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OK, so it might be a bit premature to get that "New Pittsburgh" tattoo after all.

That's one of the nagging doubts some progressives went to bed with last night, after Tuesday's Democratic primary resulted in defeats for both Tom Michalow and state Rep. Erin Molchany. Both candidates were running in city/suburb hybrid districts, against familiar Democratic names. Molchany was squaring off against Harry Readshaw, a 10-term incumbent into whose South Hills district Molchany was drawn; Michalow was battling North Side Rep. Adam Ravenstahl, a two-term rep and brother of Pittsburgh's former mayor.

And for progressives, what may be most worrisome is not whether they lost, but how:

It was enough to make some know-it-all Wednesday morning quarterbacks wonder: Could progressives have won Michalow's race if they'd invested a bit more of the energy they put into Molchany's? (There's an even darker possibility, of course: What if Michalow did better because he didn't have as much progressive "help"?)

It's not that everyone was blindsided by Tuesday's results. I've been told by various sources that Molchany's campaign had internal polling which showed that she faced a steep uphill climb: Her drubbing on Tuesday was actually not quite as bad as her own polling predicted it could be. Campaign consultant Matt Merriman-Preston, who worked on both the Molchany and Michalow campaigns, says that while no such poll was carried out for Michalow, he had field reports -- "which turned out to be fairly accurate" -- that the race would be tight.

But Merriman-Preston, a celebrated architect of Peduto's political strategy, was wary of drawing too many lessons from yesterday's primary.

"There's only a big-picture takeaway when I win," jokes Merriman-Preston, with a somewhat rueful laugh. "When I lose, it's all just minutiae."

Or in Molchany's case, cartography. Redistricting forced Molchany into a district -- made up of city South Hills neighborhoods as well as Brentwood and Baldwin -- that was mostly Readshaw's home turf. Molchany did well in the portion of the new district she brought with her: In the city's 19th ward of Beechview, for example, she trounced Readshaw 75-25. But Readshaw beat her by a similar margin in his base of Carrick, and in the suburbs he steamrolled her by three-to-one.

"I'm still parsing the numbers, but it was definitely geography," Merriman-Preston said this morning. "When you lose by 20 points instead of 20 votes, there's more going into it at the beginning."

And while Molchany became a cause clbre for Peduto and like-minded allies, it's not always clear how much that support helped in the heavily white, working-class district. Take, for example, Peduto's ad endorsing Molchany. While Peduto's backing may have inspired progressives, it also prominently mentions Molchany's work with Planned Parenthood, which took a strong role in her campaign . But among political insiders there is speculation that, in a socially conservative district, name-dropping an abortion-rights group may have been a double-edged sword.

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In cross-town legislative races, a combination punch for city progressives