My main takeaways after having time to let it all sink in:

National message is neither here nor there until you get back Congress in order to reverse some of the gerrymandering. First things first: the swing districts are fewer and fewer as time goes by, as the (planned) polarization grows, they grow in importance. You've got to target them with candidates that fit the district! You can't win those with gobs of outsider money or making it a national message race, the people in the district have to like the candidate, it's just that simple. You can't get Congress in order to start reversing things without doing that first. Reed and Emmanuel know how to do this, their methods apply more than ever:

But Democrats don’t just need to choose the right battles, they also need to choose credible candidates who can win them. Candidate quality may not make the difference in a place like Montana’s at-large district, where Greg Gianforte won handily just hours after assaulting a reporter. Winning hotly contested swing seats, however, requires candidates who closely match their districts—even if they don’t perfectly align with the national party’s activist base. In 2006, the Democratic base was energized and angry, but then as now, capturing a majority required winning some tough races in red and purple states across the heartland. As leaders in that 2006 effort, we recruited a football player in North Carolina, a businessman in Florida, an Iraq veteran in Pennsylvania, and a sheriff in Indiana. The Democratic Party won twice as many seats as it needed to gain control.

There’s a long-term payoff for a party that gets this right. Good candidates not only help build a wave, they help sustain it

This is reiterated by yet another NYTimes guest op-ed on topic yesterday, a local guy about the Ossoff race is trying to point out you can't expect a secular Jew to win in a district with Bible Belt heritage. The Times has incorrectly given it a headline that suggests it's a national problem for the Dems, it's not, it's just about that district:

The Democrats’ Religion Problem

By DANIEL K. WILLIAMS JUNE 23, 2017

Carrollton, Ga. — Jon Ossoff’s defeat in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District election on Tuesday wasn’t just a sign that Democrats may have a harder time winning in the Trump era than they had hoped. It is a symptom of a larger problem for the party — a generational and racial divide between a largely secular group of young, white party activists and an older electorate that is more religious and more socially conservative.

Put simply, outside of a few progressive districts, secular-minded young activists in the party are unable to win voters’ trust.

Mr. Ossoff, 30, represented this new wing of the party. He said almost nothing about his religious beliefs or the way in which his Jewish upbringing affected his political views — probably because, like many white, college-educated Democratic activists of his generation, religion didn’t shape his political beliefs.

Mr. Ossoff’s secularism would have surprised many American liberals of the 1950s and 1960s, who looked to the moral inspiration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, both of whom saw a religious imperative for social justice [....]

But again, I do also have the takeaway that national message is not the problem. This is countering Dowd's point of "they don't know what they stand for."  Because: reverse gerrymandering and it's not a problem!

Look, even with a huge number of white men despising her, Hillary won a majority of the national electorate, so national party message is not the immediate problem. It's on target with the national electorate. It's just that one has to deal with some identity groups that are dying away before that can get to work.

Obama knew how to get around this problem some and he won twice. He still energized a new coalition without upsetting as many older white men in enough districts. That's pointed out well in one of the articles, I don't remember which. Some might call that misogyny, I wouldn't, I just think it was her particular baggage, a different woman might have enough appeal just like Obama. And with all her disadvantages, Hillary would have won if only she would have spent a little more effort targeting the right districts. But she would have had a pretty heavy duty road to hoe with all those GOP guys in Congress and all the baggage constantly distracting. The distraction level would be quite near with it is now! Trump would be out there feeding it with tweets. Hillary winning the presidency without Congress would have not solved much at all.

DEMS SIMPLY HAVE TO WIN MORE SEATS IN CONGRESS FIRST.  And they have to do it by running the right candidates in the swing districts. In one, it might be a moderate, in another it might be a Bernie Sanders type, in another, a cultural conservative. I don't think race matters so much here, rather, it's the whole package. (For an extreme example, see Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee, from wikipedia: He was re-elected in November 2006, 2010, and 2014, and is currently serving his fourth full term.[1] Although registered and elected as a Democrat in a heavily Democratic county, many of Clarke's political views align with those of conservative Republicans.[2][3] Clarke frequently appears as a guest on Fox News and was a speaker at the 2016 Republican National Convention)