Democrats don't have time to wait on demographic changes. Everything is on the line in two years, and if the oldest party on the planet wants to survive the Age of Trump they've got to find their soul and rebuild their bench.

Obama won fewer than 700 counties during his reelection campaign. Hillary Clinton did worse. Democrats lost the House, the Senate and 935 state legislative seats during the Obama presidency.

They're at their lowest point since the administration of Herbert Hoover. And the first step on the long road back to power is to expand the map by competing in every state; what Democratic U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison calls "a 3,143-county strategy."

Democrats just lost the presidency to Donald Trump; to the least qualified Republican nominee in American history. You can blame Russia. You can blame the FBI. You can blame the media. But the election shouldn't have been close.

This is a wake-up call.

Republicans can win in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in New Hampshire, even the governor's race in Vermont.

Democrats can no longer afford to write off entire regions of the country: including the south, the Mountain West, Greater Appalachia, the Plains, and in the aftermath of this election, especially not the Midwest.

Democrats used to be a national party –FDR carried 46 states in 1936 and Lyndon Johnson won 44 states in 1964.

And while the Obama coalition of progressives, liberals, minorities, college students and single women worked for him, they didn't turn out for Clinton and they're too concentrated in America's cities to win back congress; or the Electoral College without Obama on the ballot.

To stop Trump and retake the government, Democrats must compete in Idaho, in Mississippi and in West Virginia by reengaging with their working-class base regardless of their culture or skin color.

Trump won because a million Democratic Rust Belt voters earning less than $50,000 a year stayed home or switched from Obama to Trump. That wasn't about race. That's about economic desperation.

Clinton had better ideas for the poor and middle-class, but working-class minorities in the Rust Belt didn't notice, and thousands stayed home like African-Americans in rural eastern North Carolina.

Elections are about ideas, but you have to communicate those ideas because undecided voters and normal Americans don't read white papers, party platforms and campaign websites.

They listen to canvassers and they see ads. But only 9 percent of Clinton's ads were about jobs or the economy according to Lynn Vavreck of The New York Times.

Clinton's message was anti-Trump but didn't inspire millions of Americans who felt left behind and isolated by trade and automation. Poor Americans felt no reason to vote and forgotten working-class voters felt no connection to the Democratic Party of Hillary Clinton.

From Andrew Jackson to the New Deal to Obama, Democrats won elections as the voice of working people, including the poor and the educated. "We can't all be born rich, handsome, and lucky," said Georgia's Zell Miller in his keynote to the 1992 DNC. "And that's why we have a Democratic Party."

But the parties switched in the post-Watergate era when Democrats sold their populist soul for Wall Street donations. The party embraced meritocracy and economic growth, emphasized social issues alienating their uncultured base, and lost their high ground as the guardian against greed and immorality.

In short, Democrats went from the party of America's poor to a second party of the rich. "Clinton ran nine points ahead of Obama's 2012 tally among voters earning more than $100,000," according to Matt Karp at Jacobin. "Further up the income ladder, among voters making more than $250,000 annually, she bested Obama's margin by a full eleven points."

The party of FDR, William Jennings Bryan and Robert Kennedy which could compete in rural America is dead. And resurrection requires a bigger vision than the minimum wage or paid family leave.

When FDR accepted his party's nomination in the wake of the Great Depression, he didn't just propose economic programs. He tied the crisis to "a period of loose thinking, descending morals" and selfishness in American life. And today's Democrats must connect income inequality to commercialism, celebrity obsession, instant gratification, corporate greed and the age of reality TV.

Democrats must propose bold policies on climate change, criminal justice reform, curbing mass surveillance and providing economic security in a time of automation; but their framework must always be people against the powerful.

Democrats must be the party of the underdog whether they live in Kentucky or Detroit, and they must ditch the pop stars for more speeches from Rev. William Barber and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown.

Democrats need to organize chapters and precincts around local issues. They need to encourage participation in grassroots democracy. And they need to push hard for anti-trust protections in this Second Gilded Age.

They can expand the work of organizations like Democracy for America and New Leaders Council by recruiting the next generations of leaders and they need to return to their days as America's big-tent.

Twenty-four percent of Americans identify as liberal, combined with American minorities they're enough to win the popular vote, but not the House of Representatives.

Democrats have two choices: move to the Midwest or end the purity tests; and they should try both because, right now, they have nothing left to lose.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards is a conservative Democratic governor in the Deep South with a 62 percent approval rating and Democrats need to find a place for him on the Sunday shows and room in their party for former U.S. Sen. Jim Webb and Judge Michael Boggs, who both have clashed with the Democratic Party.

Democrats need an energized left and an engaged center and the lesson of 2016 is to have those fights in the primary; after all the Republican civil war led to each side getting a branch of the government.

To unite the Obama coalition with African-Americans in Charlotte and the blue collar voter in rural Indiana, Democrats need a message of shared values and struggles: immigration reform with assimilation, racial justice along with respect for police, LGBT equality with tolerance for religious dissent.

Democrats can't see millions of American voters as irredeemable. They must seek to change their minds. And then bring enough working-class whites and minorities back into the fold to win in every part of the country.