“It was a wave you couldn’t stop,” said Tad Devine, a longtime Democratic operative who helped run Bernie Sanders' 2016 primary campaign. “That’s the only explanation.” | AP Photo Democrats: We ran into an unstoppable wave

Democrats had looked forward to a smooth handoff of power from a successful two-term president to a successor of his own party – with a Democratic-led Senate to ease the way.

What they got was an existential shock.


In interviews Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, while Clinton’s path to victory narrowed to the point of near-nothing, Democratic leaders said they were at a loss for how to accept what comes next.

“I’m more sick than I am shocked,” former Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Dave Obey told POLITICO. “It’s amazing to me that for the next four years this country is going to be led by a man who has been the most destructive to the process than any man I’ve seen since Joe McCarthy.”

Sizing up the prospects of a Clinton loss, Democrats offered up a number of places to point the blame: Pollsters, FBI Director James Comey, an out-of-touch message on globalization and trade, angry white people, Trump’s lightning-in-a-bottle candidacy, and even what could have been with Bernie Sanders.

“It was a wave you couldn’t stop,” said Tad Devine, a longtime Democratic operative who helped run the Vermont senator’s surprise 2016 primary campaign. “That’s the only explanation.”

Asked if Democrats should be second guessing their nomination of Clinton, Devine cited a number of built-in obstacles to Sanders’ candidacy but insisted there was “no second guessing” to those results.

“I do think he was a candidate very much in sync with the mood of the country and that would have been reflected if he would have been the nominee,” Devine said of Sanders.

Of the Democrats interviewed, all expressed a degree of shock with the Election Day results they were watching on television. Several reported receiving panicked text messages and email from friends, family and colleagues. They concurred there’d be plenty of soul searching for their party in the days, weeks and even months ahead as they brace for life in the political minority, and with Trump seemingly headed to Washington with a “drain the swamp” mandate.

The party that was hoping to be led by another Clinton is going to have to spend time studying “why they lost where they lost,” said Emily Pierce, a former Obama Justice Department spokeswoman.

She cited exit polling that showed union households breaking evenly between the two parties, a harsh reality for Democrats long affiliated with organized labor. “That’s because Trump spoke to them and the trade message was more powerful than I think Democrats realized,” she said.

Rodell Mollineau, a former senior aide to Sen. Harry Reid, insisted in an interview that he wasn’t giving up hope yet on a comeback Clinton win. “I’m not bed wetting,” he told POLITICO, noting he had been getting panicked messages from friends asking him to “tell me it’s going to be OK.”

As for what did the Democrats in, Mollineua argued, “That’s going to be a question for tomorrow.”

But he also conceded, “This party needs to do a better job reaching out to white working class.”

Pete D’Alessandro, Sanders’ 2016 Iowa campaign director, said he entered Election Day expecting a much different outcome from the one he was absorbing after a day working to get out the Democratic vote around Waterloo, Iowa.

“I thought it wouldn’t be a blowout by any stretch of the imagination, but I didn’t think they’d be fighting so hard,” he said.

While D’Alessandro insisted Clinton had the better policies for working class Americans, he admitted it was Trump who may have closed the deal. “Obviously there was a disconnect somewhere,” he said.

“For over 20 years I’ve been warning about what was happening to family income and income disparity,” Obey added. “It’s ironic that the Republican who stood in the way of virtually every effort to do something on the issue now are the beneficiary of it. I guess it shows if there’s enough obstruction for long enough that you can get by with murder, or something close to it.”

Many Democrats insisted Clinton wasn’t to blame for the loss.

Former Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, for example, said the bulk of the fault fell on the head of the FBI. “I think the unprecedented Comey announcement of a new Clinton inquiry just nine days before the presidential election has had a significant impact on the vote,” he said.

Obey too insisted Clinton and the Democrats weren’t the only ones who got the 2016 presidential race wrong. “All of the pollsters got it wrong,” he said.

And as much as Obey supported Clinton, he said the former first lady, senator and secretary of State had an uphill climb to be the country’s first female president because of the negative campaigning she’s long faced.

“They have pounded her for 30 years,” he said. “She has been a handicapped messenger. Nobody can take the kind of pounding for 30 years without it having a serious impact.”