1) Most House Democrats who hold reasonably competitive districts were defeated this year. That  guarantees the party is going to be something of a fringe-fest for the next few years. Shuler’s quixotic bid for Minority Leader is a smart attempt to distance himself from that. If Democrats return Speaker Pelosi to the leadership after suffering a 60-plus seat loss in the House, it is a real sign that they have learned nothing and are satisfied to be an ideologically pure minority.
2) Republicans will be redistricting North Carolina next year. When they draw the lines, they might want to consider what Maryland Democrats did to former moderate Rep. Connie Morella, R-Md., ten years ago. They couldn’t make her district much more Democratic (it was already deep blue), but they were able to push her over the edge by giving her a large number of Democrats who had never voted for her. With sufficient creativity in remapping, Shuler could lose tens of thousands of sympathetic Republican voters to Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., and inherit thus suffer the same fate.