Hey folks, let's keep it simple (and more importantly, true) when we think about why we lost what we lost in this election. There were, I would claim, just 3 reasons. And those 3 reasons, from what I've seen all over the web, I believe explain 100% of the detailed results in terms of demographics, who voted why, etc:
Reason number 1: "Independent" or "swing" voters. For this voter, politics is something they pay very, very limited attention to and the following is, I think, an accurate summary of their thought process around this election: We elected Obama president. That means he's in charge. Things aren't good now. Obama has a D by his name. So, Democrats aren't doing a good job. Therefore, vote against everybody with a D by their name.
Reason number 2: There are a certain number of people in the country who really, really hate Obama's guts.
Reason number 3: Although we got pretty good turnout of every other part of our team, we did not get good turnout from young people. Depressingly, this is completely normal for a midterm election.
That's it, the whole ball of wax really. Lingering angst about what we could or should have done differently about health care reform or global warming or DADT is important when we think about what we should do in governing, now and in the future (which is of course a hugely important topic). But it has nothing to do with why we lost this election. So when we're thinking about how to win the next election, let's not waste time thinking that it does.
This diary (my first, BTW) won't be big on "what do we do now". A little too early for me to have much of an idea about that. To at least recognize the obvious, though:
We can't do much about Reason #2, except to recognize (thankfully, if callously) that a lot of these folks are old and so there are less of them in each passing election. We can and must do more about reason #3, though we'll get a big boost here in 2012 just because it won't be a midterm. Reason #1 will be the tough one to deal with. One line of attack is to try to change this voter's conclusions, which means making the economy better, which everyone would like to do but will be very hard especially with Republicans manically opposed to everything that could help (see the collected columns & blog posts of Paul Krugman). The other avenue is to make these voters less important by getting out our own base in bigger numbers.