All in the state where Ronna McDaniel ran the local Republican Party before moving to Washington to chair the Republican National Committee.

Read: Democrats’ burgeoning chances in the Rust Belt

Mark Schauer, the former congressman who came close but lost in his 2014 Democratic campaign for governor, jokes that he has “cycle envy.” But he says he recognizes all that came together this year, including Whitmer out-raising an opponent who was kicking in some of his own fortune to a race that in total spending became one of the most expensive in Michigan history, to let her win on TV and on the ground.

“Donald Trump inspired a lot of people, and a lot of other things did too,” Schauer said. “That was not enough.”

Trump can win in 2020 without Michigan, but it won’t be easy. And winning in Michigan, based on the midterm results, doesn’t look easy. In 2016, this was his last stop—an after-midnight rally in Grand Rapids the night before the election where thousands waited for him and Mike Pence, giving him an inkling that maybe he might win. This year, despite pleas from local Republicans to come, he didn’t even try to compete. He hasn’t been in the state since April.

What changed?

“People didn’t feel inspired by the candidates, or they didn’t think that it mattered, so they were tuned out. The electorate hasn’t changed. But the fact that they’re really engaged is the biggest difference,” Whitmer told me, as the campaign bus rolled down the road. “It sounds too simplistic, maybe, but showing up is half the battle. People don’t want to be told what to care about. They want leaders who fight for what they do care about.”

First, Michigan Democrats had to figure out what it was that people cared about.

The Clinton campaign was a top-down disaster. Early on at the Brooklyn headquarters, they had come up with a model of who her likely voters were, and a plan based on the assumption that they wouldn’t be able to change the minds of anyone who wasn’t already with her, and that it was about turning out more of the people who were. Nervous for weeks of the final stretch, staffers on the ground begged for more help and attention. They were turned down, told not to worry.

Read: Year of the governor

“There was always a sense that we had this exciting opportunity to elect the first woman, she’s obviously so qualified and so smart, and look at this guy,” Stabenow told me, when we caught up at a campaign office in Madison Heights the day before the election. “So there were things that people let slide.”

The first calls Stabenow made on the morning of November 9, 2016, were to local doctors and nursing organizations, telling them to get worried and active on Obamacare. She helped plan the rallies around the country that Senate Democrats started doing, including what turned out to be the biggest one, featuring Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, five days before Trump’s inauguration, with the crowd on the campus of Macomb Community College that had to be moved outside, into 28-degree weather.