 Sen. Bernie Sanders addresses the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 25. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post) By Jim Tankersley Aroostook County occupies the northernmost tip of Maine. It is vast and rural, and less than one-fifth of its adults graduated from college. It is hundreds of miles removed from the industrial Midwest, and yet a good place to start probing the question of how Democrats could win back the "Blue Wall" states that crumbled behind Hillary Clinton and cost her the presidency. On Election Day, Aroostook County voted for Donald Trump over Clinton by 17 percentage points, helping to deliver the Republican nominee an electoral vote from the state's 2nd Congressional District. It also, by a seven-point margin, voted to raise Maine's minimum wage to $12 an hour. Trump only out-polled the minimum wage increase by 400 votes. From that data point, and dozens of others mined from the results of the Nov. 8 vote, it's tempting to conclude that economic populism alone could lead Democrats out of political wilderness and back to the White House in 2020. This is the argument of a number of Democratic strategists and policymakers, including Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and Sen. Bernie Sanders. "You cannot take this election as anything but a mandate for bold economic changes to rewrite the rules of the economy," Greenberg wrote in an analysis of post-election polling. Sanders, meanwhile, has told GQ: "You need to stand for something! It's not good enough to say, 'Well, I'm not a racist, I'm not a sexist, I'm not a xenophobe, I'm not a homophobe, you gotta vote for me.'" | 
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