“The Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton pretty much communicated what was bad about Trump<br />but failed to communicate what was great about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party,” said Sally Boynton Brown, the executive director of the Democratic Party in Idaho.<br />“That’s an operational failure rather than a message failure or a candidate failure,” said Jaime Harrison,<br />the chairman of South Carolina’s Democratic Party and another contender to lead the D. N.C.<br />In one of many recent forums for the politicians vying to lead the Democratic National Committee — and, ideally, the party — out of the wilderness<br />and into better times, the candidates were asked to distill the importance of fighting Donald Trump to 10 words or less.<br />Another of the D. N.C.<br />candidates, Raymond Buckley, the chairman of the Democratic Party in New Hampshire, acknowledged to me, “Sometimes we try to impress ourselves too much by talking about issues<br />that are overly complex when the populace really wants you to boil it down to a much more simplistic message.”<br />What might that message be?<br />“What voters heard from Clinton,” he told me, “was not ‘I feel your pain’ but ‘Vote for me because he’s crazy,’ and that’s not a message.”<br />By the time of the Houston event, the field of contenders for the D. N.C.<br />chairmanship was up to 10.<br />Voters in 2016 made clear their hunger for it, and then the top three Democrats in the House — Nancy Pelosi, 76, Steny Hoyer, 77,<br />and James Clyburn, 76 — stayed put in their positions.
