At WaPo, "Democrats pinning Fla. special election loss on dismal turnout effort":
In private meetings, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and top lieutenants told lawmakers that the race would not define the midterm elections in November, also pinning the defeat on a dismal turnout effort, according to aides and lawmakers in the meetings.There's simply no spinning this loss. And while it's true that House races are idiosyncratic and localized, the political momentum goes to the Republicans. It's already bad for the Democrats this year and there was no catching a break in FL-13. In that regard, the implications are huge. Frankly, there's not much the leftist idiots can do at this point. The November midterms are shaping up to be a referendum on their poor policies and leadership, and the president's a drag on Democratic candidates across the board.
“It’s a disappointment, I won’t pretend it isn’t,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), exiting a House Democratic Caucus meeting that Pelosi tried to keep focused on staying the course toward the midterms. “It’s a loss, it’s a disappointment. It’s not the end of the world. And I don’t know that it tells you a lot about the complexion of the election in November of this year.”
Republicans openly mocked the Democratic effort to explain the results.
“It’s very significant, by any objective standard,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in an interview, citing the Republican candidate David Jolly’s first-time candidacy and record as a Washington lobbyist as reasons he should have been defeated. Democrats fielded a former statewide official and spent more money than the GOP, while Jolly focused relentlessly on Obama’s handling of the Affordable Care Act’s implementation.
“It’s an indication the American people in a swing district, or arguably a blue district, might want to go in a different direction,” McConnell said.
The Jolly victory came just days after GOP strategists were privately mocking the quality of his campaign. It put Democrats deeply on the defensive because their candidate, 2010 gubernatorial nominee Alex Sink, ran what party officials considered a textbook campaign by pledging — on camera in TV ads that ran heavily — that she would work to fix parts of the health-care law but not entirely repeal it.
Her campaign message is expected to be repeated over and over by Democratic challengers in GOP districts throughout the nation, as well as by four key Senate incumbents who voted for the 2010 health-care measure. The fate of those four senators, all running in states Obama lost in 2012, is likely to determine the balance of power in the Senate, where GOP candidates are clear favorites in at least two states and would need four more to claim the majority.
See Josh Kraushaar at National Journal for more, via Memeorandum, "Why a Republican Wave in 2014 is Looking More Likely Now."
