Progressives Still Think We're Losers

I still keep reading about how the Republican strategy to make people hate Democrats is so effective, which is why they keep beating us.  As one commenter at WaMonthly wrote:

The sad part is that though the rebranding is a failure, Republicans have risen in the polls. Their secret is to make all elections about Democrats. Voters hate politicians, so the Democratic message of 'vote for us' tends to lose to the Republican message of 'don't vote for them'. The exceptions were 2006 and 2008, when even people who don't pay attention to politics realized how bad Republicans are.

And first off, this is a "secret" strategy?  I don't think so.  Attacking Democrats has been the cornerstone of every Republican campaign for the last forty years. 

And secondly, are we to imagine that Dems didn't make 2006 and 2008 all about Bush?  I'm pretty sure this is a strategy we used quite effectively, with the difference being that we then went ahead and explained how we'd do things better.  Meanwhile, the Republican strategy is to demonize everyone who isn't a Republican, under the delusion that there are more Republicans than non-Republicans.  And of course, the more they motivate the base, the more they offend everyone else; making it so they'll lose more votes than they gain.

And the weird thing is how they continue to imagine that 2006 and 2008 are somehow outliers.  And that makes sense as these same people were adament that we'd lose in those elections too, and still don't quite understand why their political model didn't apply in either year. 

But of course, it's not 2006 and 2008 that were the outliers.  It was 1994, 2002, and 2004 that were the outliers, while we made gains in the other seven Congressional elections.  So Republicans have a 3-7 record, yet we're to imagine that they've got a brilliant strategy that we just can't beat.  And for as much as I keep pointing this out, these people continue to hold on to their obviously flawed political model and refuse to acknowledge that the much-hailed Republican Hate Strategy has been an immense failure for a very long time.

And as for this year, it's not the Republican strategy that has them beating us.  It's the economy, stupid.  And if things keep improving as they are, there's little Republicans can do to win this election.  Sure, the sky is falling for progressives, because they think we need to hit Republicans harder than they hit us.  But they said the same damn thing at this point before the last two elections, and still don't understand why they were wrong.