Did Democrats take Obama for granted?

[thewillynilly]

I think the Dems are quickly finding out how much Obama was holding their party together.

Do you think Dems have taken him for granted? What can they do to build the party again, or who can they nominate in 2020 who will get the turnout Obama did?

[Liberalrocks]

To an extent, but remember the party loss extensively during his midterms.

[Rookie Yinzer]

They bled governerships, Congressional seats, and state legislatures under him. What exactly was taken for granted?

[RINO Tom]

They bled governerships, Congressional seats, and state legislatures under him. What exactly was taken for granted?

[publicunofficial]

Held it together, or held it back?

[At-Large Senator LouisvilleThunder]

He consolidated the party too well that it prevented other Democrats from gaining influence due to the benches in many red states being wiped out in '10, '14, and '16. This is the downside of the ruling party playing defense during the last six years of his presidency while Republicans recruited many talented individuals to rebuild the party after the GWB years. There was simply too much hubris on the dem side that they were content with gridlock in congress while they foolishly thought that demographics would keep the white house in their hands for eternity. Obama was a good president who should have done more to dispel the lies against him and recruit more new charismatic dems to run in Middle America. The democrats should nominate someone that can connect with the WWC because they are the most elastic swing voters historically, and the minorities will vote for who ever is nominated if he or she can present a strong message of hope and change that Obama articulated so well in his 08 campaign.

[All Along The Watchtower]

They took his personal popularity and political skills for granted and assumed (to the point that they even thought much about it) that those traits would carry the Democratic Party as a whole - in both downballot races as well as the 2016 presidential election. This turned out to be a massive error with lethal consequences for the party and more importantly, many of its constituents (among many other people in the country as well).

I'm actually now of the view that McConnell's "we need to make sure Obama's a one-term President, above all else" strategy was politically genius not so much because it actually made Obama substantially less popular (though it certainly didn't help him in terms of Republicans branding Obama's policies with his name i.e "Obamacare") but that the obsessive focus on Obama motivated the conspicuously/extremely anti-Obama Republican voter base and the Right's grassroots activists to get ever more aggressively involved in downballot campaigns - congressional, gubernatorial and other statewide races, plus state legislative and local elections - which, when paired with the absurdly immense drop-off on the Democratic side in non-presidential/midterm races, paid off handsomely for the Republicans.

In other words, as popular as Obama was (and still is) among Democrats and much of the American public in general, tying his much-maligned-by-Republicans name to the much less popular Democratic Party (as a whole) and hanging him as an albatross around other Democrats' necks was for the Republicans, a very brilliant and successful political strategy indeed. And with the benefit of hindsight and in many respects, it paved the way for Clinton's defeat last November.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

He was a Democratic president that continued to lose seats in off year elections like Bill Clinton did.  Until, there is a unified Democratic controlled Gov't, control House, Senate and Presidency for more than 2 years, then, no one can take either Clinton or Obama for granted.

[Mr. Morden]

They bled governerships, Congressional seats, and state legislatures under him. What exactly was taken for granted?

Yes, though honestly that almost always happens.  What modern president *hasn't* bled governships, Congressional seats, and state legislatures for his party?  At some point, you've got to conclude that the incumbent president's party loses ground during his presidency for structural reasons, rather than because every president who gets elected is somehow bad at politics.

[The Ex-Factor]

It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand his personal charisma patched up a lot of divisions within the party. The constant negativity and bickering about political tactics (pragmatic centrism vs. left-wing activism) right now feels exactly like the political debates from 2000-2008 within the party, which shows those issues were always there, Obama was just a skilled enough politician to cover it all up.

On the other hand, while Obama was personally popular he presided over a period that ended with the Democratic Party in its worst position since the 1920s. So there's that.

[Mr. Morden]

They bled governerships, Congressional seats, and state legislatures under him. What exactly was taken for granted?

Yes, though honestly that almost always happens.  What modern president *hasn't* bled governships, Congressional seats, and state legislatures for his party?  At some point, you've got to conclude that the incumbent president's party loses ground during his presidency for structural reasons, rather than because every president who gets elected is somehow bad at politics.

Yet some lose more ground than others, and some leave their party at a much wider disadvantage. It's a rule based on a small group of presidents and that leaves a wide degree of variation unexplained.

Republicans had never held the kind of advantage that they do in state houses today until the end of Obama's presidency, and the last time when they controlled Congress so persistently was during the Great Depression, a period when national politics were so different as to be barely worth comparing to those of the present day.

Even if it is mostly a matter of geographic polarization between large urban cores and the country's economic periphery, something unique seems to be happening.

IMHO, the main thing that’s different now is the geographic distribution of the Democratic vote.  Compare, say, the 2000 election (after two terms of Clinton) with the 2016 election (after two terms of Obama): The GOP in 2000 won the national House popular vote by 0.5 percentage points in 2000, which was enough to retain their majority, but just barely.  A small shift in votes that year would have seen the Dems retake the House.  Six seats were won by Republicans by 2 points or less, and if five of those had gone the other way, you end up with House Speaker Dick Gephardt.  Whereas in 2016, the GOP won the national House vote by 1.1 percentage points (a slightly better margin than in 2000, sure, but not by much).  However, their structural advantage is vastly greater now, to the point where a uniform swing of as much as 10 points isn’t enough to dislodge them from the majority (swings aren’t going to be uniform, obviously, this is just a benchmark).  Heck, the Dems’ 5 point House popular vote win in the 1992 election would not be enough to give them a majority of seats if you replicated that today, because of the geographic distribution of votes.

And then you’ve got the presidential level, where the Dems won the popular vote but lost the electoral college in both cases, but the mismatch was much greater in 2016 than 2000.  Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote by much more than Gore beat Bush, yet no Florida recount scenario could have bailed her out of her electoral college loss.

And similar issues with state legislatures.  I don’t have the numbers in front of me now, but it’s obviously problematic to simply count up the number of state legislative seats in the country held by each party, as if they all count the same.  Democratic votes are far more concentrated in California, the most populous state, than they’ve ever been, for example.  California’s State Assembly has 55 Dems vs. 25 Republicans., while Wyoming’s House of Reps has 51 Republicans vs. 9 Dems.  So on a raw count of who has more legislative seats between those two states, it’s the Republicans, yet obviously the Democrats represent many many more voters if you’re combining the vote tallies of those two states.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Democrats have this tendency to take things for granted.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

I think it's more accurate to say that Democrats took for granted that Obama had forged the Permanent Democratic Majority and a win in 2016 was inevitable.

[The Chill Moderate Republican]

I wouldn't really say that the party took him for granted, I would rather say that the media did that for him.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Hillary Clinton would have passed comprehensive immigration reform and passage of Obamacare would have sealed the deal.  And we don't know what effect it would have had on Congressional races thereafter.

But, realizing this mistake, Dems will make no hesitation, with another Black president in Cory Booker to help bring Latinos in by passing the referendum on statehood with PR and comprehensive immigration reform even if it means nuking the legislative filibuster.  If, after, weakened Trump/Pence admin leads to the Democratic trifecta in 2021