things that happened last night

When I wasn't paying attention.

Angle losing to Reid. Somewhat surprising given how the polls were going out there, but really, the GOP had no business losing that seat. And Angle was the one thing Reid really had going for him.

O'Donnell got 40% of the vote (lost by 16). I'm thinking that's a little shockingly high, but it should start a bit of thinking against Palin's viability too. Alvin Greene getting 28% is also a bit of a strange outlier.

Feingold lost. Ugh. I didn't like the campaign-finance law either, but otherwise the guy was a rock for civil liberties at a time we need somebody who would be.

Looks like Murkowski probably won in Alaska. That jackass arresting reporters didn't deserve to win.

Rand Paul won. Pretty comfortably. Make of that what you will. Thanks to Conway for running a lame campaign attempting to paint a conservative as a libertarian. Or to the libertarian for running away from it.

Doesn't look like Rossi or Buck won, but they're both really close. Either way, with West Virginia and California and Delaware pretty much safe in the pocket and Nevada more or less a toss up that broke badly for them because of a poor candidate, there wasn't anyway for Republicans to win the Senate. 6 or 7 was the best they were getting. House was a little higher overall than I expected. 60 was definitely more than around 45 or so. But it looked to have been trending that way over the last couple weeks. Any number above 39 was enough. Doesn't matter whether it was 100 or 60 to me. It wasn't going to budge DC politics and simply puts an orange guy in charge of the House. Woo-hoo. Or something. I'm not convinced that the tea party is going to be very happy with their "achievement" in about 6 months, but we'll see.

Governor's races were probably the only thing out this election that will actually matter, simply because it's a redistricting election and Republicans can cement some districts for themselves (hello gerry's mander). I don't expect the control of the House to actually help Republicans very much. I kind of wish more national attention had been focused on this. Seemed like an afterthought in the political horse race coverage. I'm not sure that it would have swung many of those mansions one way or the other to cover them more, but there's a couple close ones still laying out there. More to my thinking, it's the one area of the election that most resembles "politics as usual", with some scraping of the plate by politicians for their own benefit.

Oh and Prop 19 lost out in California, so we don't get much fun seeing how that would play out in the courts. In fact, there's a chance that the medical dispensaries are going to start getting raided by the state itself too, depending on who won the AG's slot and whether the Governor lets them run with it.