Like most of you, I've been feeling pretty good today. It's nice to win again. Really nice. I had been worried about the voting machines, but I knew the public wanted to boot out the Republicans in a major way, so takeover of the House seemed very likely. There were so many races where we were competitive.
But the Senate? I assumed that dirty tricks would keep us from getting enough seats for a majority. So this was icing on the cake. Oh, and I especially wanted to see George Allen go down, and I always had a good feeling that Jim Webb wouldn't disappoint. And then there were the many pickups down the ballot. Wow. It feels good.
I know it seems a bit early to bring this up, but I can't help it. The question came into my head. What about the Senate in 2008?
Not to get into all the personalities involved, because it's getting late (for another day!), but, simply - how many seats will we need to defend and how many will the Republicans have to defend? Well, good news. 2008 looks very promising for us. The Republicans will need to defend 21 out of 33 seats (while we will have 12).
And does anyone remember what the breakdown was for 2006? 18 Democratic seats (including Vermont's independent seat), 15 Republican seats. Because we had more seats to defend than the Republicans, the pundits said months ago that we would never pull it off.