Let me take the first crack at some discussion of what happened last night, although it is complicated by results that remain unknown in several races.
1. The evening was very short on presidential election drama. In my mind the election was over at about 7:30 EST. When John McCain was leading 51-49 in the early returns from Indiana (gathered from the most rural parts of the state) that was all we needed to see. A Republican who needs to struggle in order to hold Indiana is deeply fucked.
After that data was released it simply became a matter of Obama's margin of victory in the Electoral College.
2. I will talk about this at length next week but, for all intents and purposes, polling was dead-on in this election. I rip on polls a lot and I listened to eight weeks of people dreaming up scenarios (fueled by either Democratic pessimism or GOP optimism) about how they were totally fabricated and unreliable. But it turns out that aggregated state polling was essentially 100% correct in the presidential race. Blue states went blue. Red states went red. Toss-up states had extremely tight margins of victory for one candidate or the other.
3. The uncompetitiveness of PA is the only state-level result that surprised me (although Obama's 200,000 vote win in Florida was a pleasant surprise too). Perhaps the GOP spin about how McCain was pouring every dollar into PA and pinning all of his hopes on it subconsciously affected my expectations. Given all the time, money, and talk that McCain poured into the state I expected a narrow Obama win similar to Kerry's razor-thin win in 2004. Turns out the state was a total blowout – with exactly the 10-12 point gap predicted by the polls.
4. In the Senate races, nothing shocked me except Ted Stevens. I am floored by that one. Not only did Begich lead before the indictments, but the few post-indictment polls showed double-digit margins.
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It's embarrassing to whiff on a race like this and I'd love to say that I have a convenient explanation for what happened. Unfortunately I'm speechless. Every result, even when I guessed wrong, made sense except for this one.
5. We're going to be waiting several days, possibly weeks, for Franken-Coleman results. Not until the last military and absentee ballots arrive in the mail will we know who squeaked out a win.
6. With overwhelmingly Democratic Lane County (Eugene) still only 25% reported, I like Jeff Merkley's chances to close a 14,000-vote gap with Gordon Smith.
Merkley also leads big in Clatsop and Benton counties, both of which are only half-reported.
7. The combined races that will be decided by less than 0.5% of the vote – OR and MN Senate seats as well as presidential results in NC, IN, and MO – make clear that turnout matters. That a state like MO can have 4.3 million ballots cast with only 6,000 votes separating the candidates should remind us all that, in many instances, our vote does actually count. Of course, I suppose many more races support the argument that staying home is OK too. But let's be optimistic for the moment.
8. Excepting the Senators from Maine, the purge of New England Republicans from Congress is complete with the defeat of Christopher Shays.
9. Fox News may have hit a new low last night. I am convinced that their audience is 50% talk radio fanboys and 50% hipsters watching them ironically to mock them. Brit Hume's effort to lead a panel chat on "Will a President Obama raise our taxes or just jack up the deficit to pay for his trillions in new spending?" as the results rolled in was too amusing to be sincere. Extra credit for trotting out Juan Williams (the Clarence Page-style "inarticulate token black liberal" character) who couldn't name a single policy proposal Obama made during the campaign.
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10. The right-wingers trying to take solace in how "close" McCain made the race should note that this is the most sizeable margin of victory since 1988. George W. Bush could only envy this kind of win. I think "mandates" are bullshit, but America went more solidly for Obama than it ever did for Our Leader.
More later. Add your observations and thoughts.
J. Dryden says:
My assumption regarding Stevens is that, like the Missouri voters who chose a corpse over John Ashcroft, the people of Alaska voted for a guy who will have to be replaced by a governor sympathetic to the cause, and will thus keep the Senate seat in the red. So, not so much a vote for Mr. I'm-Off-To-The-Pokey, but rather for the party.
Scott says:
It appears as if the GA senate race is going to a runoff. Chambliss' vote total dropped below 50% last night with just a few precincts left in metro Atlanta, which were going heavily towards Martin.
I think Martin is screwed for a couple of reasons. First, the runoff would drop the Libertarian candidate, who had about 3.5 percent of the vote. One would imagine that most of the Libertarian voters would pick Chambliss over Martin. Second, there are no Obama coattails here any more. Martin would have to win this on his own merits and it didn't look like he could do it when Obama was at the top of the ballot.
On a related note, doesn't Ted "series of tubes" Stevens' reelection essentially mean that Sarah Palin will be the next senator from Alaska?
In the immortal words of Seymour Skinner, "prove me wrong kids, prove me wrong."
Ed says:
I suppose I shouldn't shutter the Martin-Chambliss race yet since it will continue beyond Election Day, but I tend to agree that the runoff will not produce an appreciably different result. You never know, though.
Brandon says:
Dryden, you're probably right about Alaskans casting a vote for the party, knowing that even if Stevens can't serve that another Pub will take the seat. Unless there was some kind of backlash against the Stevens trial, like how dare they mistreat our guy like that…I don't know Alaskan politics enough to speculate.
Michael says:
Two lite observations: 1) Obama looked amazingly rested after what had to have been a wearying campaign; 2) I could only half-listen to his speech because I was trying to simultaneously watch the network crawl, but it had some pitch-perfect moments.
Everything I hear and read about Obama organization is discipline, discipline, discipline. People I've talked to who have either volunteered or are actually employed by the campaign say that they've never seen anything like it. The use of technology, the money management, and the messaging have all exceeded previous efforts by huge margins.