Clinton did virtually nothing to court white voters in the Rust Belt

While the Republican candidate aggressively courted white workers in the Rust Belt, Clinton neglected to make a single visit to Wisconsin during the general-election campaign; in the race’s closing weeks, her campaign aired more advertisements in the city of Omaha than in Michigan and Wisconsin combined.

While Obama tailored much of his messaging in 2012 to the concerns of white workers in the Midwest — painting Mitt Romney as a callous plutocrat, championing his party’s support of the auto bailout — Clinton focused her paid media on Trump’s vulgarity and lack of expertise, rather than on his history of exploiting contractors and conning consumers.

Beyond messaging and strategy, Clinton brought countless other liabilities to the 2016 race that Obama never had to overcome: her relative lack of oratorical prowess, an active FBI investigation into her handling of classified information, her status as a longtime member of an unpopular political Establishment, a history of taking exorbitant sums of money to give closed-door speeches to Wall Street banks, and, of course, her gender.

The salience of that last variable is difficult to assess because Clinton was the first and only female major-party nominee in the history of our republic … but that fact suggests we should err on the side of assuming it was quite salient, indeed.