To: puborectalis who wrote (993457 ) 1/13/2017 7:03:09 AM From: FJB 2 RecommendationsRecommended By
Read Replies (1) | Respond to The catastrophic fall of the Democratic Party theweek.com Over the past eight years, Democrats went from an ascendant majority to a marginalized party that has all but ceded enormous swathes of the country. The man who presided over that collapse, Barack Obama, now allows that he may have had a little something to do with that failure . You don't say. However, he leaves behind a much different political legacy for his party than some of his recent predecessors did. When Reagan left office, the Republican Party won the White House — the first time since Martin Van Buren that a sitting vice president won the White House through an election without the death or resignation of the president. Democrats lost control of the House after a 40-year run during Clinton's first term, but Democrats managed to win back control of the Senate as his term ran out — helped in part by Hillary Clinton's successful Senate run in New York.For Democrats at the end of the Obama era, the situation looks much more bleak. In fact, it's so bad that Washington Post analyst Philip Bump referred to the precipitous decline in Democratic fortunes as the " Thelma and Louiseing " of the party. Democrats have lost 10 percent of their Senate seats from the 111th Congress, 19 percent of their House seats, and 20 percent of their seats in state legislatures during Obama's time in office. On top of that, the party has lost more than a third of its gubernatorial seats. The Democratic Party finds itself in its worst shape since before the Great Depression — just a few short years after its ascendancy to dominance during the Great Recession. some of the blame in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos , but only for the initial pushback in 2010. Obama blamed the normal midterm correction for giving Republicans the opportunity to control the redistricting process in 2011, but also noted that he was kept too busy to participate in his party's organizing efforts.Obama sells his impact far too short. Almost all of the decline in Democratic fortunes occurred in those first midterms before the Census-driven redistricting had begun . Democrats lost 64 House seats, putting them at a 242-193 disadvantage, almost identical to their current status. The plummet in state legislative seats also mainly took place in 2010, with another significant decline in last year's elections; that same pattern holds for their U.S. Senate seats and gubernatorial seats.The 2010 midterms were a large-scale backlash against the agenda of Obama and Democrats — not just in Washington, D.C., but across the country — and Democrats never recovered from it. Had this multi-year shellacking been the result of the timing of the Census, we would have expected to see Democrats recover their positions in the Senate and gubernatorial elections, which do not rely on population-balancing districting. But here in reality, Democratic leadership led the party off a cliff in 2009-10, and to this day have not acknowledged their error — except in this instance by President Obama, and then only in the most limited fashion.this warning on her Twitter feed Monday to Republicans looking to fulfill their promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare. "How long will it take for @HouseGOP to acknowledge they don't have the people's support?" Republicans fought all four of the past elections on repealing ObamaCare , including Donald Trump's pledge to make repeal his top legislative priority, and managed to beat Pelosi all four times — and win the White House in 2016 to finally accomplish it. That kind of tone-deafness to voters' concerns is precisely why Pelosi's party finds itself retreating into coastal enclaves and academia. So, who's the culprit? Obama and Pelosi, certainly, but also Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, and everyone else who ignored the frustration of voters for the last six years. Until they replace that leadership
