THAT'S ALL FOLKS... The election's over, and so is this blog. We've had a lot of fun tracking the polls, campaign ads, dirty tricks, and down-to-the-wire ballot counts of the midterms here at "Showdown '06." But now that even George Allen has called it a day, it's time for us to, too.

We're shutting down the election-focused blog, but we'll be launching a new staff blog in this space soon. After all, we've got a lot to keep track of now that Democrats will be running Congress, and the prospect of real change might be just around the corner.

That's all folks.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE... There's a weird (though also, of course, familiar) refusal to make judgments in John Dickerson's Slate piece about the return of Trent Lott. I know we're all supposed to forget about the Strom Thurmond thing now, but isn't there something at least noteworthy about the fact that Senate Republicans are willing to rehabilitate a guy who said, essentially, that he'd rather be living in a segregated country? Would it be out of line to suggest that Lott's return to leadership tells us something about the priorities of Senate Republicans, and about the party more generally?

This is a line of inquiry that doesn't seem to interest Dickerson, who describes Lott's sin as a "bone-headed statement" comparable to John Kerry's recent botched joke. Instead, he spends a while relating a story about Lott and Teddy Kennedy making nice during the Clinton impeachment hearings, in the service of making the plausible case that Lott's record as a "dealmaker" could mean that he'll work productively with Democrats when it suits him. There are also the obligatory jokes about Lott's hair.

I thought the whole thing with writing for Slate, as opposed to say, Time, is that you get to express an opinion. So either Dickerson just can't bring himself to do that, or he really believes there isn't anything of interest in the return to leadership of a man who said he wished a segregationist had been elected president. Hard to say which would be worse.

SENATORS' SEATS ... Incoming senators have their committee assignments. Montana's Sen-elect Jon Tester has been tapped for the Energy committee, which ought to be a hotspot over the next two years. I'm a little disappointed, though, that the first organic farmer turned senator didn't also get a spot on the Agriculture committee; next year's Farm Bill promises to be an epic showdown among traditional ag interests, conservationists, and energy proponents -- Tester would have been welcome.

I'd been waiting to hear whether Virginia's Sen-elect Jim Webb would be tapped for Armed Services, Foreign Relations, or Veterans Affairs -- it turns out he was tapped for all three. All the more reason for the administration to hope to see Bob Gates confirmed before the New Year.

Overheard...While having a sidewalk lunch today at Talay Thai on Capitol Hill, I overheard two young, very well dressed people praying before digging into their red curry dishes. Luckily, I had my notebook. An excerpt: "Bless us as we search for new jobs."

HELLO MEL... So Mel Martinez is taking the reins at the RNC. Reporters have been quick to point out that Martinez was the author of a much-publicized memo urging Republicans to seize the political advantage presented by Terri Schiavo, and that he has some questionable connections to Jack Abramoff, via Bob Ney. It’s not all that shocking that a few skeletons lurk in his closet (this year proficiency in some kind of political skullduggery practically seems to be a requirement for consideration for the RNC gig.) What Martinez’s hire really signals is the growing alarm among some Republicans at just how badly their image among Latinos has been damaged. Martinez spent a good deal of time this year trying to persuade House Republicans not to cause a political train wreck by pushing for an excessively harsh immigration bill. Now he gets to fix up the train.

And Martinez is no slouch. Even though he wasn’t up for re-election this year, he was a prodigious fundraiser and campaigner for his colleagues, including those in the toughest races, like Rick Santorum. In other words, he seems to have a lot of energy for lost causes, which is increasingly what the GOP’s Hispanic outreach resembles these days.

HANDICAPPING HOYER AND MURTHA... Could Nancy Pelosi's announcement of support for her old friend John Murtha in his race with Steny Hoyer for majority leader give the Pennsylvanian a chance of pulling off an upset? A knowledgeable former Hoyer aide thinks it will have "some impact", but he puts Pelosi's move in the "least-she-can-do" category, and still strongly expects Hoyer to prevail.

By my source's count, Hoyer had support from 110 returning members. Over the weekend, Hoyer announced that he had the backing of 21 of the 40 new members, though my source thinks he'll have more beyond that. That gives Hoyer at least 131 members in his camp, more than enough to put him over the top.

The former Hoyer aide thinks Hoyer's hectic travel schedule -- in which he appeared on behalf of Democratic candidates in around 60 districts in the race's final 10 days -- made the difference. Hoyer, he says, "can go into the moderate districts where Jack [Murtha] can't go. [Murtha's] a pretty polarizing figure in lets say a third of the country, and the schedule reflected that."

HOYER V. MURTHA...I'm kind of ambivalent about the big Hoyer-Murtha batttle for majority leader. I'm no huge fan of Hoyer's ties to K Street and his general establishment-based political style, but, as Matt Yglesias points out, it's not as if Murtha is a whole lot more progressive. Indeed, when Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released its annual "Most Corrupt Members of Congress" report in September, Murtha and the disgraced Reps. William Jefferson and Alan Mollohan were the only Democrats to make the list.

—Zachary Roth 2:54 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (2)

Today’s Post has a comprehensive rundown of the deceptive tactics outgoing Maryland governor Bob Ehrlich and prospective Republican National Committee head Michael Steele used in Maryland on election day (after witnessing them firsthand last Tuesday, I blogged about them here and here). It turns out that this wasn’t the first time Ehrlich and Steele resorted to an unsavory election-day strategy. As The New Republic reported a couple of weeks ago, in 2002 they hired residents of a DC homeless shelter and students from Bowie State University to hand out misleading literature. The story gets worse...

—Washington Monthly Election Day Blog 2:13 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (1)

WHY REPUBLICANS CAN'T GOVERN FROM THE CENTER... A year ago, California Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar was in a heap of trouble. He had tried to pass, in swaggeringly partisan fashion, four controversial ballot measures. All of them lost, and his popularity was plummeting. To right himself, the governor purged his staff, reached out to the Democratic legislature, and embraced popular center-left positions on global warming, prescription drugs, and the minimum wage. His popularity soared. Last week, he won reelection with 55 percent of the vote.

President George W. Bush also found himself in trouble last year. His Social Security privatization plan had flopped. Iraq was descending into chaos. Corruption scandals shook Congress. But rather than admitting error, moderating his tone and reaching out to his opponents, the president did the opposite. He painted critics of his war policies as terrorist appeasers, gambling that support from the GOP’s conservative base would get the party through the midterms—a strategy most congressional Republicans supported. That decision to “stay the course”—in Iraq and with the conservative Republican agenda generally--failed to forestall, and probably intensified, last week’s political bloodbath.

The midterm elections reaffirmed an old political truth: no party that veers too far from the ideological center of America can hold power for long.

—Paul Glastris 10:07 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (11)

Washington has been chewing over election-related numbers for three straight days now, and I’d like to highlight one particular set of data that’s probably giving Karl Rove a nasty case of indigestion: the effect of the immigration debate on the midterm results.

A few months ago, most House Republicans thought that border security would be, as Rep. Jeff Flake put it to me, their “magic carpet ride” to re-election. Moderate and pro-business elements within the party tried to convince them that a hard-line stance a) wouldn’t actually deliver that many votes, and b) would incinerate Karl Rove’s efforts to weld Latinos to a long-term Republican majority. And on both counts (as we anticipated in October) they were right.

—Rachel Morris 6:43 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (3)

2008 HOMETOWN HEROES ... Percent of voters in states with likely presidential candidates who think their hometown guy/gal would make a good president (data from AEI Election Watch seminar). In bold are those cases when contender's party affiliation is NOT the same as the way the state voted in 2004.

MORE ON FORD... Debra raises an interesting point about the Ford race, but it seems a bit incomplete. I'm prepared to believe that the notion that Ford dates white women could have cost him support among black women. But nowhere in the post Debra links to is there any actual statistical evidence that either A) Ford's support among black women, or B) the rate at which black women voted, were lower than what might have been expected for a black Democrat running in Tennessee. There are, I'm pretty sure, actual numbers on that stuff (anyone have them?), and I'd want to see those numbers before drawing any conclusions.

UPDATE: Thanks to the magic of the internets, those numbers turn out to be just a few clicks away. According to exit polling, Ford won 91 percent of the vote among non-white women (only 2 percent of voters were neither black nor white, so "non-white" essentially means "black" here). Non-white women made up 9 percent of the electorate, while non-white men accounted for only 6 percent. In addition, blacks as a whole went for Ford by 95 percent to five, and they made up 13 percent of the electorate.

This doesn't settle the issue, because maybe Ford could have been expected to get more than 91 percent (or maybe non-white women could have been expected to make up more than 9 percent of the electorate) were it not for the dating-white-women issue. But, looking at these numbers, it doesn't appear that a drop in support among black women, as a result of the dating issue, was a real factor in his loss.

Black Women: White Bigotry's Unindicited co-Conspiritors? As much discussion as their was around the 'jungle fever' campaign aimed at Harold Ford's supposed lust for white women, the one group which escaped scrutiny in his downfall is black women. Anyone who pays attention to black culture knows of the rift between black men and black women, most particularly highlighted by misogynist rap music and black women's low marriage rates.

Now, Booker Rising, a website for young moderate-conservative blacks highlights the obvious but mostly-overlooked point: that Ford, with his penchant for 'non partisan' dating, shall we say, may have been the straw that broke Tennessee's sisters' backs.

NOT SO FAST...Could corruption be 2006's version of "values"?

We all remember how in 2004, the immediate post-election consensus was that "moral values" issues were the key to Bush's win. But it quickly emerged that a poorly-worded exit poll quesiton had probably exaggerated the actual influence of those issues. As time went on, the values explanation was replaced by the (probably correct) view that concerns over national security were more important.

This year, a CNN exit poll showed that voters named "corruption" as their top voting issue. But at an event I just attended, sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future, Democratic uber-pollster Stan Greenberg challenged that notion. According to his polling, Iraq was far, far more important than corruption -- or any other issue. Indeed, only 28% of voters thought there were real differences betweeen their two candidates on the issue of "special interests" (Admittedly, "special interests" and corruption aren't exactly the same thing, but you get the idea.)

Don't get me wrong: Like Nick, I'd love to see Democrats make lobbying and ethics reform a priority. In fact, I'm on record arguing that doing so is crucial to sustaining a long-term majority. But the comforting conclusion that this election was about Abramoff and DeLay, rather than Iraq and Bush, may not stand up to scrutiny.

THE NEW MAP ... Forget Red vs. Blue; Urban vs. Rural; Base vs. Swing; Upside-down vs. Inside-out. At a press conference yesterday, Hotline's Chuck Todd yesterday proposed a new way to think about the electoral map:

It seems congressional staffers syill reeling from Tuesday's results have yet another sea change to look forward to: the imminent return of the five-day workweek.

APRES '06: LE DELUGE?: It looks like losing their majority may be just the beginning of the bad news facing Senate Republicans, already bracing for an even tougher fight in 2008. This morning, Roll Call lays out the bleak landscape ahead for the GOP: In two years, the party will be trying to hold on to 21 seats, while Dems will only need to defend 12. And unfortunately for Republicans, the areas where they'll be playing defense in '08 don't include any of the biggest electoral vote battlefields. (Translation: A budget-busting campaign cycle for the GOP, without the fundraising advantages of congressional control.)

As if that weren't enough to give incoming NRSC chair John Ensign an early case of the night sweats: consider that minority status may not suit many of the GOP's most secure sitting senators, from John Warner (whose replacement would need to win in increasingly purplish Virginia) to Pete Domenici and Chuck Hagel. At a minimum, it's likely at least half a dozen retirement-leaning incumbents may need to be sweet-talked into sticking around for another term.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO RAHM?... There's definitely something to Rick Perlstein's argument, over at The New Republic, that the burgeoning Rahm-worship we're seeing among much of DC's pundit class is misplaced. Emanuel, the DCCC chair, made a conscious effort to recruit Democratic candidates who would appeal culturally and stylistically to conservatives: veterans, law-enforcement types, and even an ex NFL quarterback. But, as Perlstein points out, many of Emanuel's most talked about recruits -- Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs in Iraq -- disappointed yesterday. At the same time, some of the Democrats' surprise winners were candidates -- like Carol Shea-Porter in New Hampshire -- who were backed by the netroots, and shunned by Emanuel. Over the summer, we actually kicked around the idea of a story on exactly this emerging reality. (At the time, Heath Shuler, the ex-quarterback who won yesterday in North Carolina, was also struggling.)

—Zachary Roth 6:25 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (15)

MORE PUNDITRY ... The day after an election, Washington's National Press Club resembles an ideological bazaar, with soothsayers, craftsmen, and faith healers from both parties peddling interpretations of past and future in adjacent rooms. Step across the hall, enter a different worldview.

At 10 am, for instance, Howard Dean gave a rousing talk on Democrats' opportunity to assume the mantle of national security, while in the next room two conservative powerbrokers, David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and Pat Toomey, president of the Club for Growth, surveyed hurricane damage before a more modest spattering of reporters.

—Christina Larson 5:36 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (6)

POST-ELECTION PUNDITRY...I wanted to write some more on the post-election panel event I just went to, which featured Chuck Todd of The Hotline, political analyst Charlie Cook, Dem pollster Celinda Lake, GOP pollster Ed Goeas, Bush media adviser Mark McKinnon, and Clinton White House press secretary Mike McCurry. A number of interesting though not-necessarily-connected points:

The most intriguing thing anyone said came from Goeas. He noted that, according to his numbers, the movement toward Democrats in the campaign's final weeks came not as a result of the Foley scandal, but instead after Bill Clinton's combative appearance on FOX News -- in which he lost his temper with host Chris Wallace -- a few days before Foley broke. Goeas said that his measurement for Democratic "intensity" skyrocketed after the interview, and that it seemed to act as a signal to Democrats not to back down.

—Zachary Roth 5:19 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (0)