Also eye opening is that a key to their success in flipping state legislative chambers has been a successful program of minority outreach. After the 2014 Democratic electoral downsizing, The New York Times reported that G.O.P. Gains by Tapping Democrats' Base for State Candidates

WASHINGTON -- As Republicans took control of an unprecedented 69 of 99 statehouse chambers in the midterm elections, they did not rely solely on a bench of older white men. Key races hinged on the strategic recruitment of women and minorities, many of them first-time candidates who are now learning the ropes and joining the pool of prospects for higher office.

They include Jill Upson, the first black Republican woman elected to the West Virginia House; Victoria Seaman, the first Latina Republican elected to the Nevada Assembly; Beth Martinez Humenik, whose win gave Republicans a one-seat edge in the Colorado Senate; and Young Kim, a Korean-American woman who was elected to the California Assembly, helping to break the Democratic supermajority in the State Legislature.

In Pennsylvania, Harry Lewis Jr., a retired black educator, won in a new House district that was expected to be a Democratic stronghold; he printed his campaign materials in English and Spanish. Of the 12 Latinos who will serve in statewide offices across the nation in 2015, eight are Republican.

"This is not just rhetoric -- we spent over $6 million to identify new women and new candidates of diversity and bring them in," said Matt Walter, the executive director of the Republican State Leadership Committee. "Most of these chambers were flipped because there was a woman or a person of diverse ethnicity in a key targeted seat."

That's a pretty remarkable achievement for a party that many thought were about to go the way of the Whigs just a few years ago -- and largely because of the party's obvious problems with diversity and the Dems remarkable ability to run up the numbers with African American and Latino voters in the age of Obama. But the Republican diversity wins are closely related to a long term effort to target state legislatures.

The Dem's wins in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections obscured the setbacks for the party in the states. As National Journal put it, the GOP "wiped the floor with Democrats" in the 2010 midterm elections, setting a record in the modern era by picking up 680 seats in state legislatures. The next-largest harvest of legislative seats was the Democrats' 628-seat gain in the Watergate-dominated election of 1974. The 2010 landslide gave the GOP the upper hand in the subsequent Congressional redistricting process, allowing Republicans to tilt the playing field in their favor and shape U.S. elections for years to come. In the meantime, conservatives have used friendly, GOP-dominated state legislatures to ram their agenda through legislatures--in "red" states and even some states that lean "blue"--on a range of issues: imposing harsh voter restrictions in North Carolina, for example, and passing dramatic anti-labor legislation in Michigan.

It wouldn't much matter what model bills the American Legislative Exchange Council, the State Policy Network and the Family Policy Councils put forward -- if they did not have the votes to pass them in state legislatures.  

The Democrats and related interest groups know that they have some catching up to do. The Times reported:

"The midterms were a wake-up call that this is something we need greater focus and resources around, and not just simply to take for granted and believe that we have some sort of monopoly on minority elected officials," said Nick Rathod, a former Obama administration official who leads a new organization, the State Innovation Exchange, that will seek to bolster liberal policies and candidates and to counter the success of conservative state-focused groups.

But by the same token, the development of model liberal bills won't much matter if the votes aren't there to pass them.  Old political habits die hard, and policy development alone do cannot win elections and pass legislation, no matter how good the communications strategy may be.

(I should add here, that the State Innovation Exchange acknowledged this in the wake of the recent off year elections in Kentucky and Virginia.

This is a structural issue that won’t be fixed by a reliance on demographic shifts or millions of dollars spent in television ads during election cycles. In order to truly compete, progressives need a long game that involves a comprehensive strategy with deep investments like pipeline development of compelling candidates, state policy platforms that allow progressives to promote policy not just play defense against proposals that will hurt working families, and research and communications support for legislators.

I would go farther still. I think the missing ingredient is an authentic grassroots movement dedicated to building for power and electing authentic progressives to state legislatures in all 50 states. We are seeing some of this in the Moral Mondays movement led by Rev. William Barber in North Carolina. The model is spreading to other states. Similarly, Democracy for America, is a progressive Democratic organization that picked up where the 50 State Strategy that was the focus of the tenure of Howard Dean at the Democratic National Committee, left off. (The 50 state strategy was abandoned when the Obama administration arrived.) Also, Wellstone Action, named for the late Senator from Minnesota, seeks to build a broad and deep bench of political leaders and activists with the grassroots electoral skills to help.

How Did It Come To This?

As Bill Berkowitz and Pro-Publica reported, The Republican State Leadership Committee has been in business since 2002, but changed focus in 2010 and created a "Project REDMAP" -- with an eye to redistricting following the Census.  

And their success was astounding.

The "Final REDMAP Report," dated December 21, 2010 and posted on the Redistricting Majority Project website, pointed out that "Twenty legislative bodies which were previously split or under Democratic control are now under Republican control. This includes key chambers where the RSLC devoted significant resources, including the Michigan House, New York Senate, Ohio House, Pennsylvania House and the Wisconsin Assembly and Senate."

The report also noted that "In comparison to past elections, Republicans had more success than either party has seen in modern history. Republicans gained nearly 700 seats on Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, outperforming the 628-seat Democratic gains in 1974, 472-seat Republican gains of 1994 and more than doubling the 322-seat Democratic gains of 2006. Before Election Day 2010, Democrats controlled 60 state legislative chambers to the Republicans' 36. After the November 2nd elections, Democrats control 40 chambers, Republicans control 55 chambers, two remain tied and one (NE) is unicameral/non-partisan."

We can't say we weren't warned and that the stunning successes of conservative Republicans and the policy consequences are not real. But we can say that the great electoral changes believed to be inevitable because of evolving demographics, such as the increase in the number of Latinos and the supposed decline of white evangelical voters should be considered with great skepticism. There are always many factors at work than can be measured by demographics alone.

(We should also take hard looks at claims,that the Religious Right is dead, dying, or breathing its last; that the culture wars are over, or that related issues are losing potency.)

Journalist Sarah Posner demonstrated this in a slam dunk discussion after election day.  There is some remarkable detail in her full report, but here is the key point:

"The religious right spent decades building get-out-the-vote operations and candidate recruitment and training grounds. Those efforts do not vanish with demographic changes, particularly if evangelical turnout is outsized compared to other demographic groups." That's why white evangelicals may only make up 32% of the population, as in Kentucky, but make up 52% of the electorate. Turnout matters.

Certainly one of the take-aways of 2014 is that false optimism in the face of well-financed and well-organized opponents is a fool's game.