DETROIT — The shock Democrats felt on election night 2016 was familiar to progressive activist Justin Myers. It was the same way he felt when he was a young organizer, canvassing in minority neighborhoods. As an African American man, Myers figured he'd be able to connect with the black and brown residents as he sought support for left-leaning candidates on the ballot.

At one house, a woman opened the door, and Myers went into his spiel.

"She stopped me dead in my tracks and said, 'Just stop,'" Myers recalls. The woman then said, "You're only here because it's election time. You don't care about our community. You don't care about our issues," she told him.

It was a lesson Myers, now CEO of the progressive group For Our Future, remembers well, and it's one he's employing now as the group seeks to take back "blue wall" states Democrats lost to President Donald Trump in 2016 as well as retain battleground states the eventual Democratic nominee will need to prevail in 2020.

In Michigan, a state that's 16 electoral votes Trump captured by winning just 10,704 more votes – or 0.3 percent of votes cast in the Wolverine State – Democrats are getting back to some very basic, old-fashioned campaign rules.

Listen. Don't treat voting as a transaction. And make sure you don't take for granted those "reliable" voters – such as African Americans – who turned out to be not so reliable for Democrats in 2016.

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"We seek to remedy the issues this woman actually pointed out," Myers says. "We want to first learn what's important to the voters and wrap our candidate around those issues."

For Our Future Michigan – a project of For Our Future and the For Our Future Action Fund – knocked on 214,000 doors in the state last year, collecting more than 2 million data points on voters and the issues that matter to them, according to organizers. The idea is that traditional polling offers a simplistic view of voters' concerns, while face-to-face conversations with people allows organizers to delve deeper into issues and circumstances affecting voters in different counties and neighborhoods. Only after that conversation do the canvassers ask residents if they plan to vote – and for whom.

And the issues are not necessarily what political professionals might expect: Auto insurance costs are a big deal in much of Michigan, as is clean water, roads and bridges, and education funding. "Hate Trump" showed up in the questioning, but it wasn't the top issue. And organizers don't think an anti-Trump campaign will be enough to get people out to vote for the Democrat for president next year.

Detroiters also have different concerns than voters in the rest of the state, ranking crime, abandoned housing and blight among their top five issues, according to For Our Future research.

"It's not that people believed they were taken for granted" in 2016, "though that's a part of it," says Branden Snyder, director of Detroit Action for a New Economy. "They hadn't seen people engage in things they actually care about," like "pocketbook issues for black voters," he says.

Trump did that on a broader scale in 2016, personally criticizing Ford Motor Co. for expanding auto production in Mexico. The direct hit on an iconic Michigan industry and company resonated with white, working-class voters who felt politicians were doing nothing as their jobs disappeared.

"It's an issue of being engaged with voters 12 months a year, rather than 60 or 90 days before an election ... That just breeds resentment."

Democrat Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, did not excite Democratic voters, Myers says. And other

Democratic professionals on the ground say their pleas for more Michigan attention were ignored.

"Really, Michigan did not receive the resources necessary," says Joe DiSano, a Democratic consultant in Michigan. "There were people on the ground, including myself, screaming their heads off, saying, 'This is slipping away.' It fell on deaf ears in Brooklyn," where Clinton's campaign was headquartered, he adds. "We were at a crisis point."

The For Our Future campaign in Michigan appears to have been successful in 2018: Democrat Gretchen Whitmer flipped the governorship, winning by nearly 10 points, and Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow kept her job. Republicans lost their supermajority in the Michigan state Senate and lost five seats in the state House of Representatives.

Democrats flipped two U.S. House seats blue, making the Michigan delegation evenly divided at 7-7. And the results in other districts indicate a Democratic trend: According to an analysis by Politico, in every single contested congressional race except one, the Democratic candidates gained ground from the 2016 election – even in cases where the GOP candidate prevailed.

Michigan is still very much a battleground state next year, and Trump has a proven record there, having flipped 12 of Michigan's 83 counties red in 2016. Meanwhile, Republicans are mounting their own on-the-ground effort, telling The Detroit News that they have trained more than 1,400 volunteers on basic organizing techniques, social media and more.

But the president's approval rating has slumped in Michigan, from 48 percent approval and 40 percent disapproval in January of 2017 to 42 percent approval and 54 percent disapproval last month, according to Morning Consult. But those numbers shouldn't mean Democrats don't need to learn the lessons of 2016, experts say.