Third Way Is Determined To Make Sure The Democrats Run Candidates For Congress Just Like Hillary

If this is the vision of the Democratic Party going forward, we might as well start a new party today

Hillary's worst performing states-- the half dozen where she didn't manage to get even 30% of the vote-- were all states that Bernie won in the primaries. They are 6 red states where desperate voters looking for a way out of their situations looked at Hillary and Bernie and said "Bernie!" and then looked at Hillary and Trumpanzee and said "Trumpanzee!" They wanted change and, in the general election, the Democratic Party was offering them the status quo. The GOP was offering them much worse: a backward, reactionary agenda but that isn't how it was packaged or how it came across in the minds of many voters. These are the states-- along with Hilary's final percentages of the popular vote:

• Oklahoma- 28.93
• Idaho- 27.49%
• Utah- 27.46%
• North Dakota- 27.23%
• West Virginia- 26.43%
• Wyoming- 21.63

With the exception of Trump-hating Utah, Hillary did worse than Obama did in every one of those states, both times he ran, although he ultimately lost each one of them. These are his percentages for the 2012 campaign, the weaker of his two runs:

• Oklahoma- 33.23%
• Idaho- 32.62%
• Utah- 24.75%
• North Dakota- 38.69%
• West Virginia- 35.54%
• Wyoming- 27.82

Now let's look at how Bernie performed against Hillary in each of these states, some of which had primaries and some caucuses:

• Oklahoma- Bernie: 51.9%; Hillary: 41.5%
• Idaho- Bernie: 78.0%; Hillary: 21.2%
• Utah- Bernie: 79.3%; Hillary: 20.3%
• North Dakota- Bernie: 64.2%; Hillary: 25.6%
• West Virginia- Bernie: 51.4%; Hillary: 35.8%
• Wyoming- Bernie: 55.7%; Hillary: 44.3%

One more set of comparisons-- how many votes Bernie got in the primary compared to how many votes Señor Trumpanzee got in the primary:

• Oklahoma- Bernie: 174,054; Trumpanzee: 130,141
• Idaho- Dems had a caucus and GOP had a primary
• Utah- Bernie: 61,333; Trumpanzee: 24,864
• North Dakota- GOP picked delegates at a convention
• West Virginia- Bernie: 123,860; Trumpanzee: 156,245
• Wyoming- Bernie: 156; Trumpanzee: 644

I'm not saying Bernie would have won Wyoming or even West Virginia, but he probably would have doubled Hillary's scores in some of these states and won in the states Hillary screwed up-- Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and perhaps even Florida and North Carolina. You know what always makes me cry when I watch this clip? The part when Elizabeth Warren's business card comes up on the screen:



So that brings us to what James Hohmann at the Washington Post slyly and incorrectly referred to as "a center-left think tank," Third Way. Wikipedia defines Third Way as "a political position advocating a varying synthesis of right-wing and left-wing policies," although the actual Third Way organization, founded in 2005, is far more about right-wing policies than left-wing and, at best it could be called a center-right think tank. As Lee Fang pointed out in 2013, the think tank "relies on money from corporate interests, lobbyists and Republican donors." He calls it a "centrist think tank that portrays itself as a Democratic group" whose overriding raison d'être is to pound it into the heads of Democrats to "avoid economic populism at all costs" and to "steer clear of creating a strong safety net." Only an Inside the Beltway journalists like Hohmann could ever refer to this garbage heap of a group that has more in common with Paul Ryan than with Franklin Roosevelt as "center-left." Democratic politicians involved are primarily Blue Dogs and New Dems, in other words, the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Hohmann's stenography for the center-right group was meant to lure people in with a recognizable and obvious truth-- "to win the House majority in the midterms, Democrats will need to make big gains with suburban voters... and that "there is no one kind of voter or district that can deliver the House for Democrats in 2018"-- in order to make their pitch for more terrible right-of-center candidates like Clinton. They're wrong; that has been the pathway to destruction for the Democratic Party since 2006 when Pelosi agreed to hand the DCCC over to quintessential Third Way hack, Rahm Emanuel.

I'm not a fan of the right-wing GOP polling firm Rasmussen but today they published some interesting data on what Democratic voters feel about their own party leadership. They found that "just 31% of Likely Democratic Voters believe the current national leadership of their party is representative of most Democrats. Most (58%) feel instead that the party needs to find new leaders... Voters in most demographic categories see a need for new leadership in both parties but say the need is even stronger for Democrats... Bernie Sanders was the first choice of Democrats to run against Trump in 2020, with Hillary Clinton in second." We looked at the question of post-Pelosi/Hoyer congressional leadership on Friday and it's one of the topics I plan to talk about this coming Friday when I do an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the SandersForPresident SubReddit at 1pm (PT). I never did one of those things before; come join in, would ya?