In any attempt to understand the outcome of the election, attention must be paid to the Democratic National Committee. The DNC did all in its power to insure the nomination went to its preselected candidate, with her high “unfavorability” ratings.
The purpose of the primaries and caucuses is to let the voters of the Party choose a candidate they like well enough to vote for and support with some enthusiasm. By having an open, free-wheeling primary season, the Republicans ended up with a candidate whose supporters were enthusiastic and turned out to vote for him in large numbers.
The DNC’s forcing of Hillary Clinton on the Democratic primary voters is eerily reminiscent of their forcing Al Gore on the Party faithful in the year 2000. Both Gore and Clinton are capable, intelligent people who might well have made good presidents, but we’ll never know because neither of them was a candidate with appeal broad enough to win the electoral vote.
Re-structure of the Electoral College favors the Republican Party. In order to overcome this disadvantage, any Democratic candidate for president must appeal to the center as Barack Obama did in 2008. An articulate, camera-ready senator with a short, clean record, he was an ideal candidate and was elected – twice.
In Arkansas, hardly a hotbed of liberal thinking, a substantial majority voted this November in favor of medical marijuana. Nationwide a majority of Americans supports gay marriage. So, the support is there for progressive, centrist policies. In order to tap into that support, the Democratic Party must let the voters of the Party choose a candidate they want, not one preselected for them by the Party’s powerbrokers.
Had the DNC allowed the kind of open primaries the Republicans had, Hillary Clinton would probably have rolled off the turnip truck on the same corner as Jeb Bush with his $100 million, and a viable candidate (one the voters liked well enough to vote for) could have emerged. Remember, Barack Obama handily defeated Clinton in 2008, when she was eight years younger and not yet burdened with Benghazi and her emails.
People can complain about the Electoral College and speculate about Russians hacking the vote count in, say, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Michigan to give the result Putin wanted. Certainly, it was a tragic mistake on Barack Obama’s part to have left a Republican in charge of the FBI, a man who was all too happy to announce 10 days before the election that he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s emails. But, setting all that aside, people did not vote for Clinton because they did not want to: a result foreshadowed by her “unfavorability” ratings which were high before the primaries ever began.
If the powers that be in the Democratic Party wish to win the presidency in future elections, they must start conducting their primaries in an open, democratic manner: Let the people decide, like the Republicans did. It works.
David Zimmermann