Election Results

So the results look pretty good. The Democrats took the House by a good margin. The Senate is now down to Virgina to determine if it's 50-50 or 51-49. And the wonderful surprise is that Rumsfeld resigned and Bush accepted it (though in his press conference the president suggested he was lying last week about Rumsfeld staying). So let's see what the Dems can do. Bush said some nice things at his 1pm press conference about working with this Congress but I don't believe it. My guess is Bush's one practice veto will lead to more. The Dems should be able to reassert congressional oversight and I'm sure that will lead to more executive privilege issues.

In looking at the results this one thought struck me. Remember all the talk a couple of years ago about the Republicans successfully gerrymandering districts and that would mean the Democrats would never win again? I guess that wasn't true. It struck me as odd that the in spite of gerrymandering, Democrats won the House (where districts matter) and yet the Senate is close to 50-50 and that's just a popular vote.

I guess the right way to look at it is that only 33 Senate seats up for election. The media I've seen has been concentrating on number of seats changed and you see numbers like 5. If you look at it as 24-9 (Democrats won 21, Independents 2 in CT and VT, and Republicans only 9 with VA still undecided) that's pretty severe.

Economist Brad DeLong, who I normally like, wrote 32,100,000 vs. 24,524,000: "One way to look at last night's election is that the implicit gerrymandering of the Senate and the in-the-tank-ness of the press corps are keeping people from realizing how big the blowout was. Consider this: it looks like 32,100 thousand Americans voted for Democratic Senatorial candidates, and only 24,524 thousand Americans voted for Republican Senatorial candidates. That's a 13.4% margin of Democratic victory."

Ok, he meant million instead of thousand, but gerrymandering the Senate? Last I checked Senators were elected by popular votes of the states and that was mandated by the Constitution. If his numbers for the popular vote are right, that's pretty interesting.

So hopefully VA goes to Webb. In the mean time, the Supreme Court heard an abortion case today and Israel and Gaza are shooting rockets at each other and the military leader of Hamas is calling for strikes against the US.