The primary lesson from this cycle is that money spent on hideous negative ads in the last week, works.
And that saturation eMail and phonebanking can actually be counter productive.
In the final couple weeks of the 2014 campaign, I worked phonebanks in CT and heard from a lot of people that they were sick to death of the grassroots GOTV push, particularly the avalanche of eMails begging for $5. I know I was tossing about 100 per day! It made eMail almost useless since you had to sort through all this chaff to find the ones that were real.
And the worst of that was the tone set by those eMails. Doom and dread are not good ways to motivate a movement.
dKos was only one of the culprits and has been excoriated repeatedly in these pages by other posters, but they're not the only ones. Direct from the campaigns themselves, general eMail blasts from National, other outside groups, it was relentless. And efforts to unsubscribe were ineffective.
And it irritated a lot of supporters.
I know because I got my ear chewed off by several of them while phonebanking.
Next cycle, we need to do this better. Not saturate our voter base with annoying, heavy loads of negativity, be a little better at knowing when to back it off.
Of course, next cycle will be very different: a Presidential election at the top to bring out more voters, a favorable map and a couple years of H3ll from the GOP to point at.