Election post-mortem

Democrats thought they had demographics, the young adult vote, the Hispanic vote, the women’s vote, and the cultural tides all going for them.  And yet, they lost catastrophically.  So what went wrong?  After the jump, excerpts and some links to attempts to account for what happened.

From Dan Balz, Hard questions for Democrats as they look to 2016 – The Washington Post:

As they awoke Wednesday, Democrats found many ways to soften the sting of the shellacking they took Tuesday night. The Senate map was bad. The party in the White House always suffers in midterm elections. Demography is still on their side in presidential elections.

However true, those efforts to find silver linings after a storm of repudiation ignore larger questions for the party: As Democrats look toward 2016, just who are they and what do they stand for? Are they a party that narrowcasts messages to select constituencies — think “war on women” — and speaks largely in the language of fear? Or are they a party whose leaders can articulate a big, fresh and positive message?

Much has been made about the absence of a Republican governing agenda in this year’s campaigns. Democrats combing through results from Tuesday and from exit poll crosstabs can point to the fact that on some issues, the public clearly does favor them. But the small-bore issues on which Democrats tried to wage the campaign proved insufficient for the task of winning.

[Keep reading. . .] 

One consequence of the electoral defeat, according to Alexander Burns of Politico,  is the loss of  candidates who were hoped to constitute a new generation of Democratic leaders.

See also liberal E. J. Dionne on how, “for Democrats, the 2014 election was not the 2010 Republican landslide. It was worse.”

What is your post-mortem analysis?