Jennifer Rubin has four suggestions for those not enamored with the next president:

While unnerved by the election of a demagogic populist and queasy about its implications for democratic institutions, public discourse and America’s place in the world, no one in the few dozen we have spoken with at length is throwing up his or her hands, heading for the backwoods or declaring that the United States is finished. From all of these voices some major themes emerged:
1. Right and left must end their sworn allegiance to economic determinism. Democrats insisted that economic progress would induce workers to vote for a third Obama term. Both Democrats and Republicans thought that employed, better-educated Americans outside the Rust Belt would abandon Donald Trump in droves; they didn’t. Liberals, conservatives and especially libertarians missed a truism: People are not always rational and are not purely economic beings. They look for a sense of community, status, recognition and a host of intangible rewards. A few smart voices, such as the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks, have recognized that “an acute crisis has been rolling through working-class America.” He explains:

There is indeed a gap in this country, and it has now led to a political revolution, a significant realignment in American politics. But the relevant gap wasn’t income. It was dignity. … What precisely did Mr. Trump offer these voters? Snake oil, say critics. Most economists predicted that policies built on Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration and antitrade rhetoric would hardly help unemployed, working-class people in places like Kentucky and West Virginia. But where these experts heard incoherent specifics, many voters heard a consistent deeper theme: A promise to work hard at restoring left-behind Americans’ dignity by bringing back jobs and striking back at the cultural elites who disdain them.

We can reject Trump’s message of xenophobia, sexism and racism and the urge from populists to infantilize white, working-class voters as helpless victims. We are left, however, with an acute need to cultivate a sense of belonging — to nation, community and shared values.

2. Government likely won’t get better, so look elsewhere. Trump might be crazy like a fox — or he might be crazy and completely incapable of governance. Nevertheless, he presents us with the opportunity not only to rebalance power between the executive and legislative branches and between the federal and state governments, but between the public and private sector. The latter includes philanthropy, civil society and business. We all have looked too frequently to the government for fixes and mandates; now is the time to look to voluntary efforts, persuasion and advocacy aimed directly at business. (One silver lining to Trump’s election: An outpouring of donations and volunteer offers to charitable and public advocacy groups.)
Two items caught our attention. First, Ikea announced it “will now offer up to four months paid parental leave to its U.S. workers of all genders, whether they’re salaried or hourly — and irrespective of whether they’re becoming parents via birth, adoption, or fostering. The move, announced on Tuesday, sets IKEA apart from its peers in the U.S. retail sector.” Second, the Human Rights Campaign announced Monday:

The nation’s major companies and law firms are advancing in record numbers vital policies and practices to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) workers around the world, according to the 2017 Corporate Equality Index released. . . . The Corporate Equality Index (CEI), launched in 2002 to assess LGBT-inclusive policies and practices at Fortune 500 companies, also highlights how corporate leaders are increasingly stepping up to play a leading role in opposing anti-equality legislation — from statehouses to the U.S. Capitol. Through their actions, taken as LGBTQ workers and customers have been facing a record number of anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures across the country, business leaders are building on their longstanding commitment to expanding workplace equality for LGBTQ people.
This year, a record-breaking 517 businesses earned the CEI’s top score of 100, up from 407 last year. That’s a single-year increase of more than 25 percent … Leadership demonstrated by these businesses, including speaking out against discriminatory laws like North Carolina’s HB2, reflect more than a decade of work inside these companies to expand LGBT, and particularly transgender, workplace equality.

All this was accomplished without extortion or gifts from the president-elect. Philanthropic groups, think-tank researchers, advocacy groups, labor and other non-government actors can stimulate business leaders’ enlightened self-interest. Certainly there is a role for government and for compulsory rules, but so long as government remains dysfunctional, why not go directly to the source (e.g. all the Fortune 500 companies)? Truth be told, the worse government becomes, the more responsibility the private sector will need to assume for education, R&D and even promoting social cohesion. It’s hard to do business when your city is racked by racial tension, your employees cannot afford to buy their employers’ own products or populist fury is demanding we throw up trade barriers and stem the tide of immigration.

3. We need massive civic education. If we learned anything in the 2016 election, it is that a slick charismatic figure can trash the First Amendment, threaten all sorts of unconstitutional actions, incite violence and appeal to naked prejudice with nary a peep from the majority of voters. In fact, the more disrespectful of our democratic institutions and civil liberties Trump became, the louder they cheered. Part of this can be written off as appalling hypocrisy from “constitutional conservatives” and faith-based leaders, but Trump capitalized on a vast wasteland of civic ignorance.
There is a felt need for civic education not only in the schools but also for adults. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) hit the nail on the head at a foreign-policy forum recently when he reminded the audience that “America was an idea that was about something much bigger than what tribe you come from. … Government is a means to an end. And our government is a smaller issue than the American idea that is that set of things and truth claims that we believe about human dignity that unite us. And, right now, we have not been having that conversation for 50 years.” (As an example, he pointed out that 41 percent of people younger than 35 told pollsters that “the First Amendment is dangerous because you might say things with your freedom of speech that hurt somebody else’s feelings. Actually, that’s the whole point of America. That we can say things that hurt each other’s feelings, because we believe so much in the dignity of the other person that we want to persuade them or be persuaded by them.”)
Perhaps if he does not get the secretary of state gig, Mitt Romney can lead a massive public campaign, organize local Constitution clubs, inspire think tanks and cajole lawyers and courts to teach fellow citizens about America’s foundational values — respect for the rule of law, equality before the law, the right of self-determination and expression, etc.

4. The sane center has to be supported. If the left goes the way of democratic socialists and the right in the direction of European national front parties, we are going to need a coalition from center-left to center-right to support democratic norms and reasoned proposals for education, criminal justice and immigration reform. That can be fostered by supporting problem-solvers in both parties (as No Labels does), joint policy initiatives between think tanks from different ideological perspectives (e.g. the Brookings-AEI report on poverty) and, where possible, bipartisan legislative action (e.g. on combating opioid abuse and human trafficking).

Unless Russians can be found in Michigan, Edward-Isaac Dovere reports on how the Hillary Clinton campaign committed political suicide in Michigan:

Everybody could see Hillary Clinton was cooked in Iowa. So when, a week-and-a-half out, the Service Employees International Union started hearing anxiety out of Michigan, union officials decided to reroute their volunteers, giving a desperate team on the ground around Detroit some hope.

They started prepping meals and organizing hotel rooms.

SEIU — which had wanted to go to Michigan from the beginning, but been ordered not to — dialed Clinton’s top campaign aides to tell them about the new plan. According to several people familiar with the call, Brooklyn was furious.

Turn that bus around, the Clinton team ordered SEIU. Those volunteers needed to stay in Iowa to fool Donald Trump into competing there, not drive to Michigan, where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.

Michigan organizers were shocked. It was the latest case of Brooklyn ignoring on-the-ground intel and pleas for help in a race that they felt slipping away at the end.

“They believed they were more experienced, which they were. They believed they were smarter, which they weren’t,” said Donnie Fowler, who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee during the final months of the campaign. “They believed they had better information, which they didn’t.”

Flip Michigan and leave the rest of the map, and Trump is still president-elect. But to people who worked in that state and others, how Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes and lost by 100,000 in states that could have made her president has everything to do with what happened in Michigan. Trump won the state despite getting 30,000 fewer votes than George W. Bush did when he lost it in 2004.

Politico spoke to a dozen officials working on or with Clinton’s Michigan campaign, and more than a dozen scattered among other battleground states, her Brooklyn headquarters and in Washington who describe an ongoing fight about campaign tactics, an inability to get top leadership to change course.

Then again, according to senior people in Brooklyn, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook never heard any of those complaints directly from anyone on his state teams before Election Day.

In results that narrow, Clinton’s loss could be attributed to any number of factors — FBI Director Jim Comey’s letter shifting late deciders, the lack of a compelling economic message, the apparent Russian hacking. But heartbroken and frustrated in-state battleground operatives worry that a lesson being missed is a simple one: Get the basics of campaigning right.

Clinton never even stopped by a United Auto Workers union hall in Michigan, though a person involved with the campaign noted bitterly that the UAW flaked on GOTV commitments in the final days, and that AFSCME never even made any, despite months of appeals.

The anecdotes are different but the narrative is the same across battlegrounds, where Democratic operatives lament a one-size-fits-all approach drawn entirely from pre-selected data — operatives spit out “the model, the model,” as they complain about it — guiding Mook’s decisions on field, television, everything else. That’s the same data operation, of course, that predicted Clinton would win the Iowa caucuses by 6 percentage points (she scraped by with two-tenths of a point), and that predicted she’d beat Bernie Sanders in Michigan (he won by 1.5 points).

“I’ve never seen a campaign like this,” said Virgie Rollins, a Democratic National Committee member and longtime political hand in Michigan who described months of failed attempts to get attention to the collapse she was watching unfold in slow-motion among women and African-American millennials.

Rollins, the chair emeritus of the Michigan Democratic Women’s Caucus, said requests into Brooklyn for surrogates to come talk to her group were never answered. When they held their events anyway, she said, they also got no response to requests for a little money to help cover costs.

Rollins doesn’t need a recount to understand why Clinton lost the state.

“When you don’t reach out to community folk and reach out to precinct campaigns and district organizations that know where the votes are, then you’re going to have problems,” she said.

From the day Clinton released her launch video, the campaign knew she’d struggle with enthusiasm. Yet they didn’t do many of the things voters are used to seeing to give a sense of momentum, insisting that votes didn’t come from campaign literature, door knocking, commitment to vote cards or the standard program of sending absentee ballot applications to likely voters rather than just appealing to the people once they’d already ordered the ballots.

“It 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.”

Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not “scientifically” significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back.

“There’s this illusion that the Clinton campaign had a ground game. The deal is that the Clinton campaign could have had a ground game,” said a former Obama operative in Michigan. “They had people in the states who were willing to do stuff. But they didn’t provide people anything to do until GOTV.”

The only metric that people involved in the operations say they ever heard headquarters interested in was how many volunteer shifts had been signed up — though the volunteers were never given the now-standard handheld devices to input the responses they got in the field, and Brooklyn mandated that they not worry about data entry. Operatives watched packets of real-time voter information piled up in bins at the coordinated campaign headquarters. The sheets were updated only when they got ripped, or soaked with coffee. Existing packets with notes from the volunteers, including highlighting how much Trump inclination there was among some of the white male union members the Clinton campaign was sure would be with her, were tossed in the garbage.

The Brooklyn command believed that television and limited direct mail and digital efforts were the only way to win over voters, people familiar with the thinking at headquarters said. Guided by polls that showed the Midwestern states safer, the campaign spent, according to one internal estimate, about 3 percent as much in Michigan and Wisconsin as it spent in Florida, Ohio and North Carolina. Most voters in Michigan didn’t see a television ad until the final week.

Most importantly, multiple operatives said, the Clinton campaign dismissed what’s known as in-person “persuasion” — no one was knocking on doors trying to drum up support for the Democratic nominee, which also meant no one was hearing directly from voters aside from voters they’d already assumed were likely Clinton voters, no one tracking how feelings about the race and the candidates were evolving. This left no information to check the polling models against — which might have, for example, showed the campaign that some of the white male union members they had expected to be likely Clinton voters actually veering toward Trump — and no early warning system that the race was turning against them in ways that their daily tracking polls weren’t picking up.

People involved in the Michigan campaign still can’t understand why Brooklyn stayed so sure of the numbers in a state that it also had projected Clinton would win in the primary.

“Especially given what happened in the primary,” said Michigan Democratic Party chairman Brandon Dillon. “We knew that there was going to have to be more attention.”

With Clinton’s team ignoring or rejecting requests, Democratic operatives in Michigan and other battleground states might have turned to the DNC. But they couldn’t; they weren’t allowed to ask for help.

State officials were banned from speaking directly to anyone at the DNC in Washington. (“Welcome to DNC HQ,” read a blue and white sign behind the reception desk in Brooklyn that appeared after the ouster of Debbie Wasserman Schultz just before the July convention). …

To Brooklyn, this was the only way to shut down what they perceived early as an effort to undermine the campaign’s planning, DNC officials playing good cop as they made promises they couldn’t keep to friends in the states, took credit for moves Clinton’s staff already were making, or looked to dig up trouble to use against them later. …

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.

Marshall, at Mook’s direction, had designed a plan that until the final weeks was built around holding Pennsylvania and winning just one more state — electoral math that would have denied Trump the presidency on the reasonable assumption Michigan and Wisconsin were Clinton’s.

There was a logic guided by data, they say.

“We have built an operation and we run an operation as if this is going to be a close race,” Marshall said in an interview with Politico in early October. “We have not seen an organization in many states on the Trump side that reflects that.”

In Michigan, Brooklyn tracked 211 staff compared with 58 for Barack Obama in 2012. A source there said the field plan called for an additional 70 staffers, but deferred to the local team instead on using the $1.4 million allotment for a limited paid canvass.

But enough tremors were reaching Brooklyn by late October that veterans of previous campaigns were brought on to help oversee a stabilization — despite tension that dated back to many at the firm never wanting Mook to be campaign manager in the first place. …

When top aides to the Trump campaign mapped out the best-case scenarios for election night, they always fell short of 270, and Michigan was always the state that they couldn’t see a way through.

Trump’s last stop of the election was a massive rally in Michigan that went on past midnight, his campaign homing in on Trump’s chances there largely from nervousness it sensed coming out of Brooklyn.

Walking out at the end, Trump turned to his running mate, Mike Pence, almost confused: “This doesn’t feel like second place,” he said, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

Democrats felt it too. Rep. Debbie Dingell, who complained throughout the campaign about the lack of urgency and support, has told people since the election that Hillary and Bill Clinton both said in their final appearances in the state that they felt something was off.

On the morning of Election Day, internal Clinton campaign numbers had her winning Michigan by 5 points. By 1 p.m., an aide on the ground called headquarters; the voter turnout tracking system they’d built themselves in defiance of orders — Brooklyn had told operatives in the state they didn’t care about those numbers, and specifically told them not to use any resources to get them — showed urban precincts down 25 percent. Maybe they should get worried, the Michigan operatives said.

Nope, they were told. She was going to win by 5. All Brooklyn’s data said so.

In at least one of the war rooms in New York, they’d already started celebratory drinking by the afternoon, according to a person there. Elsewhere, calls quietly went out that day to tell key people to get ready to be asked about joining transition teams.

But an hour-and-a-half after polls closed, Clinton aides began making rushed calls, redrawing paths to 270 through the single electoral vote in Maine and Nebraska. Still assuming wins in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Michigan suddenly looked like the state that was going to decide the presidency.

They scrambled a call with campaign attorney Marc Elias, prepping for a recount in a vote that oddly looked like it would be a narrower win than they had ever prepared for. An hour later, after they hung up, they realized it was over. They could tell by the numbers they were seeing — not the numbers being spewed from their own internal analytics team, but the numbers sitting at the bottom of the TV tuned to CNN. With the recount frozen, Clinton lost Michigan by 10,704 votes.

“I think it’s true, they executed well. I think it’s true that the plan was accomplished,” said a former labor leader in the state. “But the plan was not the right plan.”