Some Things to Think About

Just some random election-related thoughts:

• The wall-to-wall election coverage will start at HolyCoast.com at 3pm PDT this afternoon as polls begin closing in Indiana and Kentucky.  Come back and stay awhile.
• The Dems won control of the House in 1954.  It took the GOP 40 years to finally get their act together enough to win it back in 1994.  Power changed again only 12 years later.  And now we're going to see another switch only four years after the Dems took control again.  I think House control will be a lot more volatile in the future and we shouldn't think that if we win now we'll be able to keep it in 2012.  We've got to have results.  As Scott Rasmussen warns us, this isn't a vote for the GOP it's a vote against Democrats.
• What type of midterm will it be?  1994? 1938? 1922?  You can see previous midterm results at Don Surber's post here.
• Two weeks before the 1994 midterm all of the experts who are today predicting 50+ seat GOP gains were predicting 20-25 seat GOP gains.  The GOP picked up 54 seats.
• I've been predicting a 56 seat pick-up, but this is one time I wouldn't mind being wrong, as long as I'm to low and not too high.
• Even if the GOP runs the table and wins 70 seats (as Jim Geraghty predicts) we'll open the 112th Congress with a smaller majority than the Dems had in the 111th Congress.  Dems had a 77 seat majority (39 needed to switch control).  With 70 switches the GOP majority will only be 62 - only 32 needed to switch control.
• As returns come in heavily GOP districts tend to report early while heavily Dem districts take their time.  They have to wait awhile to see how many votes they'll need to manufacture to squeak out a win.
• Somewhere in the country where there's a close statewide race a judge will declare that polls must remain open in heavily minority precincts for at least an hour or two past scheduled closing.
• At some point in the process, maybe today or maybe tomorrow, Democrat election officials will "find" ballot boxes in the trunk of somebody's car or tucked away in a dark corner somewhere.  Happens every election.
• Sometime tonight, tomorrow, or very soon you'll hear Obama, Pelosi, Reid, or any number of Dem leaders try and shift blame for their defeat to Karl Rove, the Chamber of Commerce, or some unnamed evil Republican entity that raised millions in "unregulated" campaign funds and "bought the election".  What you won't hear is that by the time this is done the Democrats and their allies in the unions and liberal special interest groups will have outspent the GOP and their allies by millions.  It's not the money that beat them, it's the incompetence and the arrogance.
• In Alaska it looks like the effort by the Democrats to get Lisa Murkowski elected is going to fail.  They'll never admit it but you can be pretty sure the plan was for Murky to finish first with the Dem in second place, which would then have been followed by a Florida 2000-like legal challenge to Murky's write-in votes eventually leading to a Dem win.  Yesterday Murky said she wouldn't promise the GOP to caucus with them, so it's clear her hope was with Democrats.   She deserves to lose...again.
• William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection calls this a political decapitation as dozens of senior Dem leaders face expulsion.  As Jacobson states: "Unlike Republicans in 2008, there is no next generation of Democratic leaders. Who are the Democratic Party equivalents of Marco Rubio, Mitch Daniels, John Thune, Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan or Eric Cantor? The Republican Party has numerous rising stars. I cannot think of a single Democratic Party rising star".  True.
• In the next few days the editorial pages will be full of articles about how Obama can recover his mojo after this stunning defeat.  They'll be full of advice for the president who listens to no one, desperately hoping they can save him from himself.  The first one has already been posted.
• And then there's this: "By sunrise Wednesday morning, we still may not have a clear idea of just how many seats Republicans have won in the House," warns The Cook Political Report. "As one smart Democratic operative points out, between 10 and 20 percent of all competitive races could not be called on Election Night in both 2006 and 2008, and there were only about 60 competitive races in each of those elections. This year, with 100 races listed as competitive on our chart, the number of races left without checkmarks until later dates could easily run in the double digits."