After a walloping, Democrats regroup – and failed candidate Shawn Bagley aims to lead.

After staggering losses in the midterm elections, Democrats spent a few days licking their wounds – Republicans won seven Senate seats and 14 House seats – then started mapping out a strategy to take back Congress and win the presidency in 2016.

“I’m not going to gloss over the facts,” U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Florida, and chair of the Democratic National Committee wrote in a Nov. 8 email to DNC members. “On [Election Day], the Republicans had a good night. We didn’t.

“Within the next couple of weeks, I’m going to name a committee of key party stakeholders and experts, who will spearhead an examination of what went wrong.”

Salinas-based DNC member Shawn Bagley’s take on the expert panel: “Heck with you, I want to hear from activists.” He’s going on a listening tour called “We Have To Do Better,” with a stop in Santa Cruz Nov. 12, and the Democratic Party’s Center for Change in Seaside Nov. 20 at 6pm.

That fits with Bagley’s self-made role as an oddball operative in the Democratic party machine. In 2012, he won one of 19 open seats in a pool of 80 candidates for the DNC, becoming the first member from the Central Coast. He’s using that platform to attempt to influence Congress – and to wrest power from urban blocs.

“L.A. is the center of the Democratic Party universe,” Bagley says. “The rest of the state has to fight against them.”

Bagley supported three Democrats in rural congressional districts – Amanda Renteria and Michael Eggman in the Central Valley and Heidi Hall in the northeastern corner of California – and all three lost.

“YOU GET SO BURNT OUT RUNNING AS A CANDIDATE.”

Hall says Bagley delivered critical support to her campaign, where other Democrats passed her district by, thinking it was unwinnable. She’s considering another bid for Congress in 2016. “It would be so helpful if the national party could support start-up campaigns like mine, even if it’s not part of the national strategy,” she says.

Bagley also ran for office himself, challenging State Sen. Anthony Cannella, R-Ceres. He lost, badly; the moderate Central Valley Republican kept his seat with 61.5-percent of the vote, as of the latest count Nov. 10.

Bagley barely expected victory, but he was hopeful about winning at least one of the three congressional seats, and Dems regaining a two-thirds supermajority in the state Senate. Those plans are mapped out with stickers and newspaper clippings, taped to the walls of the “war room” in his home in the Gabilan foothills east of Salinas.

“All my goals, I got slaughtered,” Bagley says. “It was brutal.”

He tallies his failed campaign effort in numbers: 14,000 miles on his Chevy Volt, eight county fairs, 20 cities where he walked door-to-door.

“I thought Shawn shouldn’t have diverted his energy from being in the DNC to being a candidate,” says U.S. Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel, who kept his seat in a landslide victory. “It might really hurt him in the future, you get so burnt out running as a candidate.

“The other side is I’m glad he did, because nothing teaches you better than the trenches. He probably will be one of the most effective DNC members.”

Bagley says he’s unlikely to run for state Senate again, but he is up for re-election for his DNC seat in 2016.