Strategic decisions can make all the difference in a close race. Clinton lost the White House (despite winning the popular vote) to Republican Donald Trump on the strength of about 100,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. That is the definition of a close race.

But a review of Democrats' advertising decisions at the end of the race suggests Clinton and her allies weren't playing to win a close one. They were playing for a blowout. And it cost them.

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Clinton and the groups backing her aired three times as many ads as Trump and his supporters over the course of the general election, according to data from the Wesleyan Media Project. Despite that advantage, the Democrats left several key states essentially unprotected on the airwaves as the race came to a close.

From Oct. 14 through 30, they ran almost no ads in Wisconsin, Michigan and Virginia, and they aired less than half as many ads as Trump and his backers did in Colorado. By virtue of their spending choices, the pro-Clinton groups were essentially acting as if she had locked up as many as 248 electoral votes already. That is, of course, more than she would end up claiming. Here is the map as Democrats appear to have seen it, with the gray states the ones where they poured their late-October ad dollars.

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Republicans, meanwhile, were playing much stricter defense than Democrats were. The Trump camp allocated ads as if it believed he had only 190 electoral votes in the bag:

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Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

What those maps show are that Trump and the Republicans were focused on a narrower path to the White House, focusing their ad dollars on a map that would net them, in a very best-case scenario, 332 electoral votes:

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

The Clinton camp, meanwhile, was playing for a blowout. They aired almost 3,000 ads in Arizona, 3,600 in Iowa and nearly 10,000 in Ohio. They were hoping for a landslide-case scenario of 375 electoral votes:

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com