Explaining Mid-Terms for Stupid People

Mid-term elections are older, whiter, and more male. The women who vote are whiter and more-often married. This is simply reality. It's also reality that an electorate that is made up of these voters is more conservative than Presidential electorates. That's who votes in a mid-term election, and you probably can't drastically change it unless you run an extremely precise campaign, one that is often times impossible. The electorate is just going to be less liberal than Presidential years.

Knowing that, you talk to the electorate that you have. Democrats did not do that. The same catch-phrases that worked in 2012 didn't work in 2014. Democrats never understood that. They spoke to an electorate that would never exist. They lost, and lost badly, as a result.

The 2014 election is over though, and that is the end of it. What happened last night is fairly irrelevant to what will happen in 2016. That last night's electorate would prefer a Republican to Hillary Clinton in 2016 is not shocking. The electorate was a fairly conservative electorate. It's also a much smaller electorate than the one that will vote in two years.

Basically, mid-terms have a smaller number of voters, and they are older, whiter, and more male than Presidential years. While both are elections, please don't confuse Presidential elections with mid-terms.