13 red, purple state Dems face re-election in age of Trump

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.

At the same time, Schumer must try to satisfy his party’s liberals, who include Sanders and Elizabeth Warren of MA. While pundits had predicted a civil war within the Republican Party, the victory has put that on hold for now. While Trump received nearly the same amount of total votes as the 2013 Republican candidate Mitt Romney, Democratic support fell by over 6 million votes between 2012 and 2016. That is why Republicans prize ideological purity and Democrats are more inclined to compromise and govern. On the other hand, he might have been attempting to be pragmatic and gain favor with the Democratic Party.

The current head of the DNC is Donna Brazile, a longtime Democratic operative and former CNN contributor, who is leading in an interim capacity after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned on the eve of the convention.

During an interview with CNN, Jane Sanders, wife of Bernie Sanders, dismissed any speculation that her husband was considering another bid for the White House in 2020. Thanks to Wikileaks, we don’t have to speculate about that fact. Exley says one of the big reasons Clinton lost was emotional. Her state’s presidential vote remained too close to call Friday.

It’s not just this election where it is still hard to believe that Trump won. That’s how she lost, OK? He represented that change. “And the Democrats will win elections by pounding away on those issues”.

“You can not be a party which on one hand says we’re in favor of working people, we’re in favor of the needs of young people but we don’t quite have the courage to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class”, Sanders wrote in a separate statement released Thursday. There’s been a lot of Monday – nay, Wednesday – morning quarterbacking about whether he would have beat Trump.

And they narrowed the early-voting gap: In 2012, Iowa Democrats cast 68,000 more early votes than Republicans; in 2016, that advantage was reduced to 42,000.

“You’ve got to have a vision to strengthen the grassroots”, Ellison said on ABC. Or what about the blue dog or conservative Democrats? “People are exhausted of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids – all while the very rich become much richer”. So many people I spoke to during this campaign – especially in the old steel towns of the Rust Belt – wanted a businessman in the White House rather than a career politician.

Listen, 70 percent of the voters on Tuesday were white in America.

“The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy”, Trump said in one tweet.

SANDERS: Michigan. I think he also would have done better in Florida, places like Pennsylvania, New Hampshire.

SIMON: Have Democrats made a mistake possibly in seeing the electorate as different ethnic groups?

Wisconsin voted for Trump, shocking many in her campaign. What’s happening in their lives is they’re falling behind. The delegates had been roused to chant her name by a speaker who insisted she practiced an evil known as “radical feminism”. Zack Exley was a senior adviser for Bernie Sanders during his campaign.

“I think that we need to acknowledge and thank, frankly, the Trump campaign for their efforts”.

SIMON: Has the Democratic Party taking African-American voters for granted? “I hope he’ll rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and I look forward to working with him if he chooses the to do that”.

Others couldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton under any circumstances. They twice came out in incredible numbers and helped to elect Barack Obama.

But in the Electoral College – the only count that matters in USA presidential elections – the blunt-spoken real estate mogul is ahead, 290 to 228 with the victor still to be determined in two states.

Democrats have begun post-election soul searching, with Sanders and Sen. Have they assumed that because the woman was at the top of the ticket, that women would line up to vote for that Democrat? Nobody knows. I certainly wish I had had that opportunity. And he says he was never able to get behind Hillary Clinton once she won the nomination, so he didn’t vote for her.

Hillary Clinton may not approve, but the reality is that Bernie Sanders is the fittest candidate to serve as Senate Minority Leader. “He was running many points ahead of Clinton on every poll, in terms of who he might run against versus her, in terms of approval rating, in terms of popularity”. They penned article after article slamming Trump instead of educating our families about Sanders’ agenda, or persuading our skeptical friends that he had a real shot at the White House.

California, for example, has 55 electoral votes, while seven small states and the national capital – which is not part of any state – have just three votes apiece. His “revolution” in the primaries was propelled by huge margins among independents in Wisconsin (72 percent) and MI (71 percent), two states where independents later broke for Trump. Now, you could do that one of two ways. If they cared about progressive policy they would have bothered to show up. Another way to do it was to build her up.

DEVINE: Great to be with you, Scott.

SIMON: Tad Devine, president of Divine Mulvey and Longabaugh, a media consulting firm.