Face it: This was a devastating defeat. Trump faced multiple accusations of sexual assault. He was so psychopathically unhinged during the campaign that even many of his own voters doubted his fitness for the job. His party's ideas are disliked by a majority of the public. On some topics, like Social Security, they're even disliked by a majority of its own voters.
Under the circumstances, Trump and his party should have lost overwhelmingly.
4. Accept responsibility.
Instead, Democrats lost the presidency on a technicality -- one they understood in advance.
In any other human endeavor, people know that failure leads to changes in staffing and strategy. Politics should be no different.
On a very related note, the Obama Administration never held Wall Street's fraudsters accountable. Instead, Attorney General Eric Holder uttered a remarkable phrase:
"It remains true that, at some institutions that engaged in inappropriate conduct before and may yet again, the buck still stops nowhere."
Here's one lesson from 2016: the buck always stops somewhere.
5. It's not about settling scores. It's about changing the game.
This isn't about getting even or saying "I told you so." It's about fixing a problem. Many voters see the Democratic Party's current leadership as part of a selfish elite. Many draw no hope from its message.
Elections can be decided by more than one factor. Yes, FBI Director Comey dealt a possibly fatal blow to Clinton and her party. But so did some unforced Democratic errors. If you want to focus on the things you can change, here's a place to start:
Voters across demographic lines want to change the system. They deserve a clearly presented program for ending the rule of big-money politics, building a fairer economy, and ensuring decent living conditions for every American.
Incremental change is no longer enough. Democrats need to think big.
6. Trade was decisive.
Clinton's opposition to the TPP trade deal rang hollow because she had supported it in the past. Obama kept pushing it, and Clinton never vowed to fight it in a lame-duck Congress. So voters believed Trump instead.
"If you look at a map of where the U.S. has lost manufacturing jobs since 2000," John Judis points out, they are "all states that Trump won, and in the case of all but Indiana, states that Democrats campaigned in, and had won in the past."
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