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I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Bob Garfield.

The election night graphics had barely faded from our TV screens

before the media rushed to explain what the midterm vote meant.

That, say, the Republican base voted against their party because it felt betrayed,

or that a majority of voters had simply registered their disgust with the war.

Other explanations played on the failure of earlier predictions.

For instance, the net roots, the online

community of liberal activists, was supposed to carry Connecticut Democrat Ned Lamont to victory

over Joe Lieberman. So when Lamont lost, the pundits said that the net roots wasn't all it was

cracked up to be. But Anna Marie Cox, the Washington editor of Time.com, observed recently that many of those

explanations are in fact myths. She says that to piece together the real picture, consider, for example,

how the net roots candidates actually fared overall. While it's true that the net roots became

...