How Democrats can Win Elections

"The Secret Weapon Democrats Don’t Know How to Use"  - Michael Kruse Politico

No Democrat in the House of Representatives did what Cheri Bustos did last November. She wasn’t the sole member of her party to win in a congressional district Donald Trump also took—there were 11 others—but she was the only one to post a 20-point landslide, and she did it in agricultural, industrial, blue-collar northwestern Illinois. In the kind of place where Hillary Clinton lost big last fall and where Democrats have been losing in droves for the last decade, Bustos has done just the opposite.  
Here are some tips:

• unslick, face-to-face politicking.
• She shows up.
• She shakes hands.
• She asks questions—a lot of questions.
• “Don’t talk down to people—you listen,” she stressed.
• When she does talk, she talks as much as she can about jobs and wages and the economy
• as little as she can about guns and abortion and other socially divisive issues
• buck partisanship. She’s a pro-choice Catholic and an advocate for limited gun control, but she has supported the Keystone pipeline and called for improvements to Barack Obama’s “imperfect” Affordable Care Act.

• Meet with people: in manufacturing "Cheri on Shift”, stationed herself in a grocery store produce section to introduce herself to customers at a Hy-Vee in Canton (“Supermarket Saturdays”)
• have thick skin after you’re elected, because you’re going to have members of your caucus who are upset with you that you’re not voting straight party line,​

A democrat in Illinois is very different than a democrat in San Francisco.  We have to live with it.  We have to have a very big tent, and not have "purity tests"... If we want to win back the house. 

Read it here:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/12/cheri-bustos-trump-territory-democrats-215126