Coming after the drubbing Democrats received in last year’s midterms, Tuesday was another bad Election Day for the Party. In Kentucky’s gubernatorial race, Matt Bevin, a Tea Party Republican who made rolling back the state’s participation in the Affordable Care Act a central part of his platform, defied the opinion polls to win handily, bringing the number of G.O.P. governors across the country to thirty-two. In Virginia, a well-funded Democratic bid to take control of the State Senate failed. In Mississippi, voters rejected an effort to change the state’s constitution to guarantee more funding for public schools. And in Houston, the fourth-largest city in the country, a ballot measure that would have banned discrimination on the basis of age, race, disability, sexual orientation, gender, and a number of other categories was defeated by a wide margin.

Republicans didn’t take long to place the blame for the Democrats’ woes on President Obama, and to crow about their chances in 2016. “There were 29 democrat governors in 2008,” Ben Walters, a fund-raiser for the Presidential candidate Ben Carson, commented on Twitter. “When Bevin is sworn in there will be 17.” Referring to the election in Virginia, which was closely watched in Washington, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, tweeted, “.@GOP heads into the 2016 election with positive momentum and with the right vision to put our country back on track.”

There is no arguing that the Democrats have suffered a series of big setbacks at the local level. In a report issued earlier this year, a Party task force that included Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, and Steve Beshear, the outgoing Democratic governor of Kentucky, noted, “We have suffered devastating losses at all levels of government since 2008 including: 69 House Seats; 13 Senate Seats; 910 State Legislative Seats; 30 State Legislative Chambers; 11 Governorships.”

With Bevin’s victory, that last figure is now a round dozen. Even before Tuesday, there were no Democratic governors in states south of the thirty-ninth parallel. Now there aren’t any along a line stretching from the Florida Panhandle to the Great Lakes, either. It’s a similar story in state legislatures. In 2008, the Republicans controlled both chambers in fourteen states; today, they control both chambers in thirty states. Some of these states are sparsely populated, but some aren’t. In five of the ten most-populous states in the country—Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas—Republicans run the governor’s mansion and both houses in the State Legislature. If you look at a map of who controls American politics at the local level, it is a sea of red.

How much of this can be put down to dissatisfaction with Obama? In some places, such as Kentucky, where Mitt Romney won more than sixty per cent of the vote in 2012, disapproval of the President clearly played a role. Bevin, and groups supporting him, ran ad after ad seeking to tie the Democratic candidate, Jack Conway, to the President. (Conway, in turn, ran ads trying to distance himself from Obama.) The Republicans also harped on and on about the supposed evils of Obamacare. Since Kentucky is one of the Southern states where the Affordable Care Act has had a lot of success in bringing down the rate of uninsured (Arkansas is another), Bevin’s effectiveness in demonizing health-care reform was depressing, if not entirely surprising. Rather than acknowledging Obamacare’s successes, he played on voter concerns about rising premiums, large deductibles, and restricted doctor choice. In a state with a lot of evangelical Christians, Republican opposition to gay marriage also played a role.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza wrote, on Tuesday, that Bevin has Obama to thank for his victory, at least in part. This is true. But before buying the line that Obama has been a disaster for the Democratic Party in general, two other factors should be noted. First, it isn’t anything new for the Party of a two-term President to suffer electoral losses on Capitol Hill and at the local level. It’s the norm, as Philip A. Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College, pointed out in an article on Vox, last month. When Bill Clinton was elected, there were thirty Democratic governors across the country. When he left office, there were seventeen. When George W. Bush entered the White House, there were twenty-nine Republican governors. When he left, there were twenty-two. Judging by the number of governor’s mansions it now controls, the Democratic Party isn’t in worse shape now than it was in 2000.

The other factor that needs to be taken into account is a historical one. Support for the Democratic Party and some of its policies was ebbing in Southern states like Kentucky and Mississippi long before Obama came along. The Party’s problems below the Mason-Dixon line date back to the Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, which was based on attracting disgruntled white Southerners to the G.O.P. Obama’s Presidency may well have sped up the electoral secession of the Confederate states from the Democratic Party, but it didn’t start the process.

The big question now, of course, is whether this development is permanent. In mining the demographic trends that are affecting states like Texas and Florida just as much as the rest of the country, particularly the rise of the Hispanic vote, can the Democrats start to recapture some of the ground they’ve lost in the South, and also in states surrounding the Great Lakes, such as Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin?

The short answer is that if they do, it is likely to take a while. Next year, there will be another eleven races for state governorships, and the Republicans will be hoping for wins in Missouri and West Virginia, where the Democratic incumbents—Jay Nixon and Earl Ray Tomblin— can’t run again because of term limits. The Democrats’ best shot of a gain might be in North Carolina, where the Democratic attorney general, Roy Cooper, is challenging Pat McCrory, the Republican governor.

Since voters will also be picking a President next November, turnout should be considerably higher than it was on Tuesday and in last year’s midterms, which should help Democrats, on balance. Despite Republican inroads into the white working class, most Americans who are poor or living on modest incomes still tend to go Democratic. But getting them to vote in local elections is a big challenge in years when there isn’t a Presidential election. On the other hand, the electoral map favors the Republicans. To the extent that local races continue to be seen as referendums on eight years of Obama in the Oval Office, it is tough to see Democrats doing well in places like Missouri and West Virginia, where the President’s approval ratings are below forty per cent. And even if the Democrats hold steady in 2016, they will face another big challenge in 2018, when thirty-six governor's mansions will be up for grabs.

In addition to exposing Democratic constituencies to Republican efforts to cut social programs, dismantle environmental protections, and weaken labor unions, the Party’s losses at the local level are also handicapping it nationally. More Republican state legislatures means more congressional districts gerrymandered to benefit the G.O.P. And the dearth of Democratic governors is depriving the Party of potential future leaders. When it was at a low ebb during the Reagan years, Southern Democrats like Clinton and Al Gore helped revive it. Today, it is hard to identify their successors.