Honestly, the Right's willingness to so flagrantly abuse the system is only a compounding factor - we'd still have a problem even if they were relatively scrupulous, because they pay attention to the smaller races and put real effort into locking them down. They care about the lower courts and the state legislatures and the god damn school boards for crying out loud. The Dems, meanwhile, are lucky if they manage to all get facing in the same direction every four years,
if the Presidential candidate is sufficiently tingle-inducing.
Of course, the fact that the Right has no scruples makes all of this much, much worse.
I don't know if I've got anything but raw cynicism left. Maybe the midterms will go okay, but I can't even muster much hope for that.