Commentary Election post-mortems used to be pretty simple affairs. The winners would claim a “mandate” to govern, and the losers would mutter to themselves something approximating to the late Dick Tuck’s public pronouncement when he lost a race for the California Senate in 1966: “The people have spoken, the bastards.” But sooner or later they’d have to go back to the drawing board to try to figure out what they were doing wrong and what they could do differently to win back the voters who had chosen the other party. Sometimes it took a while for the message from “the people” to sink in. The Democrats lost three presidential elections in a row between 1980 and 1988 before Bill Clinton, with the help of the now-defunct Democratic Leadership Council, finally came up with a new and winning formula in 1992. Two years later, when Democrats lost their majority in the …