Interesting piece up on FiveThirtyEight this morning by Harry Enten:

Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election

The article suggests that registered Democrats in key demographic groups where Dems typically roll up huge numbers and margins opted to stay home and were a significant factor in Clinton’s loss. (As noted many times here, there were dozens of factors involved in her loss.)

Registered voters who didn’t vote on Election Day in November were more Democratic-leaning than the registered voters who turned out, according to a post-election poll from SurveyMonkey, shared with FiveThirtyEight. In fact, Donald Trump probably would have lost to Hillary Clinton had Republican- and Democratic-leaning registered voters cast ballots at equal rates. … Registered voters who identified as Democrats and independents were more likely than Republicans to stay home. Given how closely party identification tracks with vote choice, the disparity in turnout probably cost Clinton the election.

While both candidates were disliked by voters, voters who disliked both candidates favored Trump:

Trump was able to win, in large part, because voters who disliked both candidates favored him in big numbers, according to the exit polls. Clinton, apparently, couldn’t get those who disliked both candidates — and who may have been more favorably disposed to her candidacy — to turn out and vote.

So among registered Democrats, who didn’t turn out?

Non-white and Hispanic Americans were more likely to stay home than white voters. Of all voters who cast a ballot in the general election, 25 percent were black, Hispanic, Asian, or a member of another minority group. But those voters were 42 percent of those who didn’t vote. Drilling down a little further, black voters made up 11 percent of voters who cast a ballot and 19 percent who didn’t. This disparity really hurt Clinton because black voters (by 82 percentage points) and Hispanic voters (by 40 percentage points) overwhelmingly favored her, while white voters went for Trump by a 16-point margin in the SurveyMonkey poll. The turnout rate for black voters was substantially higher in 2012, the last time Barack Obama was on the ballot. According to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey,3 black Americans made up 13 percent of voters and only 9 percent of registered non-voters in 2012. In other words, black voters actually made up a larger percentage of voters who cast a ballot than those who didn’t in 2012, which is the opposite of what occurred last year. Whites, on the other hand, made up about the same percentage of registered voters who cast a ballot (74 percent) and those who didn’t (73 percent). The higher number of black non-voters in 2016 probably had a big impact.

Younger non-voters were an additional contributing factor:

Younger voters were more likely to stay home than older voters. That matches a similar pattern from 2012, according to the Current Population Survey. That probably didn’t help Clinton, but it’s not as harmful as you might think because the difference in voting patterns between the oldest age cohort (a group Trump won by 12 percentage points in the SurveyMonkey data) and youngest (a group Clinton won by 30 percentage points) voters isn’t as large as it is between racial groups. Overall, the age breakdown of 2016 voters looks about the same as four years ago. … More harmful for Clinton was which young voters stayed home: minorities. Among white voters, voters 18-29 years old made up 30 percent of voters who did not participate in the November election. Among young Hispanic voters, that climbs to 43 percent. Among young black voters, it was an even higher 46 percent. That generally matches the findings of the voter data released in some Southern states showing that young black voters were especially likely to stay home in this election. Younger black voters were far more likely to support Bernie Sanders in the primary, suggesting that there simply was not the enthusiasm for Clinton’s candidacy as there was for Obama’s in 2012. Clinton’s favorable rating, for instance, was about 10 percentage points lower among the youngest black voters compared to the oldest black voters in the SurveyMonkey poll.

Democrats were down 10 points or more to Republicans in “voter enthusiasm” before the primaries began. Clinton had succeeded in closing that gap during the general election campaign, only to see Comey’s letter reopen that gap to 10 points just days before votes were cast.

Certainly, Comey’s intrusion into the election cost Clinton votes, and, arguably, the election. Turnout deficiencies ended up being a deciding factor:

Simply put, Trump got more of his voters to turn out than Clinton did. That’s quite a turnaround from the pre-election conventional wisdom that the Clinton campaign had the better turnout machine. Of course, Clinton’s turnout operation may well have nudged many reluctant voters to the polls, but either way, it wasn’t enough. The polling numbers from SurveyMonkey indicate that Clinton was hurt dearly by the voters who decided not to vote.

There is another entire discussion to be had about why key voting groups didn’t turn out in sufficient numbers to flip the close key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. This article offers some keen insights into what happened on election day.