The biggest loss was the inability to take the Virgina senate despite big money injections. Additionally there were other, more surprising (at least to me), developments than those mentioned by the NYT: minimum wage increase failed in Portland ME (which I believe is heavily left-leaning), and ballot measure both reducing sales tax and requiring public vote for future increases passed in Washington state. Legal pot also failed in Ohio, but I find that less surprising. Kentucky's gubernatorial results not super surprising either, but bad news nonetheless.
We've also had the worker initiatives that went over like a ton of bricks here in Minneapolis, and a steady drum beat of financial pressure on Obamacare. Put them all together, and you get my chin scratching.
Regarding the electability of the GOP candidates, that's based on my own handicapping rather than an estimate of it realistically happening. The field is atrociously bad, but now there's at least a moment or two when I think, geez, one of these people
might actually pull it off. My feeling about the GOP is that, given demographic realities and how much the party fringe turns off much of the country, they need candidates that are 'interesting but not weird' (in the eyes of the broad population) in order to win the presidency. Romney wasn't particularly weird, but he wasn't interesting either. Now we have guys like Trump who is interesting to many, but likely too weird to get elected at large. Fiorina isn't wierd but she's also not interesting (other than being female). Carson and Rubio fit the bill the best, but the more we hear about them the more we learn that Carson is weird and Rubio is uninteresting. So hence, on balance, I consider them all relatively hard to elect.
...but given the actual results on the ground, I'm not so sure the Democrats are in a much better place on balance. The candidates are better, but I think they may be out over their skis on many issues, and I wonder if that's seen in recent election results.