Final results (except the recounts!)

As of 8:21, it seems like the Democrats will have a majority in both houses of congress. In the three key Senate battles, Claire McCaskill has a 42,000 vote advantage, Jon Tester has a 1586 vote edge, and Jim Webb has a periously close 7,800 vote cushion. I think that what I said about Bush and executive power will still hold true, albeit to a lesser extent. A united congress will be something of a check, but I think we'll be seeing a lot of signing statements and ignored laws to the detriment of our democracy. One other prediction about the Senate: Joe Lieberman is suddenly going to become an extremely popular man. There are going to be a lot of Democrats (Kennedy, Kerry, Dodd especially) telling him, "You know I was just kidding with that whole Lamont thing, right Joe? Come on, don't look at me like that!"

Let's take a closer look at the house. Going by the results on CNN.com for every race, I found 13 out of the 14 races that haven't officially been called yet. In these, the Republican currently leads in 8 (albeit by narrow margins) and the Democrat leads in 5. If those results held, it would give a swing of 33 seats towards the Democrats. This is a phenomenal result for the boys in blue, but it could have been a lot bigger. Last night when presenting my "49% Doctrine," I suggested that the Democrats picked off the really vulnerable republican incumbents based solely on the anti-Bush mood but couldn't sweep the board without a positive national message, a la the Contract with America. I said at the time that I thought the Dems could easily have picked up another 12-15 seats by running on more than the fact that they aren't Republicans. I was right.

Looking through all the races in the House, I was able to find what I considered the 25 closest races. I tried to limit this to contests where the margin of victory, or current lead in undecided contests, was within 4 points. This is that next tier of contests, the group that would have fallen during a political earthquake. The Repbulicans won 16 of these 25 races (Fl-13, CT-04, Il-06, NV-03 NM-01, NY-25, NY-26, NY-29, NC-08, OH-01, OH-02, OH-15, PA-06, VA-02, WA-08, and WY-AL), and thanks to that showing the GOP remain competitive in the House. On a night when nationally the GOP got hammered, the Democrats were just barely too weak to run the table. Just to be clear, we're talking about 100,000 votes nationally being the difference between a great year and a legendary triumph. I am and will continue to be convinced that any nationalized message in addition to "Bush sucks" would have given the Dems most if not all of these seats (and a couple others, too) for a net gain of something like 45-50 seats.

That will be all for me. Thanks for coming along for the ride,

--Barry Caro