We don't need to get panicky and finger pointy, but we've got one hell of a serious problem facing us and we shouldn't blow it off as a new normal midterm/presidential cycle. When a party captures the most state legislatures in 100 years, there's something fundamental going on.
I think Obama nailed it when he kept saying 2/3 of the country didn't vote. The nonvoter is the true enemy of democracy, and our freaken democracy is in real trouble.
Our democracy is in a death spiral. The more the Republicans break government and sew confusion with their propaganda machine, the more their base gets fired up, and the more normal people and our base get discouraged. FAR too many people threw up their hands and said "whats the use" and didn't vote. The youth showed up in terrible numbers, and they are our future base, so what does that say for our future.
With each set of victories the Republicans do more to suppress the vote. They do more to break every function of government. The Kochs spend more to fuel the propaganda machine that says, see! government doesn't work and it's the Democrats fault! And with each set of victories the despair among our supporters and the struggling people of America gets greater, and the harder it is to get them to come out and vote.
Everyone always says, well lets not play the blame game. Damn! This isn't a feaken game, it's serious shit and we better find a way to fix it! We've got less than a year to figure a way to reverse this death spiral of our democracy. If we don't fix it soon, there will come a point where the consequences of letting it go will be unimaginable.
We know that most of Americans support our positions by a pretty big margin, but most of the people who actually vote, don't. How do we turn that despair, laziness, ignorance, or whatever you want to call it, around?
The Democrats desperately tried to get people to vote with an extremely noble effort in the Bannock St. Project. It didn't work, or it didn't work as well as it needed to. So we need to start thinking of new approaches based on a very rigorous examination of why our supporters aren't showing up. And if you don't think this won't carry over to 2016, I think you're mistaken. We lost red states, purples states, and blues states. And if you think the American people will rise up in 2016 because the Republicans will make such a mess of things, better look at Kansas, Florida, Wisconsin...
In 2016, we need a candidate who can be the Barack Obama of 2008, only with the drive and understanding of how important the Bully Pulpit is, and how it's the best tool a Democratic president has to counter the vast right wing propaganda machine. Someone who understands that the Republicans will be out to destroy them, and someone who won't be delusional over their capability of reaching a "compromise" with the Republicans. Someone who understands that informing the American public about what the Republicans are doing to our democracy, is every bit as important as passing legislation at this critical point in history.
We simply can't keep doing the same things over and over again and expect a different result.