

Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) celebrates her reelection victory over Republican challenger Scott Brown at her midterm election night rally in Manchester, N.H. on Tuesday. (REUTERS/Brian Snyder)

There's an old saying: 'Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.'

A corollary of that in American elections is this: 'Everything the winner did worked, while everything the loser did backfired.'

Over the last few days, analyses of the election have informed us that the Democrats' Koch brothers strategy didn't work because Democrats lost, but also that the Koch brothers can't take credit for the GOP's big win because Democrats had plenty of money too. They have also told us that Democrats lost because they failed to embrace President Obama and, per Obama, that they lost because of a "failure of politics" to promote their policies, which are sound. Oh, and also, the Democrats' ground-game advantage is total fiction just two years after it was unmatched, and the same goes for their technology edge. Because, of course, they lost.

This is the natural inclination of all post-election analysis: The candidate who won by one point in a swing state is a genius. The one who lost by one point is an idiot.

This, of course, is an intentional exaggeration, and the point is not to pick on the analyses linked above, which generally make very valid points about various strategies and their efficacies. (And whose headlines are often more definitive than the text beneath them. Who would ever do that!?)

The problem is that almost everything in politics -- especially strategically -- comes in shades of gray. And to make a blanket statement that one thing did or didn't matter is really difficult to do based on the evidence at hand, which is usually just election results, fundraising, exit polls and historical trends.

The cruxes of the new pieces on the Koch brothers, for instance, are basically this:

1) That Democrats spent so much time trying to attach the GOP to the Koch brothers, but they still lost. Hence, it didn't work.

2) That Republicans, despite the Koch brothers' efforts, didn't really have a financial advantage down the stretch. Hence, "Money didn't buy the midterms," and the Kochs didn't win.

Again, though, shades of gray.

On No. 1, it's worth pointing out that the Koch brothers strategy was as much or more about mobilizing Democrats and raising money as it was about swaying swing voters to cast ballots against the wealthy conservatives.

Did it mobilize Democrats? Apparently not as much as their party would have hoped for -- after all, they lost. Would Democrats have been less-mobilized without it? Maybe not, but it's hard to know for sure.

And, in fact, you could make an argument that No. 2 above disproves No. 1 -- at least in part -- because Democrats were on very similar financial footing as Republicans. Without getting Democratic donors all riled up over the Koch brothers trying to "buy America", maybe Democratic donors don't step forward as much as they did to prevent further losses.

As for the crux of No. 2 -- that the Koch brothers didn't win because the GOP had little financial advantage -- what about the fact that, without the Koch brothers, the GOP would probably have been badly outspent? Just because the GOP didn't have much more money doesn't mean money didn't matter. If nothing else, the Kochs were responsible for a parity, without which Republicans might not have gained as many seats.

Did the Kochs deliver the Senate to Republicans by overwhelming Democrats with their money, as the early narrative went? Of course not. But that's quite a different thing than saying they didn't play a very significant role.

The biggest example of this kind of excessive post-game clarity is in stories on the ground game and technology. Just a few months ago, Democrats were prepared to demonstrate an extremely sophisticated effort modeled on what President Obama did in 2012. The "Bannock Street Project" was maybe going to save their majority.

As of today, that effort is rightly or wrongly being deemed as second-best.

This is what happens when analysis has little more to work with than unquantifiable or -verifiable hearsay.

So are Democrats suddenly second-best at technology and the ground game? Or were Republican voters just that much easier to get to the polls on Nov. 4? Again, we don't know. And until we can tap into the brain of millions of voters and discern electoral motivations that even they are often unaware of, we won't know for sure.

Again, this is not to pick on the pieces above. Most of them make valiant efforts to analyze something that is really difficult to pick apart and are much more nuanced than their headlines. They are worthwhile efforts to understand what just happened and why.

But the inclination after an election to say definitively that something did or didn't work is often too tempting. And, in the case of ground game and technology especially, it's often contradicted just two short years later.

Republicans had a very good election year, and that's to their credit, just as Democrats had a very bad year and have to answer for that. On balance, Republicans did more things better than Democrats did. That much we know.

But that doesn't mean that everything Republicans did was great and everything Democrats did was terrible. It's much more nuanced than that.