About Last Night

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid celebrates his victory at his election night party in Las Vegas on November 2. (REUTERS/Las Vegas Sun/Steve Marcus)

–Our colleague David Von Drehle wraps up Tuesday’s contests and spins things forward.

If you take the President’s 2008 victory map and subtract the states where his fellow Democrats were obliterated in major races on Tuesday — Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida — you discover that Obama’s 2008 landslide has evaporated into a dead heat.

–Looking over the electoral map as a whole, Republicans outperformed already high expectations in House races, blowing out Democrats in places like Virginia, where Reps. Boucher, Nye and Perriello all went down in defeat. They’ve netted 60 seats at current count with a few more likely headed down the pike. In the Senate, the GOP picked up a slightly more modest 6 seats (for now.) With Michael Bennet and Patty Murray looking likely to hold on, a Republican-plus-Lieberman-Ben Nelson legislative coalition doesn’t seem to be much of a threat — the Democratic leadership will have a decidedly slimmer but stable majority. Perhaps the most meaningful Republican victories last night were in the state legislatures and governor’s mansions. Redistricting will shape the electoral map for the next 10 years and relevant GOP gains were impressive. Just take Minnesota: Republicans won control of the state senate there for the first time in decades and wiped out a 87-47 (!) Democratic Farm Labor majority in the house.

UPDATE: Bennet has won in Colorado and Alex Sink has conceded in Florida.

–There are still some key races that have not yet been decided. As I mentioned before, Murray and Bennet’s re-election bids are still pending, but the math looks good for both of them. Lisa Murkowski’s write-in bid in Alaska could drag on for a really long time; the lawyers will fight this one to the last. Governor’s races in Florida, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon and Vermont remain in the air. 

–Mitt Romney, through his favored avenue of the carefully timed op-ed, calls it: Obama is in “political crisis.” (The president is at very least “introspective.”)

–Christian Heinze looks at how the 2012 field fared in the exit polls.

–And despite it being the day after the midterms, I will resist the siren call to answer Double Rainbow guy’s eternal question, “What does it meeeean?”