Did Democrats take Obama for granted?

[All Along The Watchtower]

They took his personal popularity and political skills for granted and assumed (to the point that they even thought much about it) that those traits would carry the Democratic Party as a whole - in both downballot races as well as the 2016 presidential election. This turned out to be a massive error with lethal consequences for the party and more importantly, many of its constituents (among many other people in the country as well).

I'm actually now of the view that McConnell's "we need to make sure Obama's a one-term President, above all else" strategy was politically genius not so much because it actually made Obama substantially less popular (though it certainly didn't help him in terms of Republicans branding Obama's policies with his name i.e "Obamacare") but that the obsessive focus on Obama motivated the conspicuously/extremely anti-Obama Republican voter base and the Right's grassroots activists to get ever more aggressively involved in downballot campaigns - congressional, gubernatorial and other statewide races, plus state legislative and local elections - which, when paired with the absurdly immense drop-off on the Democratic side in non-presidential/midterm races, paid off handsomely for the Republicans.

In other words, as popular as Obama was (and still is) among Democrats and much of the American public in general, tying his much-maligned-by-Republicans name to the much less popular Democratic Party (as a whole) and hanging him as an albatross around other Democrats' necks was for the Republicans, a very brilliant and successful political strategy indeed. And with the benefit of hindsight and in many respects, it paved the way for Clinton's defeat last November.