2016 Postmortem

but since you read at least that far, I owe it to you to try to answer your question.

We have spent over a month with the same two camps (and the usual suspects) pontificating about how their primary candidate would have won or about how the other group's primary candidate was the reason they lost.

I campaigned for one candidate in the primary and actively worked for the other in the general. These arguments are both bullshit.

Hillary ran about as good a campaign as anyone could have. She was AT LEAST as good a candidate as we have run in my lifetime (with the exception of Obama). She, just as Bernie would have been, was saddled with a party hierarchy that not just believed that suburbanites were reachable, but had made strategic decisions regarding the allocation of resources based upon that belief, counted on those voters coming through, and had done so for almost 25 years.

Those voters were never there, they have not been there since Bill ran on (to be honest, offensive) Republican ideas. No Democrat could have won because there is no Democrat who can do what Obama did in terms of turnout among core demographic groups.

We have two camps still fighting over who they liked best, not over how we win elections.

Those are the "blaming fits."