Regarding those Obama voters who allegedly voted for Trump...

Since I see so many posts about Dems who voted for Trump and how they can be brought back, I want to remind folks about this article that I posted months ago: Why Did Some White Obama Voters Go For Trump?

Trump gave them a choice between multiracial democracy and white primacy.

During the 2008 election, FiveThirtyEight relayed an anecdote from the campaign trail:

So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the n***er!” Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the n***er.”

We assume that the relative lack of racial violence over the last generation is because of a change of heart and attitude. And surely that has happened to some extent. But to what degree does it also reflect an erstwhile political consensus wherein leaders refused to litigate the question of multiracial democracy? Absent organized opposition to the idea that nonwhites were equal partners in government, there was no activation in the broad electorate. It wasn’t an issue people voted on, because they couldn’t.

Donald Trump changed that. With his tirades against nonwhites and foreign others, he reopened the argument. In effect, he gave white voters a choice: They could continue down the path of multiracial democracy—which coincided with the end of an order in which white workers were the first priority of national leaders—or they could reject it in favor of someone who offered that presumptive treatment. Who promised to “make America great again,” to make it look like the America of Trump’s youth and their youths, where whites—and white men in particular—were the uncontested masters of the country.

Increase Democratic turnout, or try to convert Trump supporters?

Which one?

I don't think the Democratic Party can do both, and I'd say the latter is a fool's errand.

One might suggest that it depends on where the candidate is running, but I think running against your party's national platform can cause substantial problems and make re-election pretty damn difficult.

Can't most all of us agree that the Democratic Party needs to make some major changes?

A lot of folks seem to get quite upset when Democrats - or the party as a whole - are criticized. While there can be honest debate about what changes need to be made, I would expect most of us to agree that changes need to be made.

Given Republican majorities in so many state legislative bodies and governorships, as well as Republican control at the federal level, why would anyone conclude that the modus operandi of the Democratic Party doesn't need to change--and pretty drastically?

"Democrats Neglect People of Color While Failing to Woo White Trump Voters"

An interview worth listening to: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/7/31/billion_dollar_mistake_democrats_neglect_people

A couple quotes from Steve Phillips:

So, the challenge the Democrats face is to focus on the math, and not on the myth, of what happened in 2016. And so, the myth is that all of these Democratic voters, all of these working-class white voters who had supported Obama, defected from the Democrats and then flocked to Donald Trump’s campaign and backed him, and that’s what the—that’s why Democrats lost, and that’s why they have to pursue them to be able to actually try to reassemble their power and get back into positions. But that’s not actually what happened, and it’s certainly not why they lost the election.

We had unprecedented—or, unprecedented in 20 years, black voter turnout drop-off. More than a million fewer black voters came out. And you had a splintering of the progressive white vote. And you had a larger increase of voters for Johnson and Stein—I sometimes call the JohnStein voters—than you did for Trump. And if you look in a place—Wisconsin is where it’s clearest. Trump got fewer voters in Wisconsin than Romney did. So it wasn’t like everybody flocked to him. It’s that the progressive votes splintered and was depressed. And that’s the challenge that the Democrats face, is how to reinspire, bring back out African-American voters, bring up Latino vote and bring back the whites who defected to third and fourth party.

The country is under conservative assault because Democrats mistakenly sought support from conservative white working-class voters susceptible to racially charged appeals. Replicating that strategy would be another catastrophic blunder.