Grass roots Democrats not interested in DNC's Russian collusion fantasies

David Thorton:

Voters are tuning out Democrat claims of Trump-Russia collusion.

Democrats running for office in the country’s center have a message for their party’s leadership. “You’re not helping with all the Russia talk” is what Democrats in battleground states are telling the Democratic National Committee.

“The DNC is doing a good job of winning New York and California,” David Betras, a county Democratic county party chair in Ohio, told Buzzfeed. “I’m not saying it’s not important — of course it’s important — but do they honestly think that people that were just laid off another shift at the car plant in my home county give a shit about Russia when they don’t have a frickin’ job?”

“I haven’t seen a single piece of data that says voters want Democrats to relitigate 2016,” another strategist said. “The only ones who want to do this are Democratic activists who are already voting Democratic.”

Farmers and workers who voted for Donald Trump are unlikely to be lured back to the Democrats by Russia collusion conspiracy theories, but a core problem is that Democrats do not seem to have found an issue that does resonate with swing voters. The post-Parkland push for gun control and opposition to the tax reform bill seem to have fallen flat. President Trump’s plans for tariffs may provide an opening for the Democratic opposition, but traditional liberal protectionism makes challenging the president on this issue more difficult.
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In spite of the success of moderate Democrats, the DNC doubled down on the Russia strategy last week with a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results of the 2016 election. A Democrat strategist in the Midwest told Buzzfeed that the suit was “politically unhelpful.” A spokesman for Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), whose seat is considered a tossup, called the lawsuit “a silly distraction.”

Democrats are committing the same error that Republicans made in the Obama era. In concentrating their efforts in attacks on the president, Democrats are making an assumption that everyone dislikes Donald Trump as much as they do. Similarly blistering attacks on Barack Obama motivated the Republican base, but failed to rally enough support to prevent his reelection.
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This also explains one reason why Trump was elected to being with.  He pushed an agenda to put people back to work which Democrats largely ignored the people who had been displaced by their policies.