Democrats need to reboot

The Democratic Party needs to crack the code.

The popular vote in the Nov. 8 presidential election wasn’t the basic problem. Hillary Clinton narrowly earned more votes than Donald Trump across the entire nation. In a pure democracy, she would now be the president-elect.

But that’s not the way the United States system works.

Ask “President” Al Gore (2000), “President” Samuel Tilden (1876), or “President” Andrew Jackson (1824; not the 1828 election he won four years later).

Like Hillary Clinton, they were each defeated by someone who got fewer popular votes — George W. Bush, Rutherford B. Hayes and John Quincy Adams, respectively.

We elect presidents state by state based on the number of U.S. senators and U.S. representatives in each state. It’s called the Electoral College, and it’s as head-scratching for other nation’s citizens as the British way of electing members of Parliament is for us.

Democratic leaders assumed the usually obvious — if you win the popular vote, you’ll win the electoral vote. That’s the way it usually works, and that’s what nearly all the pre-election polls were indicating.

Not this time.

The number of swing states, where the polls showed the race particularly tight, was greater this year than in past years. But pollsters were assuring their readers and viewers that even if Trump somehow won all of them, he would still have to pick off one or more of the traditionally Democratic states to claim victory.

That, they said, would be highly unlikely.

But that’s what Trump did.

Like Patton rumbling through the German-occupied nations of Western Europe in World War II, he conquered most of the Upper Midwest, picking up Michigan and Wisconsin as well as the swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Iowa.

Only Minnesota and Illinois remained in the Clinton camp.

Trump also carried Florida, another must-win state for him.

It was the Upper Midwest that did the trick for Trump, and no one saw it coming, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans.

But it happened, and Democrats need to reclaim the Upper Midwest if they’re going to compete next time.

How do they do that?

Most analysts see several reasons for Trump’s victory in the region: Clinton’s inability to connect on a personal level with most voters there, vote-reducing registration and voting-day requirements in some states, and Trump’s red-meat rhetoric on the stump.

But the single most powerful reason was apparently white working-class resentment of foreign economic competition that either had already damaged their livelihoods or was threatening to do so.

That factor is playing out in companies moving manufacturing plants overseas, low-cost imported goods and immigrant job competition driving down wages.

It’s called globalism, and millions of Americans fear it.

Hillary came late to the anti-globalism table. Bernie Sanders had made it a mainstay of his campaign, but the Democratic establishment, solidly behind Hillary, beat Bernie in the primaries with their relatively high number of unelected superdelegates and maneuvering by the Democratic National Committee to weaken Sanders’ popularity.

Trump, on the other hand, was anti-immigrant and anti-trade deals from the start.

The Democratic coalition, in order to succeed, must include working-class whites, as it did with FDR, Truman, Kennedy and, yes, even Obama.    

And it wasn’t only the presidency that Republicans captured. They maintained control of both houses of Congress, and boosted their dominance of state legislatures and governorships as well.

If you’re a Democrat and believe that Clinton lost because she’s a woman, then nominate a man next time.

If you’re a Democrat and believe she lost because she was tagged as a criminal, no matter how unfairly, then pick someone with a more sparkling public image next time.

If you’re a Democrat and believe she lost because she’s a leader of the establishment and Wall Street crowd, then pick an outsider next time.

But if you believe she lost because of longtime economic and social decline in the Rust Belt and the rest of the Upper Midwest, then you’ve got a bigger challenge.

You must build trust and identity with working-class whites while remaining true to your basic tenets of racial and gender equality, civil liberties, environmental protection, marriage equality, women’s control of their own health choices, and educational improvement.

As this election showed, that’s not an easy task.

And it wouldn’t hurt for coastal Democrats to rethink their opinion of the Midwest as fly-over country.

Most Iowans know where New York is. Many New Yorkers are hazy about the location of Iowa.

A little more attention to Middle America might pay dividends in the Democratic Party’s future.