Nate Cohn reads them:
Last week’s results suggest that Republicans would be taking a big risk if they count on nonwhite turnout falling so low again. The vaunted Democratic mobilization effort did not replicate the 2012 electorate — something it could never do given the tendency for nonwhite and young voters to stay home — but it did produce a notably more Democratic electorate in states like North Carolina and Colorado than in 2010. … There is no way to be sure that the Democrats will remobilize young and nonwhite voters in 2016, even if it is the outcome most consistent with the available data on turnout and demographics. But if they do, the Republicans may need to perform still better in 2016 than they did last week.
But Larison warns that “most voters may have grown fatigued of having the Democrats in control of the White House by the time it comes to vote in 2016”:
In order to make the prospect of at least another four years of a Democratic president interesting, the party would probably need to put forward a fresh candidate with new ideas, but that is the opposite of what Clinton’s candidacy will be.
The very inevitability of Clinton’s nomination reeks of stagnation and intellectual exhaustion. So it’s possible that some other Democratic candidate might have been able to translate recent Republican success into a clear political advantage for the next election, but Clinton appears to be uniquely ill-suited to do that. That doesn’t mean that she won’t win in 2016, but it does mean that she is in a considerably worse position now than she was six months or a year ago.
Bernstein sees an improving economy as the Democrats’ best hope:
[C]umulatively, the odds are increasing that voters are finally going to believe the economy is growing. The economic picture is hardly perfect, but it’s also not unusual for perceptions to lag any improvement. For example, 20 years ago, Republicans would tell you that the recession that began in 1990 had ended well before voters went to the polls in 1992 and kicked President George H.W. Bush out of office because of the economy’s performance. But that electorate turned around and punished the Democrats in 1994 for that same long-ended recession. It took about three or four years for voters to acknowledge good times.
But what if the good times remain worse than in recent memory? Will the voters be taking it out on every president for the foreseeable future? I remain of the view that the key to winning elections is to present solid and fresh ideas for resolving clear and emergent national problems, and to find a candidate able to do that and to govern if she wins. Which means to say that Hillary Clinton needs a radical makeover in persona and policies if she is truly going to occupy the Oval Office.
The Dish 