Democrats Need to Reach Out to the Heartland

If Demo­crats want to keep blam­ing oth­ers for their sorry per­form­ance on Elec­tion Day, they’re ob­vi­ously free to do so. Yes, they were hurt by the dis­clos­ure of Hil­lary Clin­ton’s private email serv­er, claims that the Clin­ton Found­a­tion was a “pay-to-play” op­er­a­tion, and even fake news. Yes, if FBI Dir­ect­or James Comey hadn’t re­opened the Clin­ton email in­vest­ig­a­tion, the vot­ing needle might have moved in states like Wis­con­sin, Michigan, and pos­sibly Pennsylvania. Yes, Rus­sia’s email hacks might have den­ted Demo­crats’ sup­port. But to simply blame these things is a form of deni­al. Demo­crats may see Don­ald Trump as a hor­rif­ic freak of nature, but the fact re­mains that he re­ceived 63 mil­lion votes—2 mil­lion more than Mitt Rom­ney in 2012 and 3 mil­lion more than John Mc­Cain in 2008. While Demo­crats can blame ger­ry­man­der­ing for their fail­ure to win a House ma­jor­ity, fig­ures com­piled by Cook Polit­ic­al Re­port House Ed­it­or Dav­id Wasser­man show that Re­pub­lic­ans beat Demo­crats in the na­tion­al House pop­u­lar vote, 63,153,387 (49.1 per­cent) to 61,776,218 (48.0 per­cent), with in­de­pend­ent or oth­er-party can­did­ates pulling an­oth­er 3,682,600. In­creas­ingly Demo­crats