Maddow: Democrats Are ‘Getting Smoked Strategically’ by the Republican Party

TODD: "So what is going on here? Why are down ballot Democrats across the country getting wiped out in election after election, where Barack Obama’s name’s not on the ballot? Well, the explanation of course is Democrats don’t turn out if Barack Obama’s not on the ballot. But it wasn’t that long ago, Rachel, that they did turnout in midterms."
MADDOW: "Uh-huh."
TODD: "It wasn’t that long ago, 2006. 2002 they won a bunch of governorships, even while losing Senate— Something is wrong here and you can’t just blame it on, 'Oh, Democrats don’t show up.' This is infrastructure."
MADDOW: "What’s happening is that the Democratic party is getting smoked strategically by the Republican party. The Republican party made a decision to invest long-term in the places where it makes an institutional difference whether or not you’re there. So the Republican party didn’t talk a lot about it nationally, but they invested heavily, particularly in advance of the 2010 cycle in winning state legislative seats all across the country, that nobody in the national press cared about. They flipped enough of them to flip enough legislatures to flip the congressional map that locks it in for a decade. And the Republicans are thinking that way and Democrats just aren’t."