Meet The Press host Chuck Todd and his Sunday panelists outlined the Democratic Party's heavy losses under the Obama administration, with guest Marc Caputo saying the idea of the "Obama political machine" was a "lie" that couldn't win without him on a ballot.
Under Obama, Democrats have lost 13 Senate seats and 69 House seats in Congress, and the results are even more staggering on a local level. Democrats have lost 12 governorships, including Kentucky last week with the election of Matt Bevin, 30 state legislative chambers and more than 900 state legislative seats. That's the worst showing for an incumbent president's party since the Richard Nixon years, due to the taint of Watergate.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said the Democrats were getting "smoked" by Republicans strategically, although she appeared to bring it all back to gerrymandering without actually saying it.
"What's happening is the Democratic Party is getting smoked strategically by the Republican Party," Maddow said. "They invested heavily, particularly in advance of the 2010 cycle, in winning state legislative seats all across the country that nobody in the national press cared about. They flipped enough of them to flip enough legislatures to flip the congressional map that locks it in for a decade, and the Republicans are thinking that way. Democrats just aren't."
Politico reporter Marc Caputo said the idea of the Barack Obama political machine was nonsense.
"The Barack Obama political machine and oh, we're big data? It's a lie," Caputo said. "The Obama political machine without Obama is no machine. They don't win. That was a largely personality-based campaign in two different cycles."
Also, Caputo said, Obama simply is not very popular.
"You also had, in addition to that, folks not liking Barack Obama very much, so if you were running for office, you ran away from Obama and Obama's people didn't run toward you to help," he said.