I could get used to this feeling. Of winning. Not only the House, but the Senate, since Tester has been declared the winner, and Webb's lead may exceed the Virginia margin of recount. I did not expect us to take the Senate. At all.
For the first time in my life I worked-- admittedly not much-- for a candidate above the city-council level who won. And man, was her office well-organized! Believe it or not, I find phonebanking fun. Though I may have thrown out my voice-- I hope not, since I'm giving a poetry reading in Los Angeles Thursday evening. If you're in L.A., drop in! No charge, and I hear the museum looks great-- I wouldn't know, since it's my first time in L.A.
Jessie has a neat initiative roundup with a focus on the ugly, ugly homophobia that still defaces so many corners of our sometimes-great nation. Bigotry: harder to wipe out than grease stains. Or bloodstains.
The New York Times covers others, including minimum wage increases, which seem to have passed everywhere, and the anti-Kelo vs. New London initiatives which passed in several states: as Kevin Drum warned, the California anti-Kelo initiative was actually a draconian attempt to limit all government regulation of anything, by making government pay for any potential lost revenue from any regulatory restriction on the use of any property at all. Fortunately, California's iniative failed; Arizona's passed. Was it just as bad? The Grand Canyon State also rejected homophobes, but voted to beat up on illegal immigrants (I'm not talking about the English-official-language measure, even, but the bail and education measures).
And in my own favorite referendum, Rhode Island restored voting rights to felons who have paid their debt to society. States that disfranchise felons forever-- even 30 years after probation ends-- should, you know, stop. Felon disfranchisement is one major reasons for the low black voting rates in the South: many middle-aged black men, in particular, would vote if they could.
Less heralded, but really, really good news: we flipped a lot of state legislatures. Good news for the residents of those states, and for the Dem Party as of 2010, and 2016.
Chris Bowers says our victories did not make the party any more conservative (Chris is right), that Rahm Emanuel deserves no credit at all (that may be a bit harsh), and that Howard Dean, the 50-state strategy, and the netroots deserve a lot of the credit: here Chris is 100% correct. Most of the second-tier candidates who won last night, and many of those who lost narrowly (thus diverting GOP fire and allowing other folks to win) were made possible by netroots, grassroots, small donations, local and state and non-Washington forces, of the kind that were shut out of the Dem Party too often before Howard Dean took charge. I'm talking about Tim Walz here in MN, and Shea-Porter in NH and John Hall in NY, and you can probably add your own examples. There are also winners nobody expected, not even the netroots-- that's what "wave election" sorta means.
Another trend from last night, picking up on another of Chris's ideas: blue-district wins. In the closing weeks, netroots attention focused especially hard on 50-state-strategy candidates, folks in places like Idaho and Nebraska: had they won, their seats would have been hard, though by no means impossible, to defend. But people like Chris Murphy (CT-05), who displaced GOP incumbents in Northeastern districts that voted for Kerry, now have safe seats for the forseeable future. Cool.
For all the 30-seat pickup prognostication, I couldn't shake the feeling, all day yesterday, that we would somehow come up short at the end. It's a wonderful feeling to shake off. We won.
This year's Dem party-- despite the Rahm-Dean sniping, and despite disagreements over previously-inflammatory social issues-- has been remarkably unified in its resurgence: can we keep it that way? I hope so.