4/5/2017, "Democrats are still ignoring the people who could have helped them defeat Trump, Ohio Party leaders say," Washington Post, William Wan, Youngstown, Ohio
“It doesn’t matter how much we scream and holler about jobs and the economy at the local level. Our national leaders still don’t get it,” said David Betras, the [Mahoning] county's party chair....
“I know I am just a chairman but I am a chairman in the trenches,” Betras wrote in the three-page memo, begging [Mrs.] Clinton to focus on jobs....
“While Trump is talking about trade and jobs, they’re still obsessing about which bathrooms people should be allowed to go into.”...
Worst of all, they said, the party hadn't learned from what they saw as the biggest message from November's election: Democrats have fallen completely out of touch with America's blue-collar voters...."After everything that’s happened, if we as a party still aren’t speaking to them, then we are never getting them back.”...
During the [2016] primaries, he [Mahoning County Democrat Chair Betras] learned that 18 of his own Democratic precinct captains had crossed party lines to vote for Trump. Some areas had to print extra Republican primary ballots just to keep up with the demand.
“That’s when I knew something was wrong,” he said....
[On May 12, 2016 Betras sent a] memo to Clinton’s top campaign adviser in Ohio and other senior party officials. But Betras never heard back....
He warned [Mrs.] Clinton [in the memo] that she had lost all credibility with working-class voters by waffling on trade and offering tepid solutions....That geographic disconnect has translated into policies that alienate the heartland, [Ohio Democrat Rep. Marcy] Kaptur said, overlooking, for example, the devastation of globalized free trade on places such as Ohio.
“They paid lip service to it, but the underlying attitude was, ‘You’re not modern enough, not educated enough, not willing to adjust,’ ” Kaptur said....
The party’s national leaders have focused on decrying Trump, opposing his Supreme Court pick and tying his administration to Russia. That approach — trying to defeat Trump solely by attacking him and his policies — already has failed once, many at the dinner said....
Trump not only flipped the state [of Ohio] but also won by the largest margin of any presidential candidate since 1988."...
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Added: Why did our "allies" at G7 nix the idea of making all trade "free" and drop all tariffs? But great if Merkel is new leader of "free world," then 35,000 US troops in Germany at cost of billions yearly can come home! And Germany rather than US can send troops all over the world to fight "terrorism!"-Justin Raimondo, AntiWar
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