Most of these assholes lost last night and the rest are into runoffs and/or legal challenges and may ultimately have lost as well.

Ed Kilgore at TPM has a postmortem which after finding the right nugget of data seems to miss the point. His key paragraph:

So despite talk of millennial "disappointment" with Obama, the best evidence is that their enthusiasm for him as manifested in 2008 and 2012 is not transferable to other Democrats -- or is not exhibited in the mix of millennials willing to vote in a midterm. And the same may be true of the minority voters discussed above.

But Kilgore doesn't note that most of the Democrats who lost actively ran against Obama. You can't have the votes of people who support Obama when you are running commercials showing yourself shooting Obamacare with a gun.

Since that resulted in utter failure, let's try it my way next time. I bet that you could get those votes if you ran a campaign explaining to people that they had to vote in the midterms to defend the president. Turn it into a national election. People don't vote in midterms because they don't think they matter, or because they're turned off looking at two candidates tripping over each other to attack the president. But those who supported the president in the presidential election years are likely to turn out if they understand that the president they voted for is going to lose something if they don't vote now. And here's the thing: even if you still lose, at least you didn't spend literally billions of dollars attacking your own party's policies. A full-throated defense of those policies might actually help turn the political climate around for next time.

It's true that you might lose the mythical independent moderate vote with this strategy, but it seems clear that independents broke for Republicans in this election anyway. If those people truly are independent, perhaps a strong argument in favor of your party's policies might persuade them. If not, the idea is that the young and minority voters that won you your office in the presidential years would come out and counterbalance the independents that you're not winning (and wouldn't win anyway). We've been trying it the other way as long as i've been watching politics and it's not working, so why not give this a shot next time?

One more recrimination: this can't just be an election strategy. You should really govern this way, too. If "moderate" Dems hadn't stymied Obama on the stimulus, acceded to the 60-vote filibuster, demanded that he hold off on his executive order on immigration (hey, that worked out really well, huh? Bye, Senator Udall. You were one of the better ones...), and generally shot themselves in the feet for the past six years, maybe they'd have more to show for it now.

It would be much less frustrating if the Democrats behaved as liberals rather than conservatives.

i hold out hope the more liberal branch of the dems will get so frustrated one day that they break off and form a third party.

i don't really. i just like to tell myself that little fantasy.