The election this time can be summed up by the people who stayed home – the non-voters were the game changers in the midterms.

And the group of people who stayed home were younger voters who most likely would have gone for Democratic candidates. The youth vote did NOT come out like it did in 2008. The electorate for this election was mostly older and white.

So what does this mean for President Obama in 2012? A pollster who worked for President Clinton says that Obama is in much better shape at this point than Clinton was in 1994:

In a conference call on Friday, Stan Greenberg pointed to several silver linings for a White House that had just lost 60 seats in — and control of — the House of Representatives. Obama, he predicted, has a clearer path to a political comeback than Clinton did 16 years ago.

“In almost all cases here President Obama is doing somewhat better than President Clinton was and that was at a comparable time,” Greenberg said, “[Obama’s] approval rating is higher, [his] personal favorability rating is a little higher. And the other important piece here was when the Democrats were thrown out in ’94, they had been in power for a long time and so the negative feelings on the Democratic Party were stark and reflected the difference on those numbers in ’94.”