MAYBE THEY'RE LEARNING SOMETHING – AT 10:46 A.M. ET:  Some Democrats (not all) are studying the last election to determine what went wrong.  What they're finding is no ornament to their leaders.   From The Politico: 

As they investigate the forces behind the party’s stunning losses in November, Democrats are coming to a troubling conclusion. The party didn’t just lose among rural white voters on Election Day, it may have failed to capture them in its pre-election polling as well.

Many pollsters and strategists believe that rural white voters, particularly those without college degrees, eluded the party’s polling altogether — and their absence from poll results may have been both a cause and a symptom of Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton in several states.

Determining what exactly happened is one of the most pressing problems facing the out-of-power party. In order to win those voters back — or figure out a future path to victory without them — party strategists say they first need to measure the size of that rural and working-class cohort.

John Hagner, a partner at Clarity Campaign Labs, a D.C.-based Democratic analytics firm, said 2016 taught the party a hard lesson about polling in the Trump era.

“The folks who would talk to a stranger about politics just aren’t representative of people who wouldn’t,” he said.

The first evidence of the party’s polling blind spot surfaced in a governor’s race, the 2015 contest in Kentucky. Both public and private polls going into the election showed Democrat Jack Conway and Republican Matt Bevin running neck-and-neck — Conway had a 3-point lead in the final RealClearPolitics average — but Bevin won by a comfortable, 9-point margin.

Like some of the more Democratic states where Trump upset Clinton last year, Kentucky has a large rural and a large working-class white population (often there is considerable overlap in the groups). Whites make up 88 percent of Kentucky’s population, and fewer than a quarter of Kentucky residents over age 25 have a college degree.

COMMENT:   Read the whole thing.  It's an excellent analysis of a recurring political phenomenon – a party losing contact with its constituency. 

We saw it in 1980 with the emergence of the Reagan Democrats – mostly working people who felt the Democratic Party was ignoring them.  They went to Reagan.  And last year they went to Trump.

Republicans shouldn't gloat.  The Democrats are now working the problem.  The Republicans in Washington are giving them plenty of ammunition.

March 28, 2017