Glenn Thrush:

Barack Obama has spent well over $1 billion on his political campaigns, but it’s the $20 to $30 million Democrats didn’t shell out three years ago that is costing the White House as he slogs through the first six months of his second term.

The GOP’s wildly successful, low-key, and stunningly cheap campaign to seize state capitals in 2010 has come back to haunt Obama and his fellow Democrats. It’s now clear that the party’s loss of 20 state legislative chambers and critical Midwestern governor’s seats represents an ongoing threat every bit as dangerous as the more-publicized Republican take-back of the House that same year.

There was no stopping the GOP wave that year — but strategists in both parties say Obama’s team might have blunted it if they had somehow managed to cut into the GOP’s $30-to-$10 million cash advantage in state house races by making campaigns at the very bottom of the ballot a priority.

For that seed money, Republicans secured an historic return, cementing a ten-year grip on the House of Representatives and a score of state houses, and erasing the remaining smudges of blue in red states.

“The Obama team has done some amazing things, those guys are really something, but the Democrats plain got skunked on the state houses,” says former Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), chairman of REDMAP, the group founded by Republican über-operative Ed Gillespie in late 2009 to influence state races ahead of the critical once-a-decade map-drawing process.

“They weren’t in the same league as us, and that’s having lasting consequences,” added Reynolds, who represented the Buffalo, N.Y. area for five terms.

It might be the greatest opportunity cost of the Obama Era in terms of sheer damage to Democrats, a gift that keeps giving to the Republicans in the form of GOP-dominated redistricting and a barrage of state actions that challenge Obama’s core agenda on health care, civil rights and abortion. …

For starters, Republican mapmakers had GOP state legislatures in Florida and Ohio, their ranks fattened in 2008, buck their own Republican governors to reject Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid in their states. More importantly, the conservative revival has capped the number of states fully developing their own health care exchanges at 17, far fewer than Obama’s team had anticipated.

The flipping of both houses in North Carolina has led to passage of new voter ID and registration laws Democrats claim are intended to restrict minority voting. The 2011 Alabama law that made it a crime to harbor or transport immigrants in the state was passed weeks after Republicans took over both houses in Montgomery.

And the new Republican supermajorities in Texas and elsewhere have resulted in a renewed push to limit abortions, with the GOP takeover of the Pennsylvania legislature and governor’s mansion leading to a crackdown on abortion clinics, spurred in part by the ghastly practices of convicted clinic owner Hermit Gosnell in Philadelphia.

Obama’s team has already begun prepping for the 2014 crop of races, when high-profile GOP governors, including Ohio’s John Kasich, Florida’s Rick Scott and Michigan’s Rick Snyder, are up for re-election. Earlier this month, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, former head of the Democratic Governors Association, quietly slipped into the West Wing to meet with Obama Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer to map out fundraising and campaign strategy. …

But when it comes to redistricting, the damage has already been done. The next chance Democrats have to fight back comes in 2020, seven long years away.

“It’s just one of those things Republicans have always done better than Democrats,” said Michael McDonald, a politics professor at George Mason who has served as a redistricting consultant in Virginia and New Jersey. …

“We did kill ourselves for [Alex] Sink and [Ted] Strickland,” said one Obama aide, referring, respectively, to the Florida and Ohio gubernatorial candidates swept away in the Republican wave. …

Strickland, who campaigned hard for Obama last year, says Democrats need to learn their lesson in 2014 and beyond, citing Big Labor’s backlash against anti-union legislation in Wisconsin and Ohio as examples of Democrats mustering potent state operations.

Except that those efforts failed in Wisconsin. Notice that after tens of millions of dollars in Democratic and Democrat-friendly campaign spending. Scott Walker is still governor, and Republicans still control both houses of the Legislature. (Obama’s handpicked candidate for governor is still mayor of Wisconsin’s most socially dysfunctional city, and, by the way, Democrats lost two Congressional seats.) The Wisconsin Democratic Party is now reduced to anointing a candidate for governor based on her ability to self-finance her campaign.

Besides that point, this is a rather cynical look at the 2010 election, with the inherent assumption that the GOP merely outmaneuvered the Democrats, instead of Democrats losing elections left and, well, left because they deserved to lose. Similar to Bill Clinton in 1993 and 1994, Obama overreached, and paid for it at the polls. Unlike Clinton, who was all about himself and would thus deal with Republicans, even on such GOP issues as tax cuts and welfare reform. the petulant brat in the White House refuses to compromise and refuses to deal. As a result, since Republicans are unlikely to lose the House in 2014, the best we can hope for is more than three years of more stalemate.