It is to be hoped that by the end of the day, Alison Lundergan Grimes will have, with the help of her political consultants, come up with a coherent answer to the question of whether she voted for Barack Obama for president in 2012. This evening’s debate with Republican incumbent Mitch McConnell is probably the last chance for the Democrat to end the jokes about her going mum about her vote and save what’s left of her chances to win a Kentucky Senate seat next month. But even if we set aside the justified criticisms of Grimes’s foolishness, the flap over this issue illustrates how the president’s boast about his policies being on the ballot in 2014 is very much to the point.

Grimes raised eyebrows when she ignored a reporter’s question about whether she voted for the head of her party in 2012 a couple of weeks ago. But when she doggedly refused to answer the same simple question during a taped meeting with the editorial board of the Louisville Courier-Journal, even liberals were left scratching their heads. It may be hyperbole to dub her efforts as “The Worst Senate Campaign of the Year,” as the New Republic did in their headline of a report about her, but it’s fair to say that she must be considered the biggest disappointment for Democrats.

As TNR’s Jason Zengerle put it, for a woman who was an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2012 to talk about “the sanctity of the ballot box” when asked if she backed the president showed that she thought “voters were idiots.” While Zengerle wouldn’t go as far as NBC’s Chuck Todd, who said the answer “disqualified her” for the Senate, it’s clear that the enormous funds that Democratic donors from both coasts have poured into the effort to unseat the GOP minority leader have been wasted.

Zengerle puts most of the blame for this debacle on Grimes and her father, veteran politician Jerry Lundergan, who has been calling the shots on his daughter’s campaign. Having convinced themselves that McConnell would use anything she said, even the obvious observation that a Democrat voted for her party’s ticket, as fodder for attack ads, the candidate has spent the last year and a half in a “defensive crouch.” While Democratic operatives, including Bill Clinton, touted Grimes as a talented politician with a future when they were doing their best to steer actress Ashley Judd away from a possible run for the Kentucky seat last year, she hasn’t lived up to the billing.

The result of her caution is that she has come across to voters as being almost as unlikeable as the notoriously unpopular McConnell. Indeed, right now some Kentucky Democrats might be wondering if they made a mistake in rejecting Judd. McConnell would have skewered her as a “Hollywood liberal” but she would also have been less obviously scripted, more authentic, as well as more likeable than Grimes.

Nevertheless, some of the backbiting on the left about Grimes seems to stem from the natural instinct of both parties’ bases to criticize candidates that stray from their ideological biases. Grimes has tried, albeit with minimal success to run as a centrist, something for which liberals will never forgive her if she loses in the same way conservatives despise moderate Republicans.

But the focus on Grimes ignores the main problem Democrats are dealing with this fall: Barack Obama.

Two weeks ago, the president boasted that while his name wasn’t on the ballot this fall, his policies were. That was a terrible political error but also a truthful assessment of the situation. Though local issues and the strengths and weakness of Senate candidates are crucial factors in determining the outcome of the midterms, the one unifying theme of this election remains the record of the incumbent president. With growing chaos abroad, economic stagnation, and a myriad of scandals at home, the country is ready to give the president a vote of no confidence after six years. While it is disingenuous of someone like Grimes to pretend that she can avoid being tagged as an Obama supporter, there is good reason for her to fear being identified as someone who will loyally back the president’s agenda should she help the Democrats hold onto the Senate.

The problem for Grimes is the same for every other Democrat not running in a deep-blue state. She can run but she can’t hide from the president. Just as the messianic hopes that Obama engendered helped his party in 2008, dissatisfaction with a failed presidency is bound to doom many Democrats in 2014 whether or not they run terrible campaigns.