Benjy Sarlin has the how-to guide:
Party officials love brushing off comparisons with blowouts past, telling reporters that they’ve since learned a thing or two about gritty campaigning—not like those screwups who used to run things (cough, 1994, cough). ”It’s no shock that this is going to be a hard cycle,” Jon Vogel, executive director of the DCCC, told The New York Times last spring. “People didn’t know that until late 1994; they ended their campaigns with money in the bank.” The latest wave of outside spending has shaken confidence, but as late as August Democrats were proudly showing off their cash advantage in battleground districts, as well as a 2 to 1 advantage over the Republicans’ House campaign committee. “Democrats insist that having so many well-funded incumbents proves false any comparisons to the 1994 election,” reported Chris Cillizza in The Washington Post.
Nice try, but Republicans offered the same spin in 2006. “No Republican is being taken by surprise, unlike many Democrats in 1994,” Mike Allen reported days before the election in Time, recounting his conversations with GOP officials. Conservatives were particularly heartened by their party’s 2 to 1 cash advantage in swing districts. And if that line sounded familiar then, it might be because you heard the same spin from Democrats… in 1994, when party officials bragged about their fundraising numbers two weeks ahead of the Republican Revolution. "It shows [they] recognized the challenge and started early,” DSCC spokesman Ken J. Klein told the Post. “They were well-prepared."