a bitter, painful, incredibly damaging wake up call.

to start, I think it's fair to say all of us are reacting with some combination of horror, disgust, dread, fear, anger, depression, despair, and grief. We're all on the same side here, so we should keep that in mind at all times.

though there are a dozen explanations for that apply to this cycle (Comey, misogyny, vote suppression), there are a few lessons we can learn from this in order to make ourselves a stronger party and carry the day forward:

1) We've been bleeding votes in the less-populated areas of the Midwest especially, but also in the south and mid-atlantic areas. This didn't start in 2016. It first happened to us in 2010, and then again in 2014. Our vote totals were way down in those areas from historical levels. But, the truth of the matter is that we do have a working class white voter problem. It's time we stopped dismissing them as merely a perpetually 60-40 vote against us group. They went 70-30 or even 80-20 in some places, and that's what tipped the electoral college. If they had voted 60-40 against us this election we would have won. We need to make our case to this group to keep the bad guys' margins down. We've assumed in the "demographics is destiny" mindset that we can run up the score with Latinos, African-Americans and others while counting on white voters to vote as individuals or as a complex grouping based on class, geography etc. In 2016, white people bought into identity politics, and that's a major problem for us since they still constitute around 70% of the vote.

2) Our natural base gets complacent, and so does the party. This was in many ways a repeat of the 2000 electoral cycle. Even though the threat of the Republican winning was much greater--and with much more dire consequences--in the two previous cycles, we not only lost votes to the Republicans, we also failed to turn out our base in the same numbers. Part of this is failing to recognize that, after one party has held the white house for two terms, voters are ready for something new. Doesn't matter how good the party has done, voters want a change. Call it short memory, or boredom, or whatever. But, they need something different. And some voters are going to want change more than others, because they've felt removed from whatever accomplishments happened over those 8 years. In 2000 and 2016 we saw the same thing--the primary deck being cleared for a technocratic, caretaker candidate who was carrying the baggage from previous policy fights and exposure to the DC cesspool.

What do we need to do? Easy and difficult question to answer. The easy answer is that we need to win, and then win some more, and then keep on winning. The hard part is how to do that--how do we expand our party's appeal without offending members of our coalition.

Certainly, Trump and Privatizer Ryan will give us plenty of ammo, from their attacks on Medicare to the all too predictable cases of corruption and abuse of power that will emerge from his shitshow of an administration. Certainly, we can at a minimum repay the Republicans for what they did to us in 2009-2010.

But, we also need to have a long game, a strategic game, that we execute day in, day out, without regards for what Trump tweeted or threatened to do. We need to try to win every vote possible in every congressional district, not just write off the people outside of our urban strongholds as a bunch of dumb racists beyond redemption.

Fundraising won't save us. Big data operations won't save us. A superior ground game won't save us. We learned that in 2016.