Brownstein takes a look at voter demographics:
The stampede toward the GOP among blue-collar whites was powerful almost everywhere.
In response, Adam Serwer predicts:
I would say that this makes comprehensive immigration reform super-dead for the next two years, since Democrats won't want to do anything that exacerbates the loss of working class white voters.
Ezra Klein studies the age gap. Many obvious factors explain this: the economy primarily, the turn-out (older and whiter than 2008), health insurance reform ... but what really impresses me is that the GOP ran perhaps the oldest, simplest, most hackneyed campaign ever: he's a big government liberal! And that message worked with enough white people to give us this wave. If Obama represented a chance to say "Goodbye To All That," the GOP has now proven that, for one cycle anyway, this hoary old red-blue, right-left, big-small-government abstraction still has amazing traction. Even for an electorate 54 percent of whom said they want more government-borrowed stimulus!
That it offers no actual solution to any actual problem we face seems irrelevant. The only hope I have is that Obama keeps pushing the pragmatic center forward, reveals the bluff behind the Tea Party's fake fiscal conservatism and somehow crafts a narrative to defeat this exhausted but potent meme.