One of the bad habits we have in the media is trying to give each election a narrative,
as if there is one story going right through it. Doesn't work. So instead of giving you
one story about it, I'm going to give you five takeaways that I think -- I think -- are
true. Number one is that this was just a goddamn disaster for Democrats. They got destroyed.
They got destroyed in the states. They got destroyed in the governors' races. They lost
in Maryland, in Massachusetts, in Maine. This was a wholesale rejection of the Democratic
party. This was a Republican wave. But takaway number two is that liberalism actually did
a whole lot better than Democrats did. Across the country, you had ballot initiatives that
were pretty damn liberal. A couple of them were liberal enough that you couldn't even
have imagined them being serious contenders a decade ago. In Washington, DC and Oregon
they legalized marijuana. They increased the minimum wage in Illinois and Nebraska and
Arkansas. They expanded background checks on guns in Washington state. A lot of these
ballot initiatives were in states where Republicans won the election, which suggests voters are
very angry at the Democratic party, but they don't necessarily agree with the Republican
party on very much. Takeaway number three is that Democrats, as every party does every
time they win an election, had told themselves a bunch of stories that just turned out to
be bullshit. They thought that there was a whole new electorate that had emerged, and
that pollsters simply weren't counting the rush of Latino voters and young women who
would be coming to the polls. And they're right about one thing, the polls were wrong.
But they weren't wrong because they underestimated Democratic strength. They were wrong because
the underestimated Republican strength. Takeaway number 4: There are actually a couple 2016
winners in this bunch. And the two big ones are, for the Republicans, Chris Christie, who
ran the Republican Governors Association and so gets a lot of the credit for the fact that
Republicans won a bunch of governor elections in blue states. So now Christie can go in
2016 and argue to Republicans that not only has he shown that he can win in a blue state
like New Jersey, but he was actually able to lead other Republican governors to win
in blue states like Maine and Massachusetts and Maryland. That's going to be a really
powerful appeal to a party that has not won a presidential election in a long time. On
the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton comes out of this looking pretty good actually.
Democrats are going to know they can lose an election so they're going to want a trusted commodity
who's pretty damn good at running campaigns. And a lot of possible competitors to Hillary
Clinton who could have rose up during a successful Democratic election either don't exist or
they got cut down. The fifth: It is just going to be a lot harder for the Obama administration
to really do anything going forward. That's true obviously because there are going to
be more Republicans and Republicans have not shown much inclination to compromise with
President Obama. But also Democrats have just lost an election, in part because the president
was an anchor around their campaigns because his approval ratings are bad; they feel like
he did not do a good job helping their campaigns by sticking to a good message in the run-up.
So he's going to have even less leverage among members of Congress. Meanwhile he's been promising
a big executive action on immigration reform. Is he really going to legalize millions of
immigrants? The administration thinks they will. They reiterated it on election day,
but it's hard to believe. In the end, most of this comes down to one thing: This was
a bad election for Democrats. It was a bad election for Democrats because the electorate
is unhappy and they're angry. They haven't necessarily changed their opinions on very
much. They don't necessarily think Paul Ryan is right about everything and they certainly
don't think President Obama is right about everything. But they are tired of watching
Washington fail them. And they are very, very angry at the party that is supposed to be
in control for letting that happen.