Well, I did call it, didn’t I? Just to refresh your memories here were my predictions for 7 November:

Senate 5-8 seat pick up for Democrats
House 27-34 seat pick up for Democrats
Governors 4-6 pick up for Democrats

The Senate is on the low end of my estimate (5-6), but still there. The House is right on (33) and the governors are at the high end of my margin of error (6). This is what happens when you strip the rhetoric, the partisan passions and negative ads from your analysis. I’m not saying that those aren’t factors in how elections are decided. What I am saying is that if you want an honest analysis, you must strip all the noise from what you’re looking at.

This was a year when the anger of the electorate overcame all of the partisan oratory. The people stood at the edge of the parade and collectively said, “The emperor has no clothes!” In a system where elections are mandated at set intervals, and not when we lose faith in the administration; this was as close as the American people can come to a vote of no-confidence in the policies of the administration.

There were even some signs of strategic voting. In Rhode Island, a moderate Republican, Lincoln Chafee, was turned out of office. Chafee was no fan of the administration’s policies and didn’t even vote for Bush in ’04. His problem was the ‘R’ after his name. It would seem that the voters of Rhode Island didn’t want even a decent fellow like Chaffee to give Republicans control of the Senate. This turned out to be prescient: The Democrats may control the Senate by only one seat in the end. We won’t know for several weeks, and I’m looking to the re-count in Virginia to be as nasty as the election was.

Now, let’s see if the Democrats, who are notoriously hard to organise, can produce coherent policy. It’s a new day in America.

Please give what you can to Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders).

And, of course