Cleaning up my desktop and found a few notes on the election...
Before the elction, Tamara Keith with NPR (she's been traveling with the Clinton campaign this election season) noted that months ago Hillary made the decision to run as a 3rd term of Obama in order to draw in the black vote. Some of her team warned her that voters want change after two terms. Only H.W. Bush had won a third term in 1988.
They suggested that she hit traditional Democratic themes/constituencies, appealing to advocates of pro-choice, teachers and labor unions. It was up to her to make the call and she made it. She did not visit Wisconsin after the Dem convention. She did not visit Michigan enough.
Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (MI) warned the DNC that she was getting a bad feeling talking to her constituents and that they needed to schedule in more visits. They didn't. They decided to concentrate on Florida, VA, PA and rely on MI and WI to vote Dem as they always had. All campaigns have limited resources and, like an army, must decide where to depoy those resources. Working class whites felt abandoned. Hillary didn't get enough of the black vote in the urban centers to offset the defection by working whites to Trump. Many political strategists thought Trump's "rust belt strategy" was nonsense, doomed to fail. They were wrong. Trump's team was right.
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Financing
As of early January, Clinton's lead in the national vote count is close to 3 million. However, we don't elect a President by popular vote. Through the mechanism of the Electoral College, the states elect a President.
Clinton's lead, or margin, comes down to 5 counties. Take away the margin, not the vote count, but the vote margin in four counties in New York City and one county in Los Angeles and Clinton would have lost by 1/2 million votes.
Obama conducted a broad campaign in all 50 states. It took a lot of money and human energy, both Obama's and the thousands of volunteers who campaigned for him. In the 2008 campaign, Obama spent $745 million. In 2012, his campaign spent $875 million. In 2016, Clinton spent $1.4 billion and still neglected several rust belt states that Obama canvassed.
