Still smarting from this month’s election results, Democratic leaders have begun offering rationalizations for their party’s showing. Some claim the defeats are typical “second midterm” losses for a two-term president; others point to a Republican-friendly “frail and pale” voter turnout in a year with an “unfavorable electoral map”; still others blame a “low-information” electorate unappreciative of Democratic policies. A few even attribute the setbacks to candidates who were too politically moderate.

Those might explain one election’s losses, but Democratic woes date back further than this November. Since its watershed wins in 2006 and 2008, the Democratic Party has lost wave elections in 2010 and 2014 and gained a mere stalemate in 2012. This February, the combined effect of those elections will give Republicans control of the U.S. Senate, the largest G.O.P. majority in the House of Representatives since the 1940s, at least 31 Republican governorships and G.O.P majorities in 68 of the nation’s 98 partisan state legislative chambers.[1] That’s a stunning achievement for a party that just six years ago had a “broken brand” and was derided as a “rump party” relegated to permanent minority status.[2]

That said, the last 18 months have been especially hard on Democrats—and their party leaders deserve much of the blame for that. On June 6, 2013, President Obama’s job approval numbers were 47.8 percent favorable to 47.1 percent unfavorable.[3] Those weren’t great numbers; they had eroded earlier that spring after ostensible ally Harry Reid spitefully rejected a budget compromise between the president and congressional Republicans. But President Obama had rallied from weak numbers before, and lifted his party with him.

This time would be different. That day, the (London) Guardian[4] and the Washington Post[5] broke stories on a massive National Security Agency effort to collect information from ordinary Americans’ phone calls, emails and other online activities. That would be the first of many revelations from Eric Snowden, the federal technology contractor who, disillusioned by the breadth of government spying on its own citizens, began disclosing those spy programs to the media. The programs’ antecedents dated back to the George W. Bush administration, but they burgeoned under President Obama. Within 48 hours, his unfavorable rating eclipsed his favorable, and those numbers have trended apart ever since.

Three months later, in September, health insurance companies began notifying millions of customers that, under the 2009 health care law often called Obamacare, they could no longer offer the insurance plans those customers had purchased.[6] About the same time, some doctors and other health care providers started informing some patients that, because of changes prompted by Obamacare, the providers were no longer part of the patients’ insurance networks.[7] Those notices baldly disproved President Obama[8] and Democratic allies’[9] oft-made claim that Obamacare wouldn’t disrupt people’s insurance. This was not the only lie President Obama told to the American people,[10] but it was a major one, earning Politifact’s “Lie of the Year.”[11]

The next month brought the opening of Obamacare’s “exchanges”—government websites where people could shop for insurance and learn if they qualified for subsidies. At least, that’s what the sites were supposed to do, but many visitors found they didn’t work. The worst failures were websites overseen by the Obama administration and Democratic governors in the ardently Democratic states of Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Oregon.[12]

About the same time, two doctors at a veterans’ hospital in Phoenix, Ariz., filed inspector general complaints about extensive backlogs for care and attempts by administrators to hide the backlogs by falsifying records, apparently resulting in some veterans’ deaths.[13] Months later, after officials in Washington and Phoenix had snuffed out the complaints and blackballed the whistleblowers, one of the doctors leaked the story to the Arizona Republic. The subsequent coverage led to similar revelations at other V.A. hospitals.[14]

President Obama and many of his fellow Democrats entered the 2014 elections labeled as liars, incompetents, corrupt, uncooperative and advocates of a frighteningly overreaching government. The biggest surprise of the election is that Republicans didn’t capture even more offices; but then, they’re still dealing with the labels they earned nearly a decade ago as warmongers, fiscally irresponsible and (also) advocates of a frighteningly overreaching government.

Now, though, Republicans have a chance to earn better labels. We’ll see if they do.

As for Democrats, they can look toward 2016. But they might not like what they see. The early favorites to become the party’s standard bearer—Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley—now seem politically tired, erratic, far-from-mainstream, unaccomplished or some combination thereof. More worrisome, the party’s “progressive” philosophy—which has replaced traditional, noble Democratic liberalism and concern for the poor—increasingly looks like the belief that government should benefit and empower upper-class urbanites and suburbanites at the expense of fellow citizens.

The year 2016 may find the Democratic Party where the G.O.P. once was, as the party with a broken brand and at risk of permanent minority status, hoping that Republicans will revive it.

Thomas A. Firey is senior fellow for the Maryland Public Policy Institute and a native of Washington County.