What a bad ground game looks like.

[hellofromreddit]

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.