As of writing, this tweet has been retweeted a respectable 387 times.

Democrats could take a lesson from Gary Peters in Michigan. pic.twitter.com/4OvtmPowHK — Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) November 6, 2014

Take a lesson, Democrats, it suggests. Gary Peters campaigned with Obama in Michigan and won. The unsubtle implication: Had Democrats embraced the president more openly, they would have had better success on Tuesday. (This is a subset of the "Democrats need to run as Democrats" line of thinking.)

There's a good debate to be had over the broader argument. According to exit polls, 64 percent of voters were either voting to support Obama or didn't have Obama in mind, leaving about a third of the electorate that said they meant to express opposition to the president. (Weirdly, five percent of those people voted for Democrats.) Shortly before Election Day, former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd made a compelling version of the argument. In short, voters have already decided who they oppose for being close to the president, so having him come do campaign events could only help. Now we can say: Just look at Gary Peters!

So let's look at Gary Peters. Below is Real Clear Politics' chart of the average of polling between Peters and his opponent, Terri Lynn Land. The red line at right marks last Saturday, when Obama made his campaign appearance.

In other words, Peters was almost certainly going to win -- and win big -- even had Obama not stopped by.

Let's contrast Peters with two other examples. First, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.). Peters wasn't the only Democrat to win on Tuesday. The above tweet's formulation of Peters as the only "new" Democrat skips over the fact that 12 Democrats won races outright, six of them by margins greater than Peters'. But few were closer than Shaheen's race, in which she beat a late surge by Scott Brown (R) to triumph by a narrow margin. All without President Obama setting foot in the state. Some might argue that she'd have won by more had the president appeared, but there's equal evidence to suggest the opposite would have been true. (Which is to say: little to no evidence.)

Then there's the example of Anthony Brown, the Democrat running for governor in Maryland. Brown led in the (scant) polling as Election Day approached, and in mid-October, the president hopped the Anacostia River to bolster Brown's campaign. It's likely that Brown's team already knew that he was in trouble thanks to internal polling; there wasn't much reason for Obama to show up if it didn't. The event didn't generate the headlines the campaign (or president) hoped for. Reuters: "Obama makes rare campaign trail appearance, people leave early."

On Tuesday, Brown got crushed, losing by almost 5 points in a race he was expected to win.

Democrats could also take a lesson from Anthony Brown in Maryland.

There are several layers of subtext to complaints that campaigns locked out the president, which we're not going to get into here. Data suggests that Obama was an overall drag, and it is very much the case that campaigns are risk-averse and often timid, making anything as possibly risky as an appearance with the president the sort of thing that they are likely to avoid. Relying on the Gary Peters example -- or any one example -- as proof that the Senate Democrats messed up ignores a whole lot of other things. The people that Democratic candidates really needed to make an appearance during 2014 were Democratic voters. They were invited to attend Election Day, but, instead, often decided to stay home.