The old saying is that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result. So what do you call it when you fail, get a better result by doing something different, then go back and repeat the thing that failed the first time anyway?
The Democratic Party had two real-world tests for what works in an election against Donald Trump. One campaign famously succeeded; the other infamously failed. Mystifyingly — going into an election it kept saying was “the most important election of our lifetime” — it decided to rerun the one that failed.
The Democrats have now lost to Donald Trump in two out of three presidential elections, despite the fact that he has been deeply unpopular and polarizing each time he’s run, and that large majorities of voters just four months ago described him as “embarrassing” and “mean-spirited.” This time, Democrats didn’t just lose the Electoral College to him: Trump, for the first time in his career, appears to have won the popular vote, is on track to sweep all seven battleground states, and may well end up with unified party control of Congress.
The Democrats managed this despite way out-fundraising Trump and his team, and despite facing opponents who at times seemed to be trying to sabotage their own campaign in the home stretch: insulting Puerto Ricans, vowing to repeal Obamacare, promising to plunge Americans into economic hardship, and the candidate himself musing out loud about reporters being shot and miming oral sex with a microphone, among so much else. The yearslong effort…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
