The Real Story of the 2014 Election: Who Lost

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

From gjohnsit at Daily Kos: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/06/1342721/-The-Real-Story-of-the-2014-Election-Who-Lost

Everyone is talking about why the Democrats lost, but almost no one has looked at who lost.

To put it simply, look at this:

Having comprised 10 % of the Democratic Party's caucus in the 113th Congress, the Blue Dogs will have accounted for 50% of the Democratic Party's lost seats (7 of 14 seats) during the 2014 midterms. Members of the centrist New Democrat Coalition account for the balance of lost seats. The largest membership organization within the Democratic Caucus, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, lost no seats to Republicans.

That's a pretty powerful message. This is the coalition that helped push through the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform bill with the help of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
On Tuesday the Democrats biggest upset losses were from here.

There are links in there I didn't cut and paste back into the excerpt, but one deserves the link in particular - Blue Dog ranks to shrink in new Congress from The Hill.

Both articles are both reading in whole, but to 'pre-but' the usual reply, one more cut from gjohnsit's story, in a rebuttal of his own

A lot of people have correctly pointed out that the Blue Dogs have generally run in purple and red districts, and that is why they are being shellacked.

However, that's not much of a excuse because...they are being shellacked.
The Blue Dog Caucus has gone from 54 in 2008 to 12 in 2015. If they were a college basketball team with that record they would have gone from NCAA Division 1 to the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA).
And yet some still don't want to fire the head coach.
Running DINOs in purple districts is a losing strategy, and a losing badly one at that. So why should we keep investing in a losing strategy - running Democrats that look like Republicans in conservative districts?

That pretty much says it all. Even in Conservative districts, running candidates who don't want to be proudly Dems is a losing battle, unless they can coattail in on a wildly popular Presidential candidate. But even then, when they come up for re-election without a President on the ticket, we just lose the seat again.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. One additional comment, a message I sent to gjohnsit over at DK.

One semi-tangential comment I would have is perhaps too obvious to mention, although I think it complements the overall case you made.

We talk about how Conservatives always work to make voters fearful and angry, while Progressives appeal to hope and ideals. But the deeper truth is that it is what the two sides actually are, or should be. Conservatism IS fear. The fear of change, the fear that if we do something different, it will hurt us, make things worse for us. Likewise, Progressivism IS hope. The hope that we CAN do better, become better, if we're willing to take the risk and try new things.

And if we don't combat fear with hope, we WILL lose. The greater fearmonger will win, the lesser fail. We can beat fear, but only if we promise to make things better, and then fight to do so. So it's not only the 'inauthenticity' of DINOs, or the fact that they 'don't stick to the Party platform' that costs them votes. It's that they try to balance fear and hope, and that's a hard sell. People are forced to choose between fear and hope, but BOTH candidates are offering fear, while only one is supporting hope for something better. So fear wins out.

[bemildred]

2. +1. nt