This year, most of the criticism has been aimed at the Hillary Clinton campaign’s lack of a compelling economic message, particularly one aimed at white working-class voters. It’s one of a number of reasonable explanations — as is the candidate’s personal liabilities and the campaign’s error of not treating Wisconsin and Michigan as electoral problems.

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More generally, the Democratic Party is under the microscope for losing more governors and state legislators this year, and for still being in the minority in the House and the Senate. The party certainly needs to reassess, but Democratic strategists ought to look before they leap, since there are structural reasons for the party’s current standing that have little to do with Hillary Clinton.

Midterm elections offer disgruntled voters an opportunity to send a message of dissatisfaction to the White House. Because of that. the party not holding the White House historically has done well. Republicans had a great 2010 election because voters believed that President Obama went too far, too fast in his first two years in office.

Since 88 of 99 state legislative chambers held elections in 2010, and 38 states had gubernatorial contests that year, the 2010 midterm results proved to be a bonanza at the state level for the GOP.

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Republicans gained control of 20 state legislative chambers that year. Before the midterms, Democrats controlled 52 chambers to the GOP’s 33. But after the 2010 election, Republicans held a majority in 53 chambers to the Democrats’ 32. Among the states that flipped to the GOP were Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Alabama and Wisconsin.

Republicans also netted six governorships in the midterms, including in populous states Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Republican victories in congressional races, state legislative elections and governors’ contests came at an ideal time for the GOP, since it gave them many opportunities to redraw state legislative and U.S. House districts following the 2010 Census. (Since the North Carolina governor has no role in redistricting, Republicans also controlled redistricting there too.)

That advantage allowed Republicans both to maximize the number of legislative and congressional districts they would win and minimize their future vulnerabilities, even in a presidential election year that might favor Democrats. The 2014 elections, President Obama’s second midterm election, gave GOP incumbents and challengers another opportunity to run against Washington, D.C. and a controversial president.

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Only a single incumbent Republican governor was defeated in 2014 (in Pennsylvania), while three reliably Democratic states (Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts) elected Republican governors. All three of those states went solidly for Hillary Clinton in 2016, proving that their gripe was not with the Democratic Party but with President Obama, their Democratic governors or their Democratic gubernatorial nominees.

None of this exculpates Democrats from the charge that they failed to turn out core voters earlier this month or that they didn’t have a winning message that appealed to swing voters or working-class whites.

But when Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who hopes to oust Rep. Nancy Pelosi as his party’s leader in the House, tells Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that “We’ve been getting the message wrong since 2010,” he needs to explain what that says about President Obama, whose job approval was a solid 53 percent in the exit poll but who surely is more responsible than Clinton for the current weak state of the party.

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Clinton certainly wasn’t an ideal nominee, especially given the electorate’s mood, but it’s always difficult for a party to win three straight presidential elections. Moreover, Clinton did carry the popular vote quite comfortably, by over 2.2 million votes. That isn’t an excuse, merely some perspective.

Would Bernie Sanders have won the election? I’m not sure. But I’d bet that Joe Biden would have carried Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which would have put him in the White House and almost certainly handed the Senate to the Democrats.

In other words, if Clinton had received a total of about 100,000 more votes than she did in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, we’d all be talking about the GOP’s problems, not the Democrats’.

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As Democrats evaluate the state of their party and look to move forward, they should remember that each election cycle is unique, and the 2018 and 2020 elections will be very different from the past four elections because a Republican occupies the White House.

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Obviously, the makeup of the 2018 Senate class (25 Democrats/Independents caucusing with Democrats and only 8 Republicans) limits Democratic opportunities, but the House of Representatives suddenly became a very different battlefield with a Republican president.

Since a midterm is almost always a referendum on the sitting president, the contours of 2018 will depend on President Trump’s success and failures, as well as on Democratic recruiting and fundraising. That makes it fundamentally different from the last five general elections.