Paul Krugman’s Pre-Mortem to today’s election is pretty brutal. The short version is his closing sentence:

So again: it was mainly the economy, with the effects of a bad economy reinforced by Obama’s consistent policy of undercutting both messages and movements that might have helped Democrats weather the economic storm.

We’ll find out tonight, though Krugman is certainly offering some hardcore pessimism early. Except it isn’t pessimism. It’s designed to offer a rebuttal to the inevitable talking points uttered by GOP talking heads and repeated by cable news hosts that Obama and the Democrats suffered losses because they were too liberal and overreached. That’s just not what happened. I do agree with Krugman that the economy was and is the main driving problem and the administration’s failure to aggressively tackle this with strong Democratic policy ideas and clear messaging about them is a major problem. That is, I don’t substantively disagree with Krugman’s assessment, I just shudder to read it on election morning.