You say crushing loss as if the Democratic Party is now dead in New Hampshire. In a special election in a traditionally Republican district, no one was saying it would be a Democratic landslide, or even a victory.
It is a crushing loss. Obama won the district and the Democratic candidate came within a point of winning in November. Democrats really need to have an emergency meeting about these crushing local losses they keep facing. Oh wait.....I forgot, Democrats dont care about local races, as long as they have the White House then that is all that matters. Yep, right.
No, it's not a crushing loss. The Republican candidate was Jeb Bradley. That didn't guarantee the Republicans would win a big victory--at least not in the sense that I would have tactically ignored the seat were I leading the NH Democratic Party--but it did give the Republicans a huge advantage that trifling things like having Obama win the district (seriously, that's totally irrelevant in state politics in a state like NH) were probably not going to counter. Although people could hope, which apparently you did a bit too much.
