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.

But I would take issue with something Ed Kilgore says in his defense of Hoyer. "It's not as though Steny has done anything to undermine House Democrats in their criticism of Bush Iraq policies," writes Ed. In fact, on the day last November when Nancy Pelosi announced her support for Murtha's call for withdrawal, Hoyer released a statement declaring, "a precipitous withdrawal of American forces in Iraq could lead to disaster, spawning a civil war, fostering a haven for terrorists and damaging our nation’s security and credibility."

Whatever you think of the merits of that stance, it's hard to argue that it didn't undermine Pelosi and Murtha's position.

UPDATE: THIS POST HAS BEEN CHANGED TO REFLECT THE FACT THAT REP. ALAN MOLLOHAN (D-W.V.) WAS INCLUDED IN CREW'S LIST OF MOST CORRUPT MEMBERS OF CONGRESS.

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...

"About 250 recruits, drawn by the promise of free meals and a day's pay, participated in what one recruit later called a 'scam from the start.' The students didn't get their meals, and they didn't get paid. The homeless recruits also weren't paid, and, that night, the van that had taken them at dawn to Prince George's County and was supposed to transport them back to Washington, D.C. never showed up."

As far as I know, the ’06 crop of homeless recruits (this time bussed in from Philadelphia) got paid and got their rides home; I gave my number to a few of them in case they got stranded and/or ripped off, and never heard from anyone. Thankfully, Ehrlich and Steele both lost. But the Republicans still see Steele as a valuable (read: African-American) asset, and have offered him the chance to replace outgoing RNC head Ken Mehlman.

The Democrats should fight this vociferously. Though the party is rightfully afraid of being branded with the dreaded Obstructionist Democrat label, and though the GOP will doubtless cry foul at Democratic meddling, the signal sent by a Steele appointment is too malicious to ignore. They were overshadowed by the resounding Democratic “thumpin’,” but there were numerous examples of Republican election-day malfeasance. If the GOP chooses to appoint someone who took part in these tactics—which would be tantamount to endorsing them—then the party’s higher-ups should be forced to explicitly defend this decision.

Yes, there will be some self-righteous sighing from those on the right (“See? All Democrats want to do is get in the way.”), but from a cost-benefit perspective, such a move makes sense. Let the RNC call a defensive press conference explaining why they want such a sleazy figure heading up their operations. Let them explain why they approve of the practice of hiring homeless people to hand out grossly misleading literature. The Democrats do need to pick their battles, but this is one worth fighting.

-- Jesse Singal
The Washington Monthly

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.

That truth went into temporary abeyance after 9/11, as moderate voters, rattled by fears of terrorism, lent their support to the GOP despite their discomfort with the party’s hard-right views (for several years poll after poll has shown that voters support Democratic positions over Republican ones on most major issues, from health care to the environment). But that willing suspension of disbelief vanished once voters came to see the administration’s incompetent management of the Iraq war as itself a major threat to national security.

Why the president chose defiance over accommodation—why, for instance, he fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after the election rather than before—is a question for historians. Instead, let’s look forward. If the president wants to salvage what’s left of his administration, and congressional Republicans want to rebuild their tarnished image, their best hope is to follow Schwarzeneggar’s example: tack towards the center, work with Democrats, and put their stamp on substantive, popular initiatives.

Yet there is no reason to expect they will do so anytime soon. That’s because the conservative ascendancy, which began with Ronald Reagan in 1980 and ended last week, has left a legacy of habits, convictions, and institutions that will guide Republican behavior in Washington long after that behavior has stopped making political sense.

Consider two back-to-back speeches by the president last week. On Wednesday, in what establishment Washington took to be a bold concessionary move, Bush nominated as Rumsfeld’s replacement Robert Gates, his father’s former CIA director. Gates is a member of the foreign policy “realist” school that has been highly critical of the decision to invade Iraq. Yet the very next day in the Rose Garden the president urged the lame duck Congress to approve the nomination of UN Ambassador John Bolton, a divisive figure championed by neoconservatives whom Democrats and some moderate Republicans refused to confirm last year (Bush gave Bolton the job anyway with a recess appointment which will expire when Congress adjourns this year). The president also called on Congress to pass legislation retroactively authorizing his warrantless domestic surveillance program, a bill opposed by most Democrats. Bush made these remarks almost immediately after a lunch meeting with Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi in which the two purportedly vowed to work together in a bipartisan manner. These were not the moves of a White House interested in fundamentally changing course, but one still intent on using every bit of power it has to forward an ideologically conservative agenda.

All over DC last week, Republicans dismissed the notion that an ideological course correction is in order. At an event at the National Press Club, American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene argued that the elections were a referendum not on conservative ideology but on “the performance of Republicans in the White House and the Congress.” In fact, what really hurt the GOP, Keene said, was its deviation from conservative principles such as smaller government (as if Republicans might have endeared themselves to voters by cutting popular spending programs). At another post-election conference at the conservative Heritage Foundation, majority whip Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) made a similar point. “Our ideas didn’t get beat,” Blunt declared, “we did.”

Asked what his party’s legislative priorities would be in the new Congress, Blunt rattled off a list of obscure conservative agenda items, such as time limits on consent decrees to rein in activist judges and “loser pays” rules for plaintiffs in religious expression lawsuits. These are controversial measures Republicans couldn’t pass when they controlled the House. They stand about zero chance of going anywhere in a Democratic-controlled chamber. That Blunt, the House Republican’s likely number two man next year, listed them as some of his party’s top agenda items tells you how far GOP lawmakers are from moderating their views.

Republicans may have taken what the president called “a thumping” in the midterms. But the pattern of those losses may ironically move the party even more to the right. Voters punished all manner of Republicans last week. In the Senate, for instance, conservatives like George Allen, Rick Santorum and Jim Talent were unseated, as was the moderate Mike Dewine and the moderate-to-liberal Lincoln Chaffee. But moderates were a distinct minority in both chambers before the election, and they lacked much if any clout, especially in the House. Now with their numbers even fewer, their voice within the caucus will be vanishingly small. “On a policy and political level, these results present a real challenge to the Republican Party,” wrote moderate Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.): “The majority of the American people are centrists — and our party lost many seats because the party was not in touch with what the American people care about.”

And what about the Democrats? Can they govern in a way that appeals to voters in the middle? True, the new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, represents liberal San Francisco, and many of the veteran lawmakers expected to assume chairmanships are old liberal lions, from Ted Kennedy in the Senate to John Conyers in the House.

But unlike the GOP, the Democratic Party has a hefty contingent of moderates, some of them in major leadership positions—think Rahm Emanuel and Steny Hoyer in the House, Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton in the Senate. Indeed, centrist former Clinton administration officials dominate the establishment political class in Washington---a source of continuing heartburn to more-progressive Democrats around the country.

The new class of freshmen Democrats will certainly be made up of quite a few liberal-progressives, like the economic populist Sherrod Brown of Ohio and former social worker Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire. But it will also include an array of moderate to conservative members, from Claire McCaskell of Missouri to former Redskins quarterback Heath Shuler of North Carolina. The tension between the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party will be among the more interesting dramas to watch over the next two years.

But 12 years in the minority have made Democrats of all stripes less ideologically finicky, more pragmatic, hungrier to win. They know they have won only the temporary support of moderate America, that they have not yet closed the sale, and that they must if they want to keep their newfound power.

Republicans, on the other hand, are moving in the other direction. Like Bush this past summer, they are digging in, hugging the old certainties, refusing to even contemplate a more moderate course. The longer they remain in denial, the more the Democrats will have a chance to solidify their hold on the middle, where power resides.

[Note: A version of this article appeared in Sunday's San Jose Mercury News]

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.

Nearly every Republican who ran primarily on an enforcement-only platform lost. Of 15 congressional or gubernatorial races where immigration was a major issue, Democrats won 12. Even worse for Republicans, the hard-won gains made by Rove, Mehlman and Bush with Hispanic voters in 2000, 2002 and 2004 were essentially obliterated. Voting in presidential-race proportions, Latinos supported Democrats over Republicans in House races by 69-30. In Western House races, Latinos comprised 16 percent of the voters (compared to 8.5 percent nationally), and voted for Democrats in even higher proportions: 72-27, according to CNN’s exit poll.

So far, the buzz about the Hispanic vote has focused on the role immigration played in driving Latinos away from the GOP. Democrats mostly allowed Republicans to shoot themselves in the foot on this one, so you could be forgiven for thinking that they simply benefited from the misguided antics of an inflamed conservative base. But that interpretation repeats a mistake both parties have made at various times: viewing Latinos as a convenient voting bloc that can be easily manipulated without real political investment. Democrats made that mistake by not paying enough attention to the complex concerns of Latino voters in recent elections. Rove and Mehlman made it by thinking that all you need to do to lock up Latino support is run soft-focus ads about the American Dream and have the President give periodic speeches about a guest worker program, without trying very hard to actually implement one.

The reality is more complicated. It’s a quirk of the Hispanic vote that political parties don’t necessarily win Latinos with immigration policy—it’s rarely the primary factor in their voting preferences—but can easily lose Latino voters with policies that appear excessively punitive towards immigrants (which is what happened in California in the 1990s). After all, right before the election, Latinos ranked Iraq and the economy as their overriding concerns. Yesterday, NDN held a panel to read the post-election tea leaves, where an interesting point was raised: Democrats made raising the minimum wage a centerpiece of an aggressive Spanish-language advertising campaign this year, especially in Colorado and Arizona. I don’t have any hard data to support this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Democratic gains among Latinos turned out to be a complex mix of dissatisfaction with the war, alienation from a GOP gone nativist, and, at least in some cases, receptiveness to a substantive Democratic policy proposal that directly affects many Hispanic families. (Latinos comprise nearly 20 percent of the workers who would benefit from a minimum-wage increase). Whether or not this turns out to be the case, those Democrats who actually engaged with a real concern of many Latinos took a smart step in the right direction this year.

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.)

But, in the time-honored tradition of opinion journalism, Perlstein leaves out a few examples that contradict his thesis. Brad Ellsworth, an Indiana sheriff backed by Emanuel, ran perhaps the most impressive campaign of any Democratic challenger, and coasted to victory. And, as Perlstein notes, some netroots-backed candidates flopped. In truth, you can pick examples to support either side of the argument. But beyond the rightness or wrongness of Emanuel's strategy, the larger point is that there's no need to set up the netroots and the Democratic establishment in opposition to each other. Many of the most successful Democratic candidates -- Tester and Webb, for example -- had strong backing both from the blogosphere and the party apparatus. And with a victory this big, surely there's enough credit to go around.

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.

Keene picked up on a theme we’d begun to hear before the election: If Republicans lost, it would be because they had abandoned core conservative principles for the sake of political expediency:

This year’s election turned out to be … a referendum on the performance of Republicans in the White House and the Congress rather than a contest between competing ideological visions. Indeed, this may have been the least ideological election in modern memory.

Alan Wolfe has written for The Washington Monthly on the difficulties of extracting "pure" conservative ideology from recent transgressions born of a disdain for government.

That said, Democrats did not win with ideology, either. They won with smart campaigns, a sweeping mantra for "change," and a slate of candidates that some strategists on the right and left have dubbed, not without reason, moderately conservative. Victorious Democrats such as Claire McCaskill, Jon Tester, Bob Casey, and Jim Webb are variously pro-military, pro-life, pro-balanced budget, and pro-gun rights. A few years ago, they might have been labeled Republican Lite, as though moderate Democrats had no legitimate claim to these issues. Now there seems to be a more fundamental (and flexible) discussion of what principles will unite the Democratic caucus in the future.

Meanwhile the Republican party faces its own, more painful, identity crisis. On the eve of the elections, Club for Growth polled 800 likely voters in 15 of the most competitive districts on the eve of the election (including 13 formerly GOP districts that went for Democrats). Two-thirds agreed with the notion that the GOP used to be the party of fiscal responsibility and limited government but was not today. By an 11-point margin, likely voters expressed greater confidence in Democrats to handle select fiscal matters responsibly. “We have lost our brand,” Toomey bemoaned.

How will these undercurrents color the hunt for a 2008 nominee, in both parties? Keene said, speaking for Republicans, that the long primaries will be about piecing together a coherent mission in the “post-Bush era.” (From his standpoint, that means a return to bedrock conservatism.) I think Democrats will also be looking for contenders to forge a common and compelling purpose, out of diverse aims and ambitions. Whether you label the new crop of Democratic congressmembers “moderately conservative,” as Keene does, or “populist pragmatic,” as Democratic pollster Celinda Lake did in another press conference, they do collectively represent something new.

The next presidential election will be the first since 1952 in which neither a sitting president nor vice president will be on the ticket. Not only is the field wide open, but the influence of some traditional interest groups may be waning. (This election cycle, for instance, the NRA went in with guns blazing for Sens. Jim Talent in Missouri and Conrad Burns in Montana -- both incumbents, both in sagebrush country, both lost.) With no clear successors, few obvious kingmakers (unless you count purely fundraising machinery), and dissimilar ideological currents in both parties, we have arrived at an interesting crossroads.

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.

What else: The big incipient GOP talking point -- that Dems won by running as conservatives -- was dismissed pretty convincingly by both Todd and Celinda Lake. Todd noted that none of the new Democratic senators could be described as Clinton-DLC types. He called politicians like Sherrod Brown and John Tester "pragmatic populists".

Todd also pointed out that all the talk of a demoralized GOP base didn't pan out. Republicans turned out at a similar rate as Democrats. The difference yesterday was independents, who voted at much higher rates than in previous midterms, and overwhelmingly favored Democrats. The only GOP Senate candidates who won independents were Kean and Chafee. Even Kyl and Ensign, who both won comfortably in Arizona and Nevada respectively, lost independents.

There was also more evidence for the notion that social issues are losing steam as GOP base motivators. Goeas said his polling had suggested that conservatives would respond to three things: terrorism, taxes, and the thought of Speaker Pelosi. No mention of gay marriage, abortion, or stem cell. What a difference two years makes.

Interestingly, one area where the GOP did better than expected was among seniors, a group they narrowly won. And Celinda Lake said she'd found that the Medicare drug benefit was actually quite popular with seniors -- it's their baby-boomer daughters, who are stuck with figuring out which indecipherable plan to enroll their parents in, that hate it.

BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW BUSH WOULD NEVER POLITICIZE THE WAR... Just came back from an interesting post-election event with Charlie Cook, Chuck Todd, and others. There was a lot to chew over, which I'll post on soon, but I had to share this first...

The prize for the most hilarious piece of GOP post-election spin delivered with a straight face goes to White House media advisor Mark McKinnon. He told the room that, in the last few hours, Republican friends have been asking why Bush didn't fire Rumsfeld last week, when it might have helped the GOP in the elections. But that's exactly why he didn't, said McKinnon. Bush believes, you see, that Iraq policy should be focused solely on what's the best policy. Politics should not be a concern. Hence, Rumsfeld stayed until today.

There was an audible snigger from the audience.

Corruption counted most…. Establishment Washington completely underestimated the role corruption would play in determining yesterday’s vote.

Check this out from CNN this morning: “But when asked which issue was extremely important to their vote, more voters said corruption and ethics in government than any other issue, including the war, according to national exit polls.” (Peter Stone, author of Heist, highlighted the trend a few weeks ago.)

Most people outside of the Beltway look at our system of campaign financing and high-stakes lobbying as a not-so-veiled form of bribery. An aberration.

The problem is that most people inside the Beltway look at it as generally acceptable behavior. And, for more than a decade, GOP chiefs, with DeLay leading the way, have seen it as not just acceptable, but the key to permanent governance.

Finally, DeLay and some of his deputies have fallen on their swords.

But yesterday shouldn't merely be seen as their obit. K Street will quickly reorganize itself around the new power structure on Capitol Hill (and, unless he ends up in jail, DeLay will enjoy his new life as a lobbyist.)

There’s an important, momentous dialogue just waiting to be had – one about who holds power in our democracy and why. It’s the kind of dialogue that gave rise to the Progressive Era and defined a whole new politics in this country.

The big question now for Democrats is will they go for it. Will they call for a virtual abolition of our sick system of influence peddling? Or will they tinker with minor reforms that voters neither understand nor, rightly, think will have any genuine effect in the long run? It seems as if the public is more in the mood for abolition than tinkering.

Can’t say it often enough: It’s time to think big -- and historically -- on this one.

This may seem like a rather geeky aside, given all the talk of brewing lawsuits and FBI investigations, but it's very important: Yesterday Democrats won control of a majority of statehouses for the first time since 1994, picking up all nine of the chambers that changed hands. (One especially startling acquisition was the New Hampshire House, which hasn't been controlled by Democrats since before the Civil War.) And, of course, Democrats also now hold a majority of the country's governorships.

In our last issue, I wrote about the importance of winning state legislatures for redistricting. But these state-level gains are more far-reaching than that. Winning legislative chambers allows a party to set the political tone in a state, nurture new talent (think Barack Obama) and, arguably, enact more meaningful changes in policy than is often possible in Congress. Incidentally, Democrats' state-level gains also confirm -- just in case anyone's doubting it -- the depth of the rejection that Republicans received last night.

EARLY BIRD CATCHES THE WORM...Looks like Steny Hoyer isn't wasting any time launching his campaign for majority leader. John Murtha is still expected to challenge him, but the buzz is that Steny's got it pretty much wrapped up.

Time will tell whether that's good or bad news for Democrats, but our take -- and everything else you might want to know about the prospective House #2 -- is here.

RIP, Karl Rove. .... Enough of the man too many insiders have, for too long, feared and revered. He's been the primary mover behind the poisonous politics and wrongheaded policies of the last six years.

Let's revue the record.

Karl Rove, White House policy director:

Crafts policies designed to create GOP political gain that backfire. Medicare drug legislation, a windfall for big Pharma, backfires. Social Security privatization, seen as a risky scheme by seniors and ignored by youth, backfires. Energy policy, fails to acknowledge growing national consensus on global warming, fails to keep energy prices in check, backfires. Blocking stem cell research, to stoke small part of evangelical base at the expense of medical breakthroughs, backfires. Tax cuts, mostly targeted at ultra rich, drive up historic debt, ultimately backfire.

Karl Rove, architect of 2000, 2004, 2006:

In 2000, Bush secures Republican nomination after smear campaign whacks McCain in South Carolina. Bush loses popular vote, gains Electoral College after widespread voter suppression and trickery in Florida and blessing by the Supreme Court.

In 2004, one year into the war, three years after 9/11, while the country is still healing and mobilized behind the troops, Bush launches a campaign to divide the nation. Bogus character attacks on Kerry ("swift boat") and wedge issues like gay marriage appeal to worst aspects of electorate. Trickery in Ohio leads to victory.

In 2006, Rove attempts to nationalize election around terrorism and war. Public repudiates GOP on both fronts: lose House, (likely) lose Senate.

Enough.

RIP, Karl Rove.

On a night when Democrats took back the House, and now seem likely to claim the Senate as well, few eyes were turned to reliably blue Massachusetts -- where Democrats control the entire Congressional delegation, Ted Kennedy extended his 44-year run in the Senate, and the governorship reverted to Democrats. But Deval Patrick's triumph to become the nation's second black governor, after Virginia's Doug Wilder, shouldn't be overlooked.

Patrick ran one of the best races of the year, defeating a formidable Democratic primary field including the state's attorney general. He defeated his Republican opponent, Lt. Governor Kerry Healy, by a stunning 20 percent. It's easy to see Massachusetts as a liberal redoubt -- and in many ways, it is -- but that hardly made Patrick's win an easy one.

First, the state's racial history isn't so pure. Anyone who remembers Boston's busing crisis in the mid-1970s -- flicked at most recently in Marin Scorcese's The Departed -- would be pretty amazed to see Patrick win so handily. Second, the state has had a slew of GOP governors--including for the last 16 years--who are seen as a vital balance to the state's one-party rule. Democrats don't walk to the governorship here.

On top of which: this was Patrick's first election! He grew up poor in Chicago, won a scholarship to the Milton Academy in Massachusetts and went on to career in corporate and civil rights law. He led a voting rights suit against Gov. Bill Clinton in the 80s which was settled and which led to a long-time friendship between the two men. After the famed Lani Guinier episode (when Clinton's first nominee to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department was pressured to withdraw because of her rather exotic writings on voting rights), Patrick stepped in. He's been general counsel of Coca-Cola and Texaco.

His inclusive campaign this cycle -- its slogan: Together We Can -- was a tour de force, much of it the product of David Axelrod, the Chicago-based political consultant who happens to work for Barack Obama as well. He must be one very happy consultant today.

MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, 7:55 a.m.

Even in his concession speech in front of adoring supporters at The Peabody, Harold Ford clung to that most surprising and unexpected component of his 2006 persona: Quoting passages of scripture, he made one last nudge of head upward, pointed heavenward one last time and thanked his maker, the celestial one, for the opportunity to do what he had almost done. And then, after having spoken the merest congratulations to his victorious opponent, he moved offstage, slowly, the arm of campaign chairman Lincoln Davis, his white-haired congressional colleague from Middle Tennessee, draped over his shoulder.

After all the excitement, after all the better-than-expected election results in Shelby, Davidson, and Hamilton counties, all urban centers, Harold Ford did what most Tennesseans thought in the beginning of his race he would do -- lose to an established Republican in a taken-for-granted red state.

Maybe it was never possible to win. At the end of it all, campaign strategist Tom Lee acknowledged to the media that his candidate had reached or achieved most of the campaign’s goals, falling short, perhaps, only in the upper northeast corner of the state, the so-called Tri-Cities of Kingsport, Bristol, and Johnson City, traditional Republican strongholds all.

Maybe it was what the national media saw as racial content in he infamous “Call Me, Harold” climax, spoken by a white bimbo in an RNC ad -– though most Tennesseans doubted it. Indeed, Ford seemed to do well among young white professionals, who flocked to his rallies and sported his bumper stickers on their Volvos and SUVs; they were as much a core constituency as African Americans were.

And he seemed to do well in some of the rural counties where a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage also ran up a big vote. At various times he even appeared capable of doing the impossible –- of stealing the religious vote from the Republicans. He promised on national TV that he would be a “Jesus-loving, gun-supporting” senator, began toting a Bible on the stump, and seemed about to create a brand-new political type.

But the final stubborn three percent GOP rival Corker clung to never dissolved. And red-state reality insisted on asserting itself.

--Jackson Baker
The Memphis Flyer
http://www.memphisflyer.com/memphis/

HELENA, MONTANA, 7:45 a.m.

Reporting from the Big Sky State (not Big Blue Sky State): did we celebrate before the game was over? While most people slept, rural counties, traditional Republican strongholds, kept trickling in. Now the Burns-Tester battle for the U.S. Senate is about as close as Allen-Webb race in Virginia. Maybe closer.

With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, Montana’s Secretary of State election website, showed Tester leading Burns by 3,113 votes, 168,121 to 165,008 with 8,762 votes (about 2.5 percent) going to libertarian Stan Jones. At least two rural counties, Beaverhead and Meagher, likely strongholds for Burns, had not reported any votes yet.

And nearly all the votes were counted in the pivotal Yellowstone, so-goes-the state, county, it seemed Burns was leading by 1,135 votes, 15,347 to 14,212, erasing an early lead by Tester.

It's going to be a long day.

--Bill Schneider
NewWest.net

BOZEMAN, MONTANA, 7:40 a.m. (EST)

At 1 a.m. in Montana, we still didn't know who our next senator was. I wonder how long it's been since the nation's political attention (whatever of it was still awake) focused on Montana?

And of all places, Gallatin Country, my county,­ that was really holding things up. (Well, okay, we couldn't decide the Burns-Tester race entirely on our own -- but we're definitely a county in transition from bright red to somewhat bluish so our votes will make a difference.)

And, as of 1 a.m. our time, there wasn't a single return out of Gallatin County. That's because that long line of people I wrote about last night, the ones waiting outside the county courthouse to register and vote (this is the first year Montana has had election day registration), didn't finish voting until midnight or so. And the county election official in charge, Shelley Vance, refused to release any results until everyone haf voted.

Folks probably stayed up waiting for results at the courthouse or at the Democratic and Republican victory parties. I, personally, decided to go to bed.

--Marjorie Smith

HAMILTON, MONTANA, 7:33 a.m. (EST)

It's officially the morning after, and we still don't have an official winner yet in the Burns-Tester matchup. Last night, with NPR blasting in the background, I flipped frantically through the Web looking for current results and changing numbers as critical races seemed to be going blue around the country.

Tester led for most of the night, although many of the eastern Montana counties, mostly Burns-friendly, took some time coming in. Of course, the populations in those counties are small. (For current results, check out www.newwest.net.)

Large counties -– like Cascade, where Great Falls is located; Missoula, which is a liberal stronghold; Flathead, a conservative anchor; and Gallatin, which could go either way -– took a painfully long time to have their votes tallied.

Initially it was reported that Tester took Yellowstone County; then they closed up shop to wait for a recount. It’s the most populist county and located in eastern Montana, an area where Burns has strong support. If Tester wins, it’s nearly a sure bet that he takes the state.

The buzz last night was hard to get a finger on. I spent at least two hours in a thick-walled, concrete basement of the Ravalli County courthouse. Cell phones didn’t work and the election volunteers were sweating hard opening absentee ballots and running them through tally machines.

A local state senator, a Republican still waiting anxiously for the results, was pretty candid about the Burns’ chances in the race, though he wouldn’t let me use his name.

“We’re going to get our asses kicked,” he told me.

The obvious indicators came early in the race, said the state senator. The Republican base didn’t show up. Usually luncheons and spaghetti feeds were popular local events and fundraisers for Republicans, but this year people just didn’t show up. Democrats had energy. Republicans didn’t.

In the end, Burns drew close to President Bush. He and Cheney both came to Montana to stump for Burns in the last days of the campaign, and Burns tightened the gap on Tester.

In Great Falls last night, Gov. Brian Schweitzer promised students excuses for missing class tomorrow as he encouraged supporters at the Tester party to pour a stiff drink and get braced for a long night. In Billings, where Burns awaits a decision, no one was getting comfortable either. Just before the polls, closed, I ventured over to the local Democrat campaign headquarters; they were still rallying folks to hit the streets. Instead of just calling people, they decided to knock on doors to get them to the polls. They went out in pairs. And the results were good.

Quinty Smith, a local organizer, told me later that they got every Democrat they found to the polls. In Ravalli County, that’s good, but Tester still lost the county, 9,434 to 7,489, with 90 percent of the votes counted.

Here's hoping this race gets called today.

--Greg Lemon
NewWest.net

So you want to know who's going to control the Senate? Well, you're not going to find out tonight. Some perspective here, before you turn in for the evening: the last contested vote and statewide recount in Virginia? wasn't resolved until around Christmas.

Season's greetings, people. Sweet dreams.

JEFFERSONVILLE, INDIANA, 1:49 a.m. (EST)

An hour after his concession, GOP Rep. Mike Sodrel looked like he needed some sleep, badly and soon. His campaign headquarters were still filled with a swarm of campaign volunteers, including 42 from Generation Joshua, an organization that encourages young people to get involved in politics and support “pro-life” and “pro-family” candidates. The youthful volunteers had come from several states to campaign for Sodrel in the campaign’s final days.

Over the past two years, Vice President Dick Cheney had come to the district several times for Sodrel fundraisers. In recent months, Barbara Bush and Laura Bush had come to the district on Sodrel’s behalf. Even President Bush came out to rally the base in the last two weeks before Election Day.

Late this evening, Greg Fitloff, a campaign volunteer, looked on a scene of local television reporters wrapping up their coverage for the day and lamented the election’s outcome.

He had worked on Sodrel’s two previous campaigns against Baron Hill and still couldn’t understand how his man didn’t win this round, noting that this campaign was so much better organized and funded than the previous two. He sighed and s