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Matt Barretto had good news and bad news for Democrats. They already knew the bad news: Colorado Sen. Mark Udall had been unseated by Republican Rep. Cory Gardner. The good news, which pollster and Latino Decisions co-founder Barretto shared on Wednesday, was that Udall blew it. He was a lost cause, but Colorado wasnt.

We asked voters in Colorado if they knew where Mark Udall stood on comprehensive immigration reform, said Barretto, clicking through slides from his lectern at the National Press Club. Well, 46 percent of Latinos in Colorado knew that Udall voted for comprehensive immigration reform. Forty-seven percent werent quite sure where he stood. Six percent said he was opposed.

Barretto clicked to his next slide. We asked about Cory Gardner. Twenty-one percent believed he supported comprehensive immigration reform. Forty percent didnt know his position.

"We think there was a mistake here."

Matt Barrett, Latino Decisions co-founder

Gardners position was characteristically hard to pin down. In 2013, before he entered the Senate race, he flirted with comprehensive reform. After the Senate actually passed a bill, he opposed it. He opposed President Obamas executive action to defer deportations of many immigrants under the age of 30, DACA. But when the House staged a final pre-election protest vote against DACA, Gardner sided with the Democrats.

This proved to Barretto and a whole lot of Latino strategists that Democrats had fumbled on an issue that could have won elections. We think there was a mistake here, he said. There was an opportunity to message on this issue of immigration, to talk about this issue of immigration, and it would have created some clear contrasts. We know that was the strategy in 2012.

Conservatives have an easy time explaining why they won in 2014. They locate a map. They point to the red parts. Voil. For progressives, the task of explaining how they could have won is akin to finding just the right magazine letters to cut out and paste in a ransom note.

Theyre trying that anyway. As the lame duck session of Congress approaches, progressives are encouraging the president to act unilaterally, frustrate the Republicans, and let the 2016 class of Democrats run as populists. That means a continued war against the Keystone XL pipeline, an executive order to extend deferred action to all illegal immigrants, and a rat-a-tat of vetoes over the Republican Congress.

That means getting the White House to accentuate the differences. Two bitter memories reinforce this strategy. The first: The White Houses quick 2011 accommodation with the Republicans who demanded an entitlement-cutting bargain in exchange for raising the national debt. The second: George W. Bushs decision to surge in Iraq after a shellacking ended Republican control of the House and Senate. Progressives have seen what happens when a president remains unmovable, and theyve seen what happens with accommodation. Why would he ever want to accommodate again? Why not make progressives as excited in 2016 as the right was in 2014?

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