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MT and ND were both very close, and could easily have gone the other way. I think we could have won MT and ND last year by “nationalizing” those elections, i.e., by sending in Paul Ryan to campaign with our candidates.

Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. They were still loses of seats that should have been GOP pickups.

WI - Tommy Thompson lost, but so did Romney-Ryan. Same thing in quite a few other purple states.

But Scott Walker won. Twice. Wisconsin isn't Massachusetts. Bush came pretty closed to winning it twice and it had been trending more red prior to 2008. Thompson was given a pretty good chance to win. But he didn't.

MO - Our candidate wasn’t up to it. Ditto IN.

I lived through the Akins fiasco. If you can guarantee none of the GOP candidates in 2014 are going to pull similar boneheaded stunts then I'll feel a whole lot better about 2014.

The odds are good that the Republicans will gain the Senate, keep the House, keep their large plurality of Governors and of state legislators.

And I'll repeat; the odds were good for a Senate takeover in 2012 as well. So saying the odds are good in 2014 shouldn't fill people with confidence just yet.

Close only counts in horseshoes - close is informative about the future.

Tommy Thompson was given a good chance and lost - Looking back, he lost. There is, therefore, a metaphysical sense in which his “chance” was always zero. But, given the information available early in the year, he had a good chance. As things developed, that chance slipped away. Who knows what would have happened in Wisconsin if, e.g., the storm hadn’t come ashore in New Jersey, or if Romney had handled Benghazi more deftly. I will not further engage in a superficial discussion of the meaning of probability in a complex world. But, here, wrap your head around the following “chance:” what was the chance that the Japanese scout plane that spotted the U.S. carriers off Midway would have had a busted radio?

Scott Walker won twice - but not during a Presidential election. The turnout model counts.

I lived through the Akins fiasco. If you can guarantee none of the GOP candidates in 2014 are going to pull similar boneheaded stunts then I'll feel a whole lot better about 2014.

Candidates say bone-headed things in every election. The difference is that usually the party covers for them, or at the very least, doesn't make the situation worse. In this case, Romney-Ryan went out of their way to make the situation much worse by trashing the GOP candidates instead of putting the media in their place.

In the end, the Republicans lost those seats in addition to several of the RINO races and the national elections in a very winnable year. The party leadership should be held accountable--but they won't be. They'll continue to trash conservatives, promote liberals, and be the Dems lap-dogs. It's what they do best.