Hillary Clinton can win, and the Democrats are playing it safe

[KoKo]

14. Why Hillary won't Win if she runs as a DINO/DLC Candidate in 2016...Times are A'Changing

Willy T's Post:
How Democratic Progressives Survived A Landslide - AmericanProspect (Long/Great Info)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=6216128

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The American Prospect
http://prospect.org/article/how-democratic-progressives-survived-landslide

Snips from the article:

The Democratic Party’s salvation in 2014 was supposed to be the party’s superior turnout machine. Building on the combination of high-tech voter-targeting and old-fashioned door-knocking that gave Obama an edge in the purple states in both his elections, the Democrats rolled out a $60 million “Bannock Street Project” for the midterms. The name was inspired by the location of Denver field headquarters for Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, who ran a state-of-the-art ground game that helped him weather the Tea Party storm of 2010—and who chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2014. Guy Cecil, Bennet’s turnout mastermind in Colorado, took charge of the national project this time, pledging to invest more in the field than Democrats had in previous midterms. Bannock Street sent some 4,000 staffers into ten key states, pursuing an ambitious goal: Come as close as possible to replicating the Obama coalition in a midterm year. At least in the states with toss-up Senate races.

In some respects, in some places, it worked: In battleground states where Democrats invested heavily in field operations, including North Carolina and Colorado, turnout was higher than in 2010—up four points to 41 percent in North Carolina, up five points to 53 percent in Colorado. That’s a feat, considering that turnout nationally was the lowest since 1942, a paltry 36 percent. In states like Virginia and Maryland, where Democrats didn’t invest, turnout was abysmal. But Democratic senators still lost to Republican challengers in North Carolina and Colorado, despite the relatively high voting numbers in both states. The races where Democratic field operations actually spelled the difference between victory and defeat were few and far between—Connecticut, perhaps, where unpopular Governor Dan Malloy ran the most unstintingly populist (and pro-Obama) campaign in the country and narrowly prevailed. But even there, turnout was modest, at 42 percent.

Voters came out in healthier numbers in other states where the DSCC focused its resources: 49 percent in New Hampshire, nearly 70 percent in Oregon (with its mail-in balloting), and 51 percent in Minnesota. We shouldn’t read too much into those raw numbers; these states typically out-vote most others. And it wasn’t just Democrats who were getting their voters out; Republicans were making a far stronger effort than they made in 2012 to limit the Democrats’ advantages in the field.

As Rob Collins, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told The New York Times, GOP strategists “devoured news reports about the [Bannock Street] project and scoured Federal Election Commission filings to learn as much as they could about how their rivals were structuring their turnout operations in battleground states.” The Koch brothers’ super PACs invested millions in field operations this time around, too. Even when one party does best the other, a superior turnout machine can only swing an election that’s exceedingly close.

Just as the skyrocketing, post–Citizens United spending on both sides has basically resulted in a partisan draw—with both parties becoming smarter about where to put their money, and when, and into what—neither Democrats nor Republicans are likely to have a decisive advantage in field operations and voter technology going forward. Even when one party does best the other, a superior turnout machine can only swing an election that’s exceedingly close. In 2014, “the Republicans could have been printing their voter file list from a Commodore 64, and it would not have fundamentally changed the election,” Cecil said in the aftermath. “This was not a field election.”

The Democrats’ biggest turnout problem wasn’t so much with African Americans or Latinos. What stung the Democrats, as usual, was under-30 voters’ profound lack of interest in the proceedings—they made up 12 percent of voters in 2014, down a bit from 2012, and woeful when you consider that they make up 21 percent of the eligible voting population. Single women voted less overwhelmingly for Democrats than they did in 2012, as did Latinos. All of which means that Republicans fared marginally better among some key Democratic blocs, even as the Democrats continued to fare worse among Republican-leaning groups—particularly that biggest and baddest voting bloc of all, white people.

Beyond their super-duper turnout machine, the other Democratic edge in 2014 was going to stem from a strategy borrowed from Karl Rove’s evil-genius idea in 2004 to put same-sex marriage—then still sweepingly unpopular—on ballots in battleground states. Ballot measures would draw the Democratic faithful to the polls this year, as once they did the Republicans. This year, Democrats floated minimum-wage increases in four red states (Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota) and Illinois, along with background checks for guns in Washington state and a paid sick-leave mandate in Massachusetts. The measures all passed, but they did little to benefit Democratic candidates at the top of those states’ tickets. Republicans won the big races for Senate or governor in six of those seven states. In Arkansas, incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Pryor won just 39 percent of the vote, while the minimum-wage hike garnered 65 percent in favor. Clearly, plenty of Republicans said yes to higher pay while punching their ballots for the party that opposes it.

Turnout went down in other states where progressive measures had been expected to rev up more Democratic voters. In South Dakota, a successful minimum-wage initiative couldn’t prevent turnout from dropping from 62 percent in 2010 to 54 percent. And while Oregon’s 70 percent might look like powerful evidence that a marijuana-legalization measure stimulated turnout as hoped, it also represents a drop from 2010, when 72 percent of registered Oregonians mailed in their ballots.

The great lessons of 2014—drawn from the Democrats who lived to fight another day—proved to be mostly old-school and plainly commonsensical. Timid, consultant-scripted Democrats lost. Democrats who spent the campaign posturing as moderate Republicans lost. Bold, aggressively populist candidates—the few, the loud, the proud—won.

Of course, don’t try telling that to the ’90s nostalgists who continue to dictate so many Democrats’ election strategies no matter the results. Even as some of the votes were still being counted, Politico published a “Blueprint for Democratic Victory” by the high priest of triangulation, Democratic Leadership Council founder Al From. He advised his party that the way to look forward after the 2014 debacle was to look backward—to the supposed glory days of DLC hero Bill Clinton and his loyal band of Wall Street funders. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, From refused to acknowledge the reality that Clinton Democrats were approximately as popular as lepers in 2014, and that the candidates who followed his formula—which was most of them—were whipped in virtually every competitive race for Congress or governor.

Democrats’ “principal strategy this year,” From asserted, all facts to the contrary, “was a turnout strategy—to ‘fire up the base’ and turn out groups of voters—young millennials, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and women—who tend to vote Democratic. That strategy worked spectacularly in 2008 and 2012 with Barack Obama at the top of the ticket. Much of our campaign message was part of that strategy, directed at those Democratic constituencies. But this year, with the president not on the ballot and his approval ratings down, turnout favored the Republicans.”

Rage on, Mr. From, against the dying of the light.