For What It's Worth . . .

. . . i.m.h.o., Dem losses are attributable mainly to their failure to beat back conservatives w.r.t.:

1. Election integrity (both electronic voting and campaign finance, including corporate money);
2. Media integrity (the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and restrictions on ownership consolidation); and
   
3. Public education (destruction begun long ago and currently continuing under Obama appointee Arne Duncan).
   

Americans are not stupid; they're miseducated and brainwashed. "A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking."– U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, On the Poverty of Student Life (1966).

And it's not that Dems can't message; it's that they've lost control of their own message, because it's either distorted or not reported by the media. Reality is now almost wholly overshadowed by emotional manipulation and spectacle created by a media largely controlled by the right.

Remember this from 2004 re- the term, "Reality-Based Community":

The source of the term is a quotation in an October 17, 2004, The New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush (later attributed to Karl Rove): The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." . . . "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued . . . ."

(Wikipedia; footnotes deleted.)

B.t.w., there's just one state – California – in which easily-hacked electronic voting machines have been pretty much eliminated. And in that state, EVERY statewide elective office went to Dems. Probably just a coincidence.