It will take some more time before we know for sure whether Republicans could have won a Senate majority if Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell did not win their primaries. But for now, we know that the Senate will remain in Democratic hands. But this majority is not likely to last long, even if Democrats [...]
Update: A few minutes before 1 a.m., the RGA announced they had won the majority of governors’ seats. Going into the election, Democrats held an edge of 26 to the Republicans’ 24. Haley Scores One for the Mama Grizzlies As Election Night wore on, the South Carolina gubernatorial race stayed nail-bite tight. At 9:30, with [...]
One of the most stunning stories of the 201o wave that didn’t wash over everyone: Meg Whitman, the $160 million CEO woman, who appears to have lost, according to exit polls, to a lifelong politician from the 1970s in a change election. How did this happen? What did she spend $141.5 million of her own [...]
House and Senate districts formerly held by political bigwigs have gone both ways tonight. Vice President Joe Biden’s former Senate seat in Delaware went to Democrat Chris Coons, and Rahm Emanuel’s former House seat, the Land of Lincoln’s 5th District, stayed within the party, with Democrat Mike Quigley racking up some 70% of the vote. [...]
In the beginning, there was the 23rd district of New York. Sarah Palin shook up a 2009 special election in that district – left vacant when Obama appointed Republican John McHugh secretary of the Army – by endorsing conservative Doug Hoffman. The accountant who lived outside the district and who ran on the Conservative Party [...]
There’s no doubt that voting for the Affordable Care Act made lots of Democratic incumbents vulnerable this year. Still, it’s difficult to attribute losses to a single issue. Exit polls indicate jobs and the economy were far more important to voters this year. But there are clear signs that pundits who predicted high-profile losses for [...]
In 1993, Russ Feingold arrived at the U.S. Senate as a freshman with a number one priority: Deficit reduction. (Watch the C-Span video of his welcome press conference here.) Tonight, about 18 years later, one of the Senate’s liberal lions lost his reelection. He had fashioned himself into a reliable independent voice in the Senate, [...]
When I interviewed Chris Van Hollen last week he wrote down a name on a piece of paper and placed it at the back of my notebook. The name, said Hollen, who is in charge of electing Democrats to the House, was his dark horse candidate — someone he thought would defy all odds. I [...]
The Denver Post called it the most bizarre gubernatorial campaign in state history. Indeed. In the end, Democrat John Hickenlooper, mayor of Denver, cruised to victory with a large margin. But it all could have gone very differently. Republican Dan Maes’ campaign was a complete disaster. After knocking of the GOP favorite Scot McInnis, who [...]
Tom Perriello’s loss in Virginia’s 5th District is rightly being heralded as symbolic. But Republican Morgan Griffith’s upset over Rick Boucher in Virginia’s 9th District, which covers a rural swath of the southwestern part of the state, is equally significant. Boucher was part of an endangered species, the conservative Southern Democrat. This group is a [...]
