The Clinton campaign was murdered in rural America by poor voter data. Most Democrats use the votebuilder/VAN program to generate voter lists. During this election cycle our county party, in rural Texas, noticed the following.
As of yesterday VAN showed ZERO Spanish speakers in the county. We had bilingual volunteers that wished to phone bank with Spanish speakers and could not output a list for them. There are more than zero Spanish speakers in our county.
Until early September the total number of voters VAN listed as registered in our county matched the total from the 2012 presidential election. It seems that Wendy Davis campaigned in 2014 with data that was at least two years out of date. I can only hope that we somehow did something wrong because, if true, Davis never had a chance.
As of yesterday the VAN showed the total number of registered voters in our county (after the September update) as 100,000. In actuality there were 106,000. In a fit of desperation we tried to upload a list provided by the county elections board but found ourselves unable to do so. However, we were able to confirm that a substantial number possessed new state voter registration numbers that were not in the system. This is disturbing for two reasons. First it indicates that the VAN was never updated to reflect the current number of registered voters at the close of voter registration. Secondly the shortfall was about 6% of the electorate, a substantial number.
Approximately 80% of phone numbers provided by the VAN for call banking were wrong or disconnected. This was true even when we set the VAN to give us numbers that were current within the last two years.
The VAN turned out to be unable to tell the difference between a low turnout but likely Democratic voter and a voter that had moved. We had blockwalks where almost literally every door we knocked on was the wrong person. This improved somewhat after the September update as we could removed suspensed voters (county elections sent them a card, which bounced back).
The Trump campaign had a detailed list of unregistered voters that were likely Trump supporters from their data provider, L2 Political. As of yesterday the unregistered voters tab on the VAN showed zero people.
The Trump campaign ran targeted digital ads in our county. There was nothing comparable on the Clinton side. While not directly related to the VAN, I need to emphasize that the lack of a Democratic digital presence was a major contributing factor to the blowout we suffered. The Republican party sold their soul to the Alt-Right for good digital, we got completely melted.
To sum it up. We found that we could not target Spanish speaking voters. Could not efficiently phone bank, could not engage in useful blockwalking and faced an opponent capable of targeted voter registration efforts without a similar capability on our side.
Would we have won with these capabilities? Well I doubt we would have won the county but perhaps we could have avoided a blowout that swamped out what was done in urban areas.