In our first post-election installment of the Schultz Report, David Schultz talks about the mixed bag that last night brought for Minnesota Democrats–handing a 10-point margin to Barack Obama on one hand, but failing to net any congressional pickups and falling short of the five-seat increase needed to give the party a 2/3 majority in the Minnesota House.

“For all of those [down-ticket Minnesota] races,” notes Schultz, “you have Democrats coming in on average about 10 points behind where Obama was. It might be simply that the Obama coattails were not coattails at all — that a lot of Obama people may have voted for Barack Obama and nobody else. There’s a little bit of evidence of that occurring, much like 1998 when a lot of people voted for Jesse Ventura and nobody else.

“But a lot of people did vote, and they didn’t necessarily vote straight Democratic lines. So the question is, why, in a year where the Democrats did spectacularly well across the country, why did they so underperform here?”

Listen: David Schultz talks about Obama’s big Minnesota win and its failure to yield congressional seat pickups (13:58)

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