I've had a little time to get over my post-debacle misery. Here are three reasons why the result wasn't as bad as it looked at first (or three things you wont hear the media talk about because they are relentlessly beating their "The Democratic Party is Dead" drums):
1. Kerry came within 150,000 votes of winning the election. Actually, the provisional ballots haven't been counted yet, so he probably came even closer. A swing of 150,000 votes in Ohio and we would be listening to how the Republicans want to do away with the Electoral College even though they didn't want to in 2000.
2. The seats we lost in the Senate were seats we couldn't count on anyway.
Political Scientist Keith T. Poole
ranks Zell Miller the 1,748th most liberal senator of all time, ranking him as more conservative than Republicans John Heinz and Arlen Specter, John Breaux the 1,595th, more conservative than Sam Nunn, and Fritz Hollings the 1313th, more conservative than Morgan Sanders.
3. After factoring in the Texas redistricting designed to lose the Democrats 5 seats, the results in the House don't look half bad. We were supposed to lose the 5 seats in Texas and, pending one race in Georgia and two run-offs in Louisiana, we only lost 4 total seats. We even ended up winning one of the Texas seats we were supposed to lose. Essentially we broke even outside of the Texas shenanigans.
Obviously this election wasn't our shining moment, but it could have been a lot worse.
Once I recover from the election and from a miserable travel schedule, I think I may have more to say about Bush's "Mandate" and what we should be doing after we decompress (HINT: Organize, Organize, Organize).
More to come...
Posted from The Kicking Donkey!