Question submitted by hellofromreddit

What a bad ground game looks like.

NYT made a pair of maps: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/16/us/politics/the-two-americas-of-2016.html

AlexE made gradient versions: http://www.vividmaps.com/2016/12/trumpland-and-clinton-archipelago.html

The thing that really matters from those maps is that fact that areas favoring Trump are physically connected, but areas favoring Clinton aren't. (incidentally, this extreme concentration of votes in populous metropolitan areas is why we have the big popular vote margin for Clinton, but no EC win) Campaigns rely heavily on "building out" by canvasing, word of mouth, signs, and stickers from existing areas of support to new areas. When people see or hear about the candidate then they feel enough of a connection to actually look into it. OTOH, if you hear about some candidate popular somewhere else, and don't see it in-person, and possibly already vaguely dislike that candidate for whatever reason, it's pretty easy to just assume that those other people are simply a bunch of idiots. All those "I don't see any bumper stickers," and "No enthusiasm," stories did actually matter. Even the rally size stories mattered. All of it was a reflection of the problem. It has a lot to do with the "momentum" stuff the campaign told us didn't matter. It did, but acknowledging that meant admitting their poor ground game, which would add momentum in the wrong direction.

Aside from the coasts, parts of the Southwest, and parts of the Southeast, Clinton didn't achieve much build out.

Probably a side-effect of equivocating people who almost agree with us to people who hate us. Clinton herself got way too close to doing that with her "basket of deplorables comment," but aside from that she stayed away. However, her surrogates, campaign staff, and plenty of other democrats hammered that message home loudly every day, severely undermining her.

Need to fix that next time.

I can't find similar maps for party votes in general, but I'd be pretty surprised if they were substantially different. It would go a long way towards explaining why we weren't able to root out the worst congress in living memory.

Obama is dealing with the Russia thing appropriately

All primary long: "The DNC is a private organization!" Usually stated in the context of defending the DNC's right to be horribly biased against Sanders. Well, Russia messing with a private organization is no cause for war, overturning the election, or much anything else as far as POTUS is concerned.

The fringe left solution

Don't treat those voters like trash. Hear what they have to say, build on it where there's common ground, respectfully explain things where there isn't common ground. For the ones that yell, just ignore that until they get tired of yelling.

All the cutesy crap like the ponies meme or the berniebros smear is the stuff of vindictive childhood bullies and belongs in the pigpen with the pigs we oppose.

Problem solved.

How we regarded election fraud and systemic bias in the primary

Get a load of these threads' comments:

27 Percent of New York’s Registered Voters Won’t Be Able to Vote in the State’s Primary

We need a wambulance

UPDATE ON EMERGENCY LAWSUIT FILED IN NY OVER VOTER PURGE

My Letter to Nate Silver on the Huge Exit Poll Discrepancies We’re Seeing in the Dem Primaries

Irregularities overshadow U.S. presidential vote in New York City

Sanders bumped off D.C. ballot

Bernie is demanding a recanvass in Kentucky over ONE delegate ...

It's all fun 'n games until....

You can't win elections if you don't grow up and stop hating voters

Yeah, yeah, Trump's just terrible. But this is a democracy and if the plan in the future is to grow the party enough to beat him and the party that produced him, then we'll have to win voters from his pool. Hating them does exactly the opposite, putting victory further out of reach.

The hatred for them has gotten way out of hand. Hillary's campaign really ginned that up, and it poisoned a lot of minds. I remember when the primary was still going, one of team Hillary's favorite insults was to accuse Bernie supporters of being the same as Trump supporters. And that's it--no attempt to explain why, just the assumption that it was self-evident that being compared to a Trump voter was the worst thing ever.

I work with and know tons of Trump voters, and while I think they're very wrong, I also know them well enough to know that they're not the cartoon monsters they're made out to be around here. They're actually pretty normal, and they'll respond to all the normal stuff the way normal people do. If you listen to what they complain about (by and large economic distress, bullshit like domestic spying, boondoggle military spending, and unresponsive government) and address it, they'll come over. If you mindlessly despise them, they'll stay beyond reach.

And I want to remind you of one of the most dishonest slurs thrown at Hillary: Breitbart and others tried to paint Hillary as racist because of her association with Senator Robert Byrd. In his youth, Byrd was as racist as they come--even started up a KKK chapter. But he got away from it and actually became one of the strongest civil rights advocates we've ever had by the time Hillary knew him. So, as his example shows, even among the worst people, there are still good ones. It takes a dishonest outfit like Breitbart to ignore that.

So, get over the campaign season brainwashing about deplorables and start treating people like people again if you intend to win anything more than pity.

Same goes for young voters who got turned off by the Hillary campaign or preferred to vote third-party. Painting them as lazy, stupid, and selfish guarantees that they'll ignore whatever else you might have to say. In the mean time, the republicans are endlessly talking up their potential as entrepreneurs and future leaders. Care to guess who's going to carry more sway with that group if nothing changes?

My battery is dead.

My battery's been marginal for months now, but other batteries are clearly worse.

And these jumper cables aren't even a real part of my car!

My electrons are obviously just disloyal.

Blaming external problems is just asserting weakness

Re: the numerous blame threads

I agree that lots of bad things happened that hurt Clinton and were beyond her control. But you can't fix any of that by sheer force of complaining, and focusing on it quickly turns into 16 years of crying about little old Nader. How do you think that hostility towards rinky-dink bit players fares in the face of being utterly feckless against a party that produced: monstrous debt, mass incarceration, Bush, the Iraq debacle, a policy of torture, mass financial industry corruption, legendary congressional inaction, government shutdowns, and now TV's Trump?

I know it's hard work, and people just love to distract themselves by blaming the hostile universe around us, but the democrats desperately have to focus on fixing the internal failures consuming them since those are something they do actually have control over.