Unfortunately, most of the ticket across the nation did not bring in the President. They instead spent the cycle running away from the President, trashing him at every turn. Begich, Pryor, Lundergan Grimes, and others ran from the President as fast as they could, and they all.... lost. It didn't help a single one of them. There was no benefit. Republican voters still associated them with the President's negatives, which they were reinforcing of course, and Republican politicians gleefully went along with it. Democrats, by denouncing their President, were reinforcing the argument being used against them- that the President and his Congressional allies were weak, ineffective, and in fact destructive to the nation.
This cycle started out as a sort of jump ball. Nothing was happening in Congress, and either side could have been blamed. If Democrats had a strategy worth using, they would have embraced the President and pounded on the shutdown more effectively a year ago, and they would have been able to blame an ineffective, frankly bad Speaker of the House for the problems in Washington. Instead, Democrats conceded the blame game, while also not passing anything of substance into law, leaving the public to assume it was their fault.
No matter how bad the leader of your party is doing, no matter how bad the messaging is, you have to stay on message and on the team. You can't run wild cat. You need to be a loyal and effective messenger, and you have to sell people that there is something positive about your brand. We're churning out 200,000 plus jobs a month, gas prices are falling, Dodd-Frank is working, eight-million bought health insurance on the exchanges, green energy is at the high point of it's production, and the President as a result has a story to tell. His own team made it look like a failure. For that reason, they lost, and lost badly.
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