Two weeks before Election Day, at the final Pennsylvania Senate debate, legendary Philadelphia newsman Jim Gardner began with what seemed like an easy first question. “Can you tell us,” Gardner asked Democrat Katie McGinty, “about one issue where you disagree with your party or your potential president?”

“Thanks, Jim, and I do stand with Secretary Clinton,” McGinty said. She spent the next minute never distancing herself from Hillary Clinton. “I know this, Secretary Clinton will fight for working families and that’s what I’m going to do as well.”

It’s now clear that Democratic strategists and the media spent too much time focused on the wrong question, asking how Republicans would separate themselves from their unpopular nominee, President-elect Donald Trump.

Instead of Trump being a drag on Republicans, Clinton became the anchor to which Democratic candidates willingly attached themselves. Despite her deep unpopularity throughout the campaign, no Democratic candidate for Senate ever tried to separate themselves from Clinton in any meaningful way.

The results are stunning in their consistency.

Clinton lost Pennsylvania, the first Democratic presidential nominee to lose the state since 1988, with 47.6 percent and a little more than 2.8 million votes. McGinty lost too, by almost the exact same margin, with 47.2 percent and about 50,000 fewer votes than Clinton. Clinton lost Wisconsin, with 46.9 percent, as did former senator Russ Feingold, D, in the Senate race, with 46.8 percent and 1,800 fewer votes than Clinton.

Again and again, as they positioned themselves as generic Democrats supporting Clinton, voters in turn treated these candidates quite generically.

In its final ratings the independent Cook Political Report rated 11 Senate races as either “toss-up” or “lean Democrat” or “lean Republican.” Six of those Democrats finished within 1.4 percentage points of Clinton’s share in that same state, according to the Associated Press’ calculations. Three more fell well behind her.

Only two Democrats in key races performed significantly better than Clinton: Evan Bayh, who got 125,000 more votes than Clinton in Indiana, and Jason Kander, who received about 230,00 more votes in Missouri. They both lost, by wide margins, in states where Clinton received just 38 percent of the vote.

Not surprisingly, given their near-complete dependence on Clinton, Senate Democrats only won three of those 11 races – in Illinois, Nevada and New Hampshire. Those were the only three states of that bunch that Clinton put in her electoral vote column.

It seemed like such a smart strategy a year ago, as the Republican primary became increasingly bitter and GOP incumbents in swing states fretted about their top-of-the-ticket problem. With fewer voters than ever splitting tickets among presidential candidates and down-ballot races, Democrats believed they could hitch their wagon to Clinton for victory.

There was no overhaul to the party’s agenda after the 2014 midterms left Democrats in the minority and needing a five-seat gain this fall to reclaim the majority.

Democrats talked about getting a better “message,” to a degree that it was clear many didn’t understand the difference between a message and an agenda. The message is the thematic umbrella – Clinton’s “Stronger Together” or Trump’s “Make America Great Again” — while the more difficult part is the granular policy agenda.

In 2012 Vice President Joe Biden struck gold with a campaign message: “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” But President Barack Obama’s successful reelection campaign had a broad agenda focused heavily on tax fairness, pledging tax cuts for those making less than $250,000 and to raise taxes on the rich.

By 2014 Democrats did not have a broad agenda. Instead, they proposed a minimum-wage increase and refinanced college loans for young voters, a guarantee of equal pay for equal work and new immigration laws for Latino voters. This fall, the only significant update was a more robust proposal to make college affordable.

“The problem is they talk to people in segments,” Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, who is challenging House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told The Washington Post’s Daily 202 last weekend. “Here’s our LGBT community. Here’s our labor guy. That doesn’t work. You stop becoming a national party. That’s what happened.”

Aside from regional accent, or delivery style, Democrats sounded remarkably similar. In campaign appearances two days apart in mid-October, nothing distinguished Catherine Cortez Masto, the former Nevada attorney general, from Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Ariz., in their policy positions.

Cortez Masto won the seat of retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid, D-Nev., finishing within a few thousand votes of Clinton’s winning margin. Kirkpatrick got blown out by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., as Clinton fell far short there.

Democrats mocked Republican efforts to localize their races and predicted Trump would define those campaigns. But in at least four states GOP incumbents broke free of their nominee, winning reelection by a significantly larger margin than Trump won their state: McCain and Sens. Ron Johnson, Wis., Rob Portman, Ohio, and Marco Rubio, Fla.

McCain, Portman and Rubio put away their challengers so early that their national party didn’t spend resources there, pouring that money into other critical races.

In the campaign’s final weeks, the undecided voters, particularly in working-class regions, broke sharply against Clinton. Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., the incoming minority leader, acknowledged that Trump’s anti-trade agenda and vow to bring back manufacturing jobs connected with some traditional Democrats.

“It’s my view that the Democratic aspects of his economic program is what brought the blue-collar vote to him, more than anything else, trade being the tip of the spear,” Schumer said in an interview last week with The Washington Post.

So, as the bottom fell out of Clinton’s campaign, Democratic Senate candidates had little to fall back on. Trump even became a bonus for some Republicans, winning by huge margins in Missouri and Indiana and by a larger-than-expected four percentage points in North Carolina.

Some voters did split tickets for Trump and a Democrat – just not very much in Senate races. In Pennsylvania Democrats swept statewide races for attorney general, auditor and treasurer, all receiving more votes than Clinton or McGinty.

In the North Carolina governor’s race, Democrat Roy Cooper is leading and likely to be declared the winner. He received 180,000 more votes than the party’s Senate nominee, Deborah Ross.

That’s the margin between winning and losing.

(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Paul Kane —- Paul Kane covers Congress and politics for the Washington Post.