It may seem like small potatoes, but the election defeats last Tuesday stunned them, particularly the unexpected loss in Kentucky. In non-presidential election years, Democrats always tell themselves that the vote totals don’t really reflect the makeup of the electorate, because a higher percentage of voters are Republican in the off-years and Democratic turnout soars in the presidential years. Well, that’s true, and it accounts for their successes in presidential elections and their lack thereof the rest of the time, and thus their decreasing share of state offices.

But even local and state elections matter. We see that fact reflected in the lack of depth in the Democratic presidential field this year. Democrats have to be wondering how they can increase their turnout in the off-years. Apparently, a great many of their voters just don’t care enough to vote, except for a president. What does that say about their voters? Nothing very good. How do Democrats propose to fix the problem?:

We live in a world, like it or not, where there are more conservatives than there are liberals,” said Delaware Gov. Jack Markell. “The idea that we can win elections just by turning out our base, to me, doesn’t make a lot of sense. We have to win elections by having an agenda that’s compelling not only to Democrats, but to independents and even a few Republicans.”…

That’s where the Democrats’ propaganda wing, the MSM, comes in. But so far it hasn’t worked well enough in the local sense, perhaps because people are more likely to feel the actual consequences of their government up close and personal on the local level. It’s harder to talk them out of what they’ve experienced for themselves.

So here’s another idea:

“We need to think of new ways to systematically boost turnout and expand the electorate” in off-year elections, said Hari Sevugan, a Democratic strategist who worked on President Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. “I’m not talking about campaigns having more robust [get-out-the-vote] programs. More systematic than that. We need to look at election law and enable an expanded electorate with new ideas that work at a large scale.”

Several Democrats pointed to states where the party has advanced voting reforms, like Washington and Colorado, which conduct elections entirely by mail, or Oregon and California, which will automatically register qualified citizens to vote.

Watch for it.

Yes, I know that some of you will say all they have to do is increase the amount of cheating they do. But I’m not convinced that there’s been enough of that to matter so far, except in very close elections (Al Franken, anyone?). It is rather common, however, for Democrats to use propaganda or charges cooked up by the judicial system to influence the outcome of elections.