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Perspectives: Democrats And Their Serious Mistake

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A vital key to Democratic Party success requires genuine and painful introspection. The party alienated a core constituency that must be welcomed back home.

Remember Obama's dismissal of some fellow citizens as "bitter" and "clinging to their guns and religion"? Remember Clinton tossing people into her " basket of deplorables"? Democrats now revile a core constituency that they literally used to own. They disdain many Trump supporters as Neanderthal bigots. Some may well be; but many are former Democrats who feel under attack by perceived arrogant bicoastal elites. They do not believe they abandoned their party; their party abandoned them. Many working class families, union members, farmers and other rural citizens rallied to Trump's banner as an alternative safe haven.

Democrats disdainfully dismiss these folks as crude bigots. But in key swing states many voters who had voted twice for Obama switched to Trump. Enough did so to swing these states to Trump. Elsewhere they inflated Trump's totals. Now it is difficult to reject cavalierly these voters as racists.  Rather than dismiss natural friends as enemies, shouldn't Democrats instead determine what caused this harmful fissure, and how to repair it? They should recall the Shakespearean admonition, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves..."

I'm Bob Evans, and that is my perspective.

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