It's what happened in 2016 tho
Take Michigan for example. A state that Obama won in 2012 by 350,000 votes, Clinton lost by
roughly 10,000. Why? She received 300,000 votes less than Obama did in 2012. Detroit and Wayne County should kick themselves because of the 595,253 votes they gave Obama in 2012, only 518,000 voted for Clinton in 2016. More than 75,000 Motown Obama voters did not bother to vote for Clinton. They did not become Trump voters – Trump received only 10,000 votes more than Romney did in this county. They simply stayed at home. If even a fraction of these lethargic Democrats had turned out to vote, Michigan would have stayed blue.
Wisconsin tells the same numbers story, even more dramatically. Trump got no new votes. He received exactly
the same number of votes in America’s Dairyland as Romney did in 2012. Both received 1,409,000 votes. But Clinton again could not spark many Obama voters to turn out for her: she tallied 230,000 votes less than Obama did in 2012. This is how a 200,000-vote victory margin for Obama in the Badger State became a 30,000-vote defeat for Clinton.
This pattern is national. Clinton’s black voter turnout dropped more than 11 percent compared to 2012. The support for Clinton among active black voters was still exceedingly high (87 percent, versus 93 percent for Obama), but the big difference was the turnout.
Almost two million black votes cast for Obama in 2012 did not turn out for Clinton. According to
one plausible calculation, if in North Carolina blacks had turned out for Clinton as they had for Obama, she would have won the state.
The Non-Voters Who Decided The Election: Trump Won Because Of Lower Democratic Turnout