^ I agree, mostly. But I don't think GOTV/organizing is completely useless. I think it needs to be done differently, with more money and resources and a long-term presence, so 365 days a year. The party really needs organic organizing though, not just paid. Paid organizing can only do so much. Unions and other community groups that involve copious numbers of people who interact with their community on a daily basis to help drive voting. In this sense, Democrats letting unions rot is one of the worst mistakes they could have made over the past generation.
What really needs to stop is presidential candidates lighting hundreds of millions of dollars on fire with TV ads that barely do anything. How many lost elections and different studies do we need to show that it is useless?
I posted a thread about this with a good Atlantic piece about how most campaign tactics do not work:
https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=273865.0
While TV ads are basically useless,
especially for Presidential candidates (they can serve for name recognition purposes for down ballot candidates, but name recognition wasn't an issue for Trump or Clinton), the way campaigns are set up, media consultants usually get paid in a fraction of the TV cash, so they have an incentive to drive as much towards advertising as possible.
One of the things Trump did that was actually really clever was to minimize advertising as a part of his campaign and use more free things like social media. His immense online army on social media was invaluable to him, and it wasn't all Russians: a lot of them were 4-chan browsing alt-right losers, but that group knows the Internet better than anyone else and can use it to their advantage.
Trump also realized that if he was constantly making news, the press would have to cover him and was willing to do outrageous and outlandish things that other politicians wouldn't dare do.
