Democrats Still Paying the Price for 2010 Losses : Party leaders are going to court to overturn redistricting maps that followed the GOP's midterm landslide.

The National Journal reports:

The 2010 midterm elections could not have gone much worse for Democrats. Not only did the party lose control of the House of Representatives and six seats in the Senate, the GOP picked up just shy of 700 state legislative seats, controlling 56 of the 99 chambers throughout the country. Adding to their gains in the states, Republicans also picked up six governorships in 2010, cementing their advantage.

But it wasn't just the breadth of Democratic losses that made them so damaging for the party; it was the timing. Following the 2010 census, the nation's congressional districts were reapportioned, and so were state legislative districts across the country. And it was Republicans who controlled the mechanisms by which those districts would be drawn in many states.

"Republicans were fortunate enough to have a national wave election in the worst possible year for Democrats," said Michael Sargeant, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which provides support for Democratic state legislative candidates and drew attention to the importance of the 2010 races—as did their Republican counterparts, headed at the time by now-Virginia Senate candidate Ed Gillespie.

The GOP used the redistricting process to lock in many of the gains they made in 2010, and, for the most part, Democrats were powerless to stop them. But in a handful of states, Democrats and Democratic-aligned groups have taken the maps to court.

Kind of strange happening if Barack Obama represented the future.