In the weeks since the elections, Democratic post-mortems have essentially focused on four main reasons for the Republican victory: the low turnout of Democratic base voters, the conservative nature of the states that were in play, the too-slowly recovering economy and/or stagnant incomes and the weak Democratic platform and messaging.
All these factors did indeed play a role but there was another crucial dynamic that has been almost completely ignored. The Republican victories in 2014 also reflected the perfecting and successful employment of a new and deeply troubling strategy of political extremism as the calculated political strategy of the GOP. CONT.
James Vega, The Democratic Strategist