Texas Sen.-elect Ted Cruz (R-TX) advised the Republican Party to rebrand itself under a banner of “Opportunity Conservatism” during a sweeping speech that will only stoke speculation about a 2016 presidential run, Politico reports.

Said Cruz: “Why did we lose? It wasn’t as the media would tell you: because the American people embraced big government, Barack Obama’s spending and debt and taxes… That wasn’t what happened. I’m going to suggest to you a very simple reason why we lost the election: We didn’t win the argument. We didn’t even make the argument.”

First Read: “We’ve seen plenty of new senators come in with plenty of hype and
attention (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Marco Rubio), but those worked
hard to keep expectations down. This is something else entirely.”

According to a statistical method that ranks candidates by ideology, Harry Enten notes New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) “simply doesn’t have that liberal allure” that Hillary Clinton or other popular Democrats mentioned as possible presidential candidates in 2016.

“If these numbers are to believed, the possible 2016 roster of candidates will position Cuomo and Warner as ideologically conservative Democrats, Biden and O’Malley as moderate Democrats, Clinton, Patrick, and Schweitzer as liberal Democrats, and Warren as a very liberal Democrat.”

A new Public Policy Polling survey in New Jersey finds that if Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) was to retire — or even if he doesn’t — Newark Mayor Cory Booker (D) has a clear shot at the seat.

Key findings: By a 59% to 22% margin Democrats say they would prefer their candidate in 2014 be Booker than Lautenberg. And Booker emerges as the strong favorite in an open seat situation too. 48% would want Booker as their candidate compared to 17% for Rob Andrews and 13% for Frank Pallone, both Congressmen who have shown an interest in moving up.

As the votes keep coming in, David Wasserman notes President Obama’s national lead over Mitt Romney is now 50.9% to 47.4%.

First Read: “That’s a bigger (and more decisive) margin that Bush’s victory over John Kerry in 2004 (which was Bush 50.7% and Kerry 48.2%). What’s more, the president’s lead has grown to close to 3 points in Ohio, 4 points in Virginia and 6 points in Colorado. One doesn’t win Colorado by six points without winning swing voters; there isn’t a big-enough Democratic base to make that argument.”

Rep. Mike McIntyre (D-NC) finally won his congressional race, “earning a razor-thin victory over his Republican challenger after a machine recount produced hardly any change in the margin,” the AP reports.

The 113th Congress will be represented by 201 Democrats and 234 Republicans. Democrats entered the 2012 elections holding 190 House seats — but due to vacancies in three Democrat-held seats, they gained eight seats overall.

Campaign managers, strategists and journalists have gathered at Harvard for an off-the-record conference on what happened during the 2012 presidential campaign.

It’s fascinating — and I’ll have more when audio transcripts are released — but you’ll want to catch a live stream of a public event tonight at 6 pm ET with top Obama and Romney strategists.

“Some do it professionally. Some were entertainers. I looked down the debate stage, and half
of them were probably on Fox contracts at one point in their career.
You do that. You write some books. You go out and you sell some more.
You get a radio gig or a TV gig out of it or something. And it’s like,
you say to yourself, the barriers of entry to this game are pretty damn
low.”

— Jon Huntsman, quoted by the Huffington Post, on the “corrosive” Republican primary process.

Howard Kurtz notes President Obama will host Mitt Romney for lunch at the White House today — “a gracious move that makes the president appear bipartisan” — and that the failed GOP candidate faces a “stark choice” how he can handle it.

“He can attend the private lunch, slip into a waiting car, and say nothing to the media stakeout on the White House driveway, retreating into the cone of silence that has enveloped him since the night of Nov. 6. Or he can step up to the microphones, sketch out his vision of working with the administration, maybe do a television interview or two.”

“It’s not that Romney needs to do this to salvage his political career; that part of his life is over. It’s that he needs to recast how he is remembered as a 2012 candidate.”

The Week: Three reasons Obama’s lunch with Romney is a good idea.

Remember those “weirdly over-familiar and widely mocked” e-mails from President Obama’s re-election campaign this year with subject lines such as “Join me for dinner?” or “It’s officially over”?

Josh Green finds they worked, and it was because of testing Obama’s digital team did – testing they refused to discuss during the campaign – to determine which subject lines were the most grabbing, how much they should ask people for, and even how messages should be formatted.

The testing found the best subject lines were the most casual and “Hey” was actually the most effective.

Also interesting was that people didn’t seem to unsubscribe no matter how many emails they were sent. “At the end, we had 18 or 20 writers going at this stuff for as many hours a day as they could stay awake. The data didn’t show any negative consequences to sending more.”

The vote count still isn’t 100 percent final, but Markos Moulitsas notes that President Obama could have lost every state he won by less than 5.4 percentage points — Florida, Ohio, and Virginia — and he still would’ve won the electoral vote 272 to 266.

He also notes Obama hit 48% in every battleground state while Mitt Romney managed it in just two of them.