.  Given the performance of the pollsters this year, her inflated early stock seems to have been an incredible illusion that disappeared once folks brought up any of her negative past.

I say this because the Democratic Party has no lack of capable officeholders.  There was VP Biden, Sen. Klobuchar, Gillibrand, McCaskill, Brown, as well as Sanders and Warren.  Did they have to fold in favor of Hillary?  If Hillary had to slug it out, why wouldn't that process have revealed her flaws to the point where a more electable nominee could have been chosen?

The Democratic Party paid a debt to Hillary they didn't owe.  It cost them the White House.

Because Clinton was the clear favorite and they were all greedily scrambling for jobs/career advancement from the new Clinton administration

That, and the fact that they spent their most if not all of their time staying in the liberal bubbles which just so happen to be the sorts of areas that have benefited the most - by far - from the globalized economy. And somehow, calling economically struggling and culturally alienated people who live in the countryside a bunch of illiterate, ignorant, uneducated, and racist rubes from your Ivy League, Wall Street, Hollywood, or (in my case) Silicon Valley safe space isn't a good look. I guess while we were tweeting sick burns against Trump and sharing Huffington Post articles or whatever we forgot that those uneducated rubes vote.

For people who pride themselves on being educated and empirically driven, we liberals can be awfully myopic and close-minded ourselves, seeing what we want to see and dismissing contrary opinions as inherently incorrect, "uneducated", or worse, morally suspect. And our inability to understand this is why our hubris and yes, outright elitism continues to cost us the votes of people who "vote against their interests (those who represent their interests being, of course, the smart liberals who banked so much on Wall Street's favorite Democratic candidate, who embraced the liberalism, feminism, and "diversity" of the corporate boardroom and the public relations campaigns of the 1% of Americans who have benefited oh-so-much from the income inequality that we claim to condemn).

It's hard to get people to hear you out when they - correctly - suspect that, to the extent you care about them at all, you just care about getting their votes.  Hardly a mystery that people who aren't respected don't want to listen to you.

PS: In the spirit of being Fair and Balanced, I would add that the same criticism - though phrased differently in some ways, of course - applies to Republicans in relation to black, Latino, Asian, and other Not White voters, as well as in relation to Trump voters for that matter. This is a bipartisan issue.

[All Along The Watchtower]

There's too much emphasis on white working class voters. Yes, their swing was the story of the election, but they're only about a third of the electorate. I doubt Sanders would have done as well as Clinton among minorities and college educated voters.

Unfortunately for Democrats, minorities and college educated voters (at least, college educated Democratic voters) are concentrated in states that are either solidly Democratic in presidential elections or at the very least, seem to be on their way to that status (see: Colorado).