That said, I agree with your general message about turnout.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
That is important, but it's turnout in states that have swing counties. Turnout in California is less important.
> Whether due to disappointment that Bernie Sanders wasn't nominated, or belief that voting wasn't important since Trump wasn't projected to win, or "OMG Russian hacker!!" conspiracy theories, etc. The bottom line is that Democratic turnout has dropped 15% over the past couple of cycles.
Your explanation is curiously devoid of what I see many people here omit: the repeal of the VRA. We saw changes to requirements and last minute eligability changes in many states that would have been illegal and challengable under the VRA.
While I certainly think there is a contingent of "bernie or bust" people, the turnout in blue states was NOT substantially depressed and HRC didn't lose votes. The vote totals were similar to their 2012 counterparts (in some cases higher) in blue states with absentee/mail voting making a huge appearance. If the BoB people were a significant factor for the blue vote we would ahve seen it reflected.
It's a weird myth that blue turnout was down in blue states. When I look at the vote counts post January, I just don't see it.
What we do see is a conspicuous and large gap of blue votes in red states, and when you overlay that with voter law changes enabled by the VRA the correspondence is quite high.
It's really tempting to lean on the "well they just didn't vote" argument, because it's very pat and not contentious. We should be suspicious of that though.
Instead we get stuck in the mud with tangible topics that affect regular lives like universal health care and free public higher education. Good things, sure, but not the solution to our deeper problems.
Trump received almost the exact same number of popular votes as Romney in '12, and McCain in '08. The difference is that 10 million Obama voters stayed home for Hillary:
http://i.imgur.com/AT0kqVz.jpg
Whether due to disappointment that Bernie Sanders wasn't nominated, or belief that voting wasn't important since Trump wasn't projected to win, or "OMG Russian hacker!!" conspiracy theories, etc. The bottom line is that Democratic turnout has dropped 15% over the past couple of cycles.
Like the shore in low tide, "swing" locations shift and move out when this happens. I hear advice that future nominees should just ignore blue states and focus entirely on swing locations. That's exactly what the Clinton campaign did! It's a recipe for failure in the modern day. Because once again, turnout is what matters. The rising tide pushed back the "swing" coastline.
This new era of U.S. politics scares me... because I've grown accustomed to Democrats having the luxury of sounding reasonable and centrist, while the Republicans have been forced to pander to extremists in their base. But I think the old conventional wisdom of "run to the edge in the primaries and then pivot back to the center for the general" is breaking down.
In the new rules, candidates have to LIVE out on the edge in order to keep their bases energized and draw turnout. I think we're going to see extreme left candidates facing extreme right candidates (or whatever Trump is), with a goal of get-out-the-vote operations rather than winning over swing moderates. As a swing moderate myself, this sounds disastrous no matter who wins.