* Michelle Obama: The soon-to-be-former first lady may be the only Democrat who emerges from this dumpster fire of an election in good shape. She was the unquestioned star of the 2016 campaign, delivering the two best speeches (her convention speech and her speech condemning Trump's behavior toward women) anyone gave in the race. And now Michelle Obama will be the first name on the lips of many Democrats already preparing for the 2020 presidential race against Trump.

Losers

Hillary Clinton supporter Marta Lunez, reacts to elections results in New York. (AFP PHOTO / DON EMMERT)

* Hillary Clinton: Twenty months ago, Clinton looked for all the world like a president-in-waiting. By dint of her polling numbers, her résumé, her fundraising capacity and her lack of a serious Democratic primary opponent, Clinton was rightly described as the biggest non-incumbent front-runner in modern political history. But the idea of Clinton the candidate never matched the reality of Clinton on the campaign trail. She underwhelmed repeatedly, running a too-cautious primary campaign that allowed a little-known Sen. Bernie Sanders to emerge as exactly what Clinton's campaign had hoped to avoid: a viable liberal challenger. Support for Clinton — even after she won the primary campaign — seemed obligatory rather than excited. The campaign she ran was ruthlessly efficient and organized. But what it never seemed to be was joyful or exuberant. It felt, to put a fine point on it, dutiful.

Clinton's message was in keeping with that duty-bound sensibility. The main reason she gave for people to vote for her was that, well, she was ready for it and the other guy wasn't. Clinton was never — in this campaign or in the 2008 race — able to show that she was something more than the hyper-prepared, supersmart, best student in the class. Remarkably, Clinton did show more of herself in her concession speech Wednesday morning, the latest example of politicians doing their best when they've lost something they wanted so badly.

But make no mistake: This was a colossal swing and miss for Clinton in a race that was widely seen as a hanging curveball for her and her party.

Click to watch Clinton's emotional concession speech. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

* President Obama: The outgoing president left no doubt that he saw his own legacy on the line in the 2016 election. He was an active and aggressive advocate for Clinton on the campaign trail, insisting that the progress he had made over these past eight years could be lost if Trump was elected. But for the third election in the past four, Obama was unable to transfer his popularity to his party. (Democrats suffered massive losses in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections and now, this.) It remains to be seen whether Trump will make good on his promises to undo a number of Obama's signature accomplishments — the Iran deal, the Affordable Care Act, etc. That Trump was elected on a promise to, essentially, erase the record of the Obama administration speaks to how a majority of Americans may like Obama, but they're not too keen on his policies.

* Organization/Money/TV ads: By every traditional measure of campaign success, Clinton should have rolled to victory. She had a carefully built and well-staffed organization nationally. She raised more than $1 billion, dwarfing the amount Trump raked in. She used that financial edge to flood the TV airwaves in swing states with ads, many of which, again judged by traditional standards, were quite effective. This ad, in particular, should have been a showstopper for Clinton.

But Trump still won. And in winning he proved that his seemingly outlandish focus on his Twitter feed and his large-scale rallies was the right move for him. And that Clinton's focus on organization and money was, generally speaking, a waste of time. It remains to be seen whether Trump, thanks to his celebrity, is a one-off when it comes to ignoring the traditional measures of winning campaigns or whether things have been fundamentally altered on that front.

* The media: Look, there's just no way to sugarcoat it: Everyone — and I mean everyone — in the political press and punditry expected Clinton to win. She did not win. That is a failure on our part to properly understand what the electorate was telling us. What it is not is evidence of some sort of inherent liberal bias. As I noted above, every measure that history suggests is an effective indicator of how candidates win pointed to Clinton. As did the vast majority of national and swing state polling. As journalists, we rely on the past to teach us about the present (and the future). That approach normally works — until the past is no longer predictive of the present. The time has come to throw out all of our assumptions about how the American public sees itself and what it wants in its leaders. It's time to start anew.

* Evan Bayh/Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.): The former Indiana senator, who was recruited into the race by Schumer, was seen as a shoo-in when he decided, at the last minute, to get into the open-seat race left behind by retiring Sen. Daniel Coats (R). After all, he had served two terms in the Senate (he retired in 2010) had a golden last name (his father, Birch, is a political legend in the state) and had oodles of cash ($10 million) sitting in a campaign account just waiting to be spent. Turns out that Bayh was an opposition researcher's dream, most notably because he barely ever visited Indiana after he stopped representing the state in the Senate.

Bayh's defeat, announced early Tuesday evening, was a sign of things to come for Schumer, who had hoped to become Senate majority leader when the new Congress convenes in January. That dream will now have to wait for at least two years and maybe quite a bit longer; Democrats have to defend 25 seats, including five that sit in ruby-red states, in 2018.