Michigan highlights the campaign problems that repeated all over the Midwest: an inability to react to changing facts on the ground.

“Trump won the state despite getting 30,000 fewer votes than George W. Bush did when he lost it in 2004.” Now re-read that sentence.

“(The national campaign plan) was very surgical and corporate. They had their model, this is how they’re going to do it. Their thing was, ‘We don’t have to leave [literature] at the doors, everyone knows who Hillary Clinton is,’” said one person involved in the Michigan campaign. “But in terms of activists, it seems different, it’s maybe they don’t care about us.”

Some pieces of the article sound like petty he-said/she-saids, with unverifiable anecdotes. However, the fact that TV ads in Michigan were nearly nonexistent does indicate support was taken for granted.

“Brooklyn’s theory from the start was that 2016 was going to be a purely base turnout election. Efforts were focused on voter registration and then, in the final weeks, turning out voters identified as Clinton’s, without confirmation that they were.”

Nonetheless, the official reasoning for the Dems’ loss is that key states’ numbers went south during the week leading up to the election, after FBI Dir James Comey used his position to very publicly raise suspicion about Hillary’s emails and integrity.

In either case, this chapter can serve as a lesson for what campaigns CAN control–the dangers of sole reliance on centrality and bureaucracy. The fact that liberals (who by definition more heavily favor federal control over the states)  suffered by this fallacy is perhaps poetic justice.