Really?

Via The Hill:

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) downplayed his party’s losses in the House on Tuesday night, attributing part of the challenge to “top of the ticket drag” in some states on a conference call with House Democrats Thursday afternoon.

“We didn’t land where we needed but the climate made it impossible to land where we wanted to and we landed in as good a place as we could given what was working against us,” Israel said, according to a source on the call.

Democrats in both chambers and holding governors’ mansions suffered steep losses Tuesday night as a wave of discontent with the president swept new Republicans into office and kept other vulnerable GOP lawmakers safe.

House Democrats lost at least 13 and as many as 16 seats Tuesday night, picking up only three out of about two-dozen seats Democrats saw as competitive. Still, Israel downplayed that number, noting that a president’s party has lost 29 seats during a midterm on average, and that the last two waves resulted in two or four times that number of pickups for the party benefiting from it.