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 are able to keep Joe Lieberman …
Key GOP Gov’nor Wins in SC, WI and OH
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 almost …
The Meg Whitman Lesson: Candidates Win, Not Consultants
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 money on? Why didn’t it …
The Symbolic Seats
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. …
Doug Hoffman a Spoiler Once Again
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 line had …
Mixed Results on the Health Reform Referendum
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 …
Russ Feingold Falls: A Look Back
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, …
A Dark Horse Loses
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 promised I wouldn’t look at the paper until today and I …
Tom Tancredo Goes Down
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 …
The Death of the Southern Democrat
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 …
Ballot Measure Update: Oklahoma Safe From Sharia Law
The state’s voters handily approve Prop 755:
State Rep. Rex Duncan, R-Sand Springs, authored State Question 755, which requires state courts to rely only on federal and state laws when deciding cases, and forbids courts to consider international law or Sharia law. It will appear on the Nov. 2 general election ballot.
Duncan said he
…
The Old Bulls Get Bucked, And Some Fall Off
While the Democrats’ ’06 & ’08 classes – most of whom were elected in swing seats that voted for either George W. Bush in 2004 or John McCain in 2008 or both — will likely be decimated tonight, what makes this election more of a tsunami is the endangered Old Bulls. Remember, in 2006 networks weren’t calling the House flipping …
In Victory Speech, Rand Paul Misquotes Thomas Jefferson
Maybe there is something in the tea–this habit that Tea Party candidates have, on election night, of misquoting the nation’s founding fathers. Just now, in a rousing victory speech, Kentucky’s newest senator, Rand Paul, announced, “Thomas Jefferson wrote, ‘That government is best that governs least.'”
Except, no. He didn’t. Henry …