Coco, I write everything here from the perspective of a Sanders activists who then worked hard for Hillary against Trump after the convention-something a LOT more of us did than generally get credit for-and who was just as devastated by the outcome as everyone who supported your candidate that year from the outset, and as a person who hates the Electoral College as much as anybody.

Hillary gets the anger she gets because, rather than accepting that it wasn’t any one person’s fault more than anybody else, she STILL blames Bernie for what happened in 2016, she still insists that the result was caused by Bernie not getting out of the race after Super Tuesday-even though there is no evidence that that would have made any difference-and because, today, rather than moving on from 2016, her main contribution to Democratic discourse is not to work for any semblance of unity and common ground, but to continue to focus almost exclusively on attacking Bernie, and on encouraging the myth that the only reason anybody voted for him rather than her in the ’16 primaries was fear and hatred of the idea of a woman president.

Why can’t she accept the fact that the Sanders showing wasn’t driven by sexism, that it happened because a large number of primary voters-including a majority of women under 40 in a number of states-felt her foreign policy was too militaristic at a time when the use of U.S. military force isn’t playing a positive role anywhere in the world, and because a lot of primary voters didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of ANY presidential candidate getting big donations from corporations?

I’ve been through several losing presidential campaigns. I know it sucks when it doesn’t go your way. But why can’t she see that it’s time to let the past go and be part of working for the future?

Can you see any possible good coming from her refusal to move on, from her refusal to play a positive, unifying role in the discussion, from her unwillingness to accept that the result was caused, in any way at all, by her campaign’s poor strategic choices.

I don’t like it that the EC makes the difference it makes and have supported abolishing the EC for decades now. It SHOULDN’T matter. But until we abolish it, it does. And while we still have the EC-I absolutely agree with you that it should be a thing of the past-we need to campaign in ways that are mindful of it. One thing that means is that whoever we nominate needs to spend more time in states that are either safe or leaning Democratic and to treat the voters in those states as though the party owes them something. That’s why the failure to campaign in Wisconsin or Michigan, and having only ONE campaign stop in Pennsylvania, while spending too much time in states we weren’t ever likely to carry, like Georgia or Arizona, matters. Any campaign while the EC continues to exist has to put the states the ticket is likely to carry or has a strong chance of carrying ahead of campaigning in states the ticket most likely won’t carry. Trump carried Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and therefore scraped into the presidency, because the Clinton-Kaine ticket looked like it didn’t care about the Democratic base, that it only carried about the useless objective of trying to flip GOP-leaning swing states. Because the ticket did that, turnout among the Democratic base plummeted and that collapse in turnout is why we had the result we had.

This year, whoever we nominate, Dems need to realize that we can only win by firing up the base and building turnout-that means engaging social justice-a set of issues on which Sanders and Clinton activists never disagreed with and on which the candidates never disagreed-with economic justice. We need to have a fall campaign message that connects with people who were left out in the cold by this allegedly “strong” economy. And we need a candidate who will resonate with the people in the streets as well as the people in the suites. I hope we can find that.