In an appearance on CNN, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid suggested that FBI Director James Comey played an integral role in the election of Donald Trump, saying his actions handed the Republican nominee the election. Reid says the FBI and Comey had information on Donald Trump, and refused to release it to the public.
"It's obvious he (Comey) was a partisan in all this," Reid said in the interview with CNN's Manu Raju. "There's information out there. He had it, I'm confident. And he ignored it."
Yet with all the focus on Comey or the DNC email hacks and the role Russia may or may not have played in it, some leaders within the Democratic Party are completely missing the point.
The voters who decided this election were not part of the "alt right." The voters who decided this election were not white nationalists. And there is little evidence that the voters who ultimately swayed this election for Donald Trump were deceived or influenced by "fake news" or Russian propaganda.
READ MORE: Independent Voters Flipped The Entire Presidential Election to Trump
The voters who flipped Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were likely more worried about blue-collar jobs and their health care premiums than they were about Hillary Clinton's email scandal. They were more angry about a political establishment that ignores and doesn't understand them than they were about any of the fake news stories that emerged online.
The voters who decided this election were independent voters who are fed up with the status quo and are often disenfranchised by the two biggest political corporations in the country, the Republican and Democratic parties. These voters include members of the working class who are marginalized by the current system.
Vice President Joe Biden gets this:
“We lost because of awful lot of hard-working Americans who live in areas where we did not pay much attention to,” he said at a reception celebrating a Hindu festival. “Barack Obama won these people. They are not racist. They did not vote for the Democrats this time.” - Vice President Joe Biden
He later said the Democratic Party needs to pay more attention to working class whites.
But it is not just working class whites. There is also the growing number of Americans (nearly half now) who are tired of the current duopolist system, where two private political corporations control the political process at pretty much every institutional level -- whether we are talking primary elections that decide over 90% of all elections in the U.S. to the two-sided narrative in the media.
If neither party learns from the 2016 election, 2018 and 202o will likely be as wild. Independent voters cannot be ignored. They cannot be marginalized, because these are voters who want change, and just like they did in 2008, 2010, and 2016, they will keep voting for that change until it actually happens.