Celebrating four more years. Let's make them good ones.
Some random bullet points as I begin processing the results:
- Democrats have now won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections.
- President Barack Obama is the first Democrat to get reelected with an absolute majority of the popular vote since FDR.
- George W. Bush won 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004. John McCain won 31 percent of it. Mitt Romney won 21 percent. The trend is unmistakable.
- Thirteen percent of the vote was African American, 10 percent was Latino, 3 percent was Asian. In 2008, it was 13 African American, 9 percent Latino, 2 percent Asian. Whites went from 74 to 72 percent of the vote. They'll be under 70 percent in 2016.
- Pollsters assumed that non-whites would stay home last night. They didn't. But they're still not voting at their percentages of the overall population. Democrats need to keep registering those voters and getting them politically engaged. It's already exceedingly difficult for Republicans to win the White House without non-white, heavily male vote. It will be virtually impossible
- I project Democrats to pick up seven seats in the House, far short of the 25 they needed. We got rid two of three craziest—Allen West and Joe Walsh. Michelle Bachmann looks to have survived by a sliver. Maybe she'll learn her lesson and serve her constituents rather than the national crazy tea party.
- Every top elected office in New Hampshire is held by women—the governor's office, two U.S. Senate seats, and both House seats.
Down the ballot, the state Senate went from 18-6 GOP, to 13-11. One seat is going to recount, which if successful would tie things up. The state's comically large state House was also teetering on the edge of Democratic control after Republicans gained supermajorities in their 2010 wave year.
- Democrats got crushed in North Carolina, losing pretty much everything -- the governor's mansion and both chambers of the state legislature—for the first time since the 1800s. On the other hand, the opposite happened in Colorado as Democrats took control of both chambers of the state legislature. They already have the governorship. In fact, Colorado will sport their first openly gay speaker of the House.
- Minnesota was on fire last night. The Democrats gained 11 seats in House for a 73-61 majority, and eight seats in the Senate for a 39-28 majority. They defeated a constitutional ballot initiative to ban gay marriage by a bigger margin than the polls suggested (contrary to how equality initiatives turn out), and slammed shut a voter ID initiative. They flipped on U.S. House seat to make the state delegation 5-3.
The only place Minnesota came up short was in the Bachmann seat, where we came within a sliver of taking her out. Oh well, there's always 2014.
- Don't look now, but Puerto Rico voted for Statehood for the first time, after decades of rejecting it at the ballot box. In the two-part non-binding referendum, voters chose by a 54-46 margin to change their status from commonwealth, and then chose 61 percent for statehood. 33 wanted more autonomy, and just five percent wanted independence.
I'll write more on this later, but Republicans aren't as opposed to it as you might think.
- Losers: Gallup, Mason-Dixon, that Suffolk guy who wouldn't poll Florida because it was too far gone for Romney, Dick Morris, Karl Rove, and that unskewing guy. I'm still laughing at all of them.
- Winning sure is fun, isn't it? We should do it more often.
- Romney who? Yesterday morning I bought a Reuters Romney picture for the very last time—an amazing feeling. It was a fun day because, unlike the worry-warts and the "oh, the GOP will steal the election!" crazies (and yeah, it was craziness), I knew we were going to win.
Update: A couple more thoughts... how about that Donald Trump, calling for revolution and whatnot? His days as a serious person (already in doubt) are done.
Meanwhile, it's amazing to me how little effect the big money had on the statewide races. Republicans spent $5.7 million the last week in Wisconsin, only to have the state called within 30 minutes of the polls closing. $40 million spent against Sherrod Brown did little to blunt his favorabilities -- the entire point of negative advertising.
I suspect that money had a much bigger impact downballot, where the candidates are less known.
