Photo: Natasha Vargas-Cooper

The final results are not all in but the decision appears to be cast.  Democrats have come up one seat short of winning back the state senate in Wisconsin. As of late Tuesday night, it appears that the GOP will hold on to four seats and the Dems will take back two. They needed three to flip the majority in the state senate and really take on Gov. Scott Walker.

We'll know in the next few days if efforts will go ahead to attempt to recall Walker when he becomes eligible for such action in January.

In the next few days we are also bound to hear a lot of scapegoating by Democrats as to why they came up short. There IS some funny business again in delayed vote counting and this will lead to charges of a stolen election. And the GOP SuperPacs pumped literally tens of millions of dollars into these small-time races and that will lead to charges of a purchased election.

I have a different takeaway.  The Democrats, apparently, did a great job and they lost fair and square because there's a sizable portion of the Wisconsin –and national– electorate who actually believe in the bullcrap put forward by the Republicans.

Wisconsin Democrats and their union allies did everything right in this case.  Everything that some pwogressives demand that Dems and Obama need to do at the national level. They pushed back real hard on Walker's conservative agenda.  They organized, mobilized and protested en masse for weeks and months on end. The union-backed protests forced Wisconsin Democrats to take militant and tough positions they probably ordinarily wouldn't have dreamed of.

After the GOP ramrodded Walker's budget bill through a rump legislature, unions and Democrats pulled out all the stops to get these recalls on the ballot.  A small army of volunteers ran a tough ground game for weeks leading up to Tuesday's voting. And while they were outspent on the other side, unions opened up their treasuries and helped fuel the six Democratic challengers.

So, in short, this was the sort of Democratic faction of the Democratic Party movement that so many have been calling for.

In the end, they performed honorably but they still lost. Yes, these were all Republican districts so some succor can be had in winning in two of them. But four of the challenges were unsuccessful.

Conclusion: Republicans also have grass-roots support.  They also can produce impressive GOTV. They are not all mindless robots responding to Koch brothers backed advertising.  They actually have agency.

My point, then, is not to blame Democrats for failing. Instead, this should be a wake-up call that even when you do things right, even when you have worked the ground as was done in Wisconsin, even when your electoral push is fueled by an authentic social movement, you don't necessarily win. You don't because there are still tens of millions of Americans out there who believe in all sorts of rubbish… and who vote.  Many of them are unreachable and, in fact, might as well be robots.  But many others, excuse my jargon, need to have their consciousness raised.

It means PART of the work of those who consider themselves on the Left includes having to find effective ways to actually convince and persuade these folks to think more clearly.

Simply demonizing them won't make them disappear.

The long ground-level reporting piece my daughter, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, wrote for Slake is now online.  It's a good and prescient read written back in late April but just published last week.

She's all for the unions but in no way predicted any sort of easy victory as we saw tonight.