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What we clearly see in the focus groups is they dont regret what they did.

They are millennials of color who either didnt vote or voted third party. And for Cornell Belcher, the president of Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies, who was the pollster for the Democratic National Committee under then-Chairman Howard Dean and for both of Barack Obamas campaigns for the White House, this makes them the new swing voters the Democratic Party should be trying to win over.

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Belcher came to this conclusion after conducting focus groups, commissioned by the Civic Engagement Fund, in Milwaukee and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in May. The goal was to find out why young voters who previously voted for Obama either sat out the 2016 election or voted for one of the third-party candidates. The resultswere sobering.

They are so outraged at the broken politics that they see on both sides, Belcher told me in the latest episode of Cape Up,that they really think that them protesting their vote makes both parties have to pay attention.

And there is pointed ire at the Democratic Party. One participant was particularly blunt. Youre damn right, I dont have any loyalty to Democrats, a person of color said in a focus group in Fort Lauderdale. If Republicans want to get real about s thats happening in my community I would vote for every one of them. Then maybe Democrats would take us serious too.

[Is demography destiny for Democrats? The short answer is no.]

The Democratic Party had better be paying attention now. When you look at the third-party vote margins in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the missed opportunity jumps off the page.

Theyre not necessarily Democratic voters, Belcher told me, but they are Obama voters. This is an echo of what former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on the podcast immediately after the election. Theres no connection to her. Black folks have not had a connection to her. Theyve not had a real substantive feel for her, Steele said. How could that be when she is the wife of the still-revered former president Bill Clinton and was the secretary of state for the beloved Obama? Steele broke it down. If I have a connection with your friend over here in the corner through you, he said, its not the same as my connection with you.

[Michael Steeles most searing observation was about the Black vote and its relationship with Hillary Clinton.]

Listen to the podcast to hear what Belcher thinks the Democratic Party needs to do to win back the Obama coalition and what he thinks about the intense focus on winning back white working-class voters.

We spend a lot of time talking about blue-collar white voters and Reagan Democrats. Reagan Democrats are dead, said Belcher, who believes effort should be placed on winning back millennials of color and young progressive whites. Bringing that coalition back together would seem to make a lot more sense to me than try to, in fact, bring in voters who have not been voting Democrat for quite some time.

Cape Up is Jonathans weekly podcast talking to key figures behind the news and our culture. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever else you listen to podcasts.

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These Obama voters snubbed Hillary Clinton and 'they don't regret what they did' - Washington Post

Tucker: The Left on Campus Is a 'Snake Eating Its Own Tail'

'Maddow's Dots May Never Connect': Left-Wing Author Blasts Trump-Russia Narrative

Greg Gutfeld said the media's fixation on allegations of Trump-Russia collusion represents a double standard.

"As the media fans the flames of collusion, I ask: what about them?" Gutfeld said.

He pointed to several Democratic scandals which went largely unnoticed by the mainstream press.

Pence Hits Back at Dem Who Accused Him of Health Care 'Evil'

"Hillary's dirty tricks, John Podesta's scams... Benghazi, the IRS," Gutfeld said, listing several incidents.

He said the left colluded with the USSR for decades, and added that the Kremlin was a "far worse" evil in those days.

"The chase is driven by politics and not morality," Gutfeld said of their present-day claims.

"Today's duplicity by hysterics who embraced the Reds decades ago negates their outrage," he said.

Watch more above.

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Link:
Gutfeld on the Media's Double Standards for Hillary Clinton - Fox News Insider

Scott Olson, Getty Images

In recent years, there has been an interesting trend in international relations research: a renewed focus on the role that individual leaders play in foreign policy outcomes. This runs counter to traditional international relations scholarship, which argues that the system imposes powerful structural constraints on individual leader behavior. Over the past decade, however, an increasing number of scholars have focused on the first image, suggesting multiple ways in which individual foreign policy leaders affect their countrys approach to international relations.

Donald Trumps electoral college victory in November has accelerated this research even further. At a minimum, he has sounded different from, say, a garden-variety Republican on a number of fronts. But if Hillary Clinton had won 100,000 more votes in the salient states, would things be all that different? This kind of counterfactual analysis is also a crucial part of political science and foreign policy analysis.

Over the weekend, the New York Posts John Podhoretz argued that neither American politics nor public policy would be all that different if Clinton had won:

The astonishing answer, if you really think it through, is: not all that different when it comes to policy.

Lets face it: With the exception of the Supreme Court appointment and confirmation of Neil M. Gorsuch, Trump has astoundingly little in the accomplishments column especially for a president whose party controls both houses of Congress. . . .

What would the Republicans have done in the Hillary era so far? They would have sought to stymie her, or challenge her. . . .

We would have been awash in a scandal narrative that would not be quite as breathless or bonkers as the Trump White House helps to generate but would have been disturbing and unpleasant.

Moreover, the questions raised about the unprecedented nature of the Trump presidency would have been raised by the dynastic Clinton White House, featuring a candidate who got elected despite her e-mail scandals and the spouse who was only the second president in history to have been impeached.

Read the whole thing. Podhoretz is not Clintons biggest fan, and yet almost everything in his column rings true. The thing is, whats not in the column matters as well.

He is largely correct about what President Hillary Clinton could have accomplished with a Republican Congress. Surely, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would have made his No. 1 goal similar to what it was in 2010: defeating Clinton in 2020. Indeed, in this scenario, there are ways in which the current moment would be more fraught with tension, as Clinton would have had to work hard to get Congress to pass a clean debt-ceiling increase and fund the government. We might still get that with Trump, but the probability would have been higher with Clinton.

And surely Podhoretz is also correct that Congress would have tried to hamstring Clinton with investigation after investigation. Remember this story from October 2016, in which Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, bragged about having two years of investigations prepped for Clinton?

Its a target-rich environment, the Republican said in an interview in Salt Lake Citys suburbs. Even before we get to Day One, weve got two years worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it aint good.

Even in this calendar year, Chaffetz seemed primed to go after Clinton.

So yes, there are a lot of ways in which 2017 wouldnt look all that different with Clinton in the White House. Podhoretz, however, omitted the most obvious areas where Clinton and Trump would differ: the areas of politics and policy where a president exerts the most unconstrained influence.

Focus on the rhetoric first. I seriously doubt that Clinton would publicly characterize the mainstream media as the enemy of the American people or tweet insults directed at critical commentators or request public effusions of praise from her cabinet or just generally act ridiculous in the public eye. To be fair, Podhoretz acknowledges this, noting that Hillary is many things, and many not good things, but she is not a sower of chaos or the subject of infighting so constant that no one can even catch a breath before one weird story is displaced by another. Shes far too boring for that. Still, this is not an insignificant difference.

The more important differences are in the policies where the executive ranch wields the greatest authority. I am pretty sure that a Justice Department under Clinton would not have taken a sledgehammer to Obamas legacy on incarceration, voting rights, and private prisons. A Clinton administration would not engage in the kind of deregulation that, say, Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt would. A Clinton administration would not issue a dumb, self-defeating travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries. A Clinton administration would not solicit bids to build a wall along U.S.-Mexico.

More generally, however, Clinton would be conducting foreign policy rather differently. She would not have withdrawn from either the Paris climate accord or the Trans-Pacific Partnership (I know she opposed the latter during the campaign, but the far more likely option is that she would have sought to negotiate additional side deals akin to how her husband dealt with NAFTA). There would be no underhanded GCC effort to embargo Qatar, because Clinton would never have been so stupid as to have given the Saudis and Emiratis a blank check to do so.

The nation under Clinton would not be contemplating the start of the dumbest trade war in this century. European allies would not be talking about the need to go it alone. Asian allies would not talk about the need to cut the tag with the United States. The likelihood of a competent secretary of state doing his or her job seems much higher than odds of the current one doing anything constructive. There would be no ongoing beclowning of the executive branch. And no one would be worried about the sudden collapse of American soft power, because it wouldnt be collapsing.

If Clinton were president right now, American foreign policy would not have deviated too much from the prior status quo. She would have made America Boring Again. And given how this year has actually gone, I would take that outcome every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

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Would 2017 look the same under President Hillary Clinton? - The Denver Post

Former Vice President Al GoreAl GoreGore: US going through a challenging time Gore: I suspect Hillary Clinton will 'be fine' Gore: Rest of the world knows US is going through a tough stretch MORE said on Monday that he thinks 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary ClintonHillary Rodham ClintonLawyer say Trump Jr. was 'fully prepared' to speak about Russia meeting GOP faces growing demographic nightmare in West Turner marches on in the Sanders revolution MORE will "be fine."

During an interview on NBC's "Today" show, Gore was asked whether he had talked with Clinton since the election, as he understand what it's like to win the popular vote and lose the presidential election.

"Have you spoken to Secretary Clinton since the election, commiseratedat all about that?" he was asked.

Gore said he has spoken to Clinton since the election.

"I suspect she'll be fine," he added.

"But our country, as I said earlier, is going to face some challenging months ahead."

In an interview earlier this month, Gore said the global community knows the U.S. is going through a "tough stretch" under Trump.

The rest of the world, like many of us here in the U.S., are kind of looking at President Trump and I know some people are really still all for him and everything but the majority are trying to make sense of how this presidency is unfolding, Gore told CBS Newss Lee Cowan on CBS Sunday Morning.

Excerpt from:
Gore: I suspect Hillary Clinton will 'be fine' - The Hill

An artist tookHillary Clintons unused election night confetti and turned it into a political statement.

Bunny Burson, a St. Louis-based artist, tracked down and bought the 200 pounds of confetti she thought wouldrain down on the countrys first female president and her supporters,CNN reported.

Burson then built a glass installation box for those shiny pieces of paper to twirl around inside for 24 hours a day. Painted across the front of the box are the words And Still I Rise, which is the title of a famous Maya Angelou poem.

I want women and little girls to just don't feel defeated by this, Burson told CNN. Keep going. Keep fighting.

The above installation is outside the Bruno David Gallery in St. Louis, but Burson wants to create smaller globes and sell them at Planned Parenthood centers, according to CNN.

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LOOK: Hillary Clinton's unused election night confetti turned into art - Palm Beach Post