The turning point for the Dems' demise

Hillary Clinton had measured the curtains, picked out the wallpaper and settled on all the fine furnishings for the Oval Office. That's how certain she, the mainstream media, the pollsteristas and the Democratic Party were that the Clintons would triumphantly return to their former residence on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Drunk with confidence in their looming victory, Team Hillary, boldly decided to pull out of Michigan and Wisconsin in the waning weeks of the campaign so they could "run-up" the score in other states.

But that's not what happened. Not at all.

How could it be?! Not only did the pollsters promise a rounding victory, so did the demographers – those eggheads who callously reduce us all to skin color, gender, age, national origin, religion and sexual orientation. In other words, our identifiable characteristics.

These identity profilers had been touting, ever since Barack Obama was first elected, that the Democratic Party had forever secured an unassailable coalition of Hispanics, African-Americans, Muslim-Americans, LGBTQs, feminists and young progressives, producing an electoral map which would deliver the presidency to Democrats for generations to come. The rich tapestry of diversity woven together by Dems, they predicted, would only continue to grow as its core constituency reproduced, immigrated and came out of the closet at an exponential rate while the old, white, Christian conservatives that comprised the core of the Republican Party would whither into irrelevance.

But the head counters – pollsters and demographers alike – missed something extraordinarily important by embracing this idea of identity politics: INTENSITY. In other words, our unidentifiable characteristics.

Intensity is important in elections. People who have intense feelings about candidates vote. People who don't, don't.

It's hard for statisticians who see us as mere numbers to understand or measure something as esoteric as intensity of emotion. In Hillary Clinton, you had a candidate who raised the intensity of fear, anger and skepticism among Republican voters to an all-time high. At the same time, the only intense emotion she could muster from Democrats was contagious indifference.

And, indeed, while Clinton was courting voters based on their identity, Trump was appealing to them based on their ideology. Hillary had little success in exciting voters based on their demographics – particularly skin color and youthfulness – but Trump had great success at exciting voters by appealing to their most intense core values.

There was something else at play, though. Something more profound.

The demographers who had precociously predicted an undefeatable rainbow coalition for Democrats forgot about – or at the very least, took for granted – one very important component of past election victories: suburbanites.

Herbert Hoover had nudged that voting bloc into the Democratic column with the Great Depression, and that's where they stayed for the next 85 years, delivering the White House for Dems in 12 out of 21 presidential contests.

While the number crunchers presupposed suburban support, Team Hillary, seemingly eschewed it. Standard populist messaging deployed by every Democratic national ticket for nearly a century was nowhere to be found in the 2016 election. Nothing about protecting Social Security or Medicare to appeal to older suburbanites. Nothing about protecting labor unions to appeal to blue-collar working men. Nothing about public safety and public schools to appeal to soccer moms.

Worse yet, these planks of the party platform were replaced by new priorities that scared the dickens out of suburban voters. A stubborn defense of Obamacare, Marxist schemes to create a backdoor hamburger tax by raising the minimum wage to an unsustainable $15 an hour and amnesty programs for illegal immigrants were extraordinarily off-putting to folks living in sleepy bedroom communities around the country. But the Dems could have held onto enough voters in battleground suburbs to carry the day if it weren't for their incessant assault on law enforcement.

The demonizing of police: How far will it go? Get Jeff Roorda's cop's-eye view of the current climate against law enforcement with "The War on Police: How the Ferguson Effect is Making America Unsafe"

I was intimately involved in the police response in Ferguson, Missouri, and watched one Democratic politician after another embrace the false narrative there and heap undeserved derision on law enforcement. The Dems that were smart enough to recognize that this was a losing strategy were running away from their party leaders like their a--es were on fire but they couldn't run fast enough. And assessing blame on law enforcement just wasn't enough for Team Hillary and other Obamanites. They ultimately settled on the real culprit in Ferguson, Baltimore and other great American cities burned to ash at the hands of rioters: "white privilege."

I don't claim to be much of a political scientist, but I do know this: When you tell people who work 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week just to make ends meet that they are "privileged" – based on nothing more than the color of their skin – and that they deserve less and rioters, looters and arsonists deserve more, you're going to have an electoral revolt. That single phrase, "white privilege," at once flipped the political allegiance of suburbanites while at the same time sending their intensity of emotion against Hillary and anyone with a (D) behind his name soaring.

But it's OK. The DNC has a plan in the wake of the 2016 elections: double-down on their divisive messaging.

And they found the perfect place to start, with the DNC chairmanship. Although largely symbolic, the post has importance in putting a face on the Democratic Party.

At first, there was some talk about awarding the top party job to insurgent Senate candidate Jason Kander. I served with Kander in the Missouri House of Representatives. He is smart, affable and moderate. As Missouri's secretary of state, he was a fiscal hawk slashing fees businesses paid to house their corporations in the Show-Me State and cutting red tape. He is a decorated combat veteran who is unshrinking in his support for a strong military. His parents were in law enforcement, and as an attorney, Jason represented rank-and-file cops. He is an unabashed supporter of the police. But most important, he knows how to compete on tough political turf.

In Missouri, where Hillary Clinton lost by over 18 percent, Kander nearly knocked off an incumbent U.S. senator, losing by less than 3 percent. Kander bested Clinton with urban, rural and suburban voters in Missouri.

So, what was the response to Kander from the power-brokers in the Obama and Sanders wings of the Democratic Party? "No thanks!"

Unbelievable.

Instead, there is a Bernie-Barry tug-of-war unfolding between Rep. Keith Ellison and Obama Cabinet member Tom Perez.

The smart money seems to be on Ellison. By smart, I mean prognosticators who have a good track-record of predicting how out of touch and elitist the coast-centric leadership of the Democratic Party has become. Not that there's much of a difference between Ellison and Perez ideologically. They both seem to believe in all the same bad ideas that sent suburban voters scrambling off the reservation.

Take it from me, Ellison's questionable past ties to the radical hate group, the Nation of Islam, should be enough to disqualify him for the job. After all, with all the noise from the media accusing Donald Trump of being a white nationalist, it is plainly apparent to me that Ellison is much closer to being a black nationalist.

And here's why you should take it from me. I'm one of those suburban Democrats who is disenchanted with the current state of the party. I've been a Democrat my whole life, serving eight years as a Democratic lawmaker until I was termed-out of the Missouri House. There used to be a place for a guy like me in the party – a guy who supports law and order, public education, organized labor and retirement security. But Obama and Clinton have left voters like me behind. And, Keith Ellison leaves no place in the party for a guy like me – the kind of guy that Democrats need to win elections.

So, to the DNC I say it's time to choose: Find your way back to the hearts and minds of voters like me or lose your identity – and keep losing elections.