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Another Democrat Wins in Texas!

Ciro Rodriguez beat incumbent Republican Congressman Henry Bonilla today in Texas District 23 by an enormous margin, 54.3 percent to 45.7 percent! The district had been redrawn by the Supreme Court, because Tom DeLay's cynically crafted district lines were found to violate the Voting Rights Act. The new configuration stretches from San Antonio and Laredo almost to El Paso, taking in large swathes of South and West Texas.

It's an extraordinary and unexpected victory, since on November 7 right-wing Bush supporter Bonilla led Rodriguez 49 percent to 20 percent. But since Bonilla did not achieve a majority, he had to face a runoff, and the 5-week race turned into yet another referendum on Bush. Bush lost.

"Voters sent a message in November and they sent another one tonight, that change is coming to Washington," said Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Greg Jefferson of the San Antonio Express-News describes the upset:

Andy Hernandez, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a former Democratic National Committee staffer, said Rodriguez's victory was in step with last month's Democratic upheaval.

"You have to see this as part of the national trend where Republicans lost in swing districts," he said. "This anti-Republican trend, which Hispanics had a big part in, played out here."…

Bonilla came into the runoff with $1.6 million in the bank and the advantages of incumbency — a familiar name across the sprawling district and list of projects for which he'd secured federal funding.

Rodriguez hobbled out of the special election nearly broke and with a reputation as a less than savvy campaigner.

But he had a name that registered in Bexar County and South Texas, and soon he had the interest of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. After testing the water with polls, the organization wound up spending more than $900,000 on mail-outs and television ads.

When national Democrats came on the scene, Rodriguez's campaign was transformed from a largely all-volunteer effort to a more professionalized operation.

The race quickly turned bitter.

Rodriguez accused Bonilla of slashing veterans' health benefits and voting against a $1,500 bonus for troops active in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For his part, Bonilla questioned Rodriguez's judgment over his support for repealing a law allowing the use of secret evidence in deportation cases, saying it would have led to the freeing of suspected terrorists, and for accepting a $250 contribution in 1998 from a man later convicted of illegal business transactions with Libya.

Andy Hernandez said Bonilla's accusation and the TV ad that followed might have hurt Bonilla, not Rodriguez. "It just wasn't credible."

Richard Langlois, chairman of the Bexar County Republican Party, blamed Bonilla's fall in Bexar County on his supporters staying home Tuesday.

"Obviously, it was voter apathy," Langlois said. "Obviously, something happened."

Indeed, something happened. Some Democrats decided they could win anywhere against the corrupt GOP, even in West Texas, and worked hard to get out the vote, especially the Hispanic vote. Some Republicans lost faith in Bush and didn't bother to go to the polls or encourage others to vote. Some Republicans even (horrors!) voted for a Democrat. It's a sweet victory, and another well-deserved punch in the solar plexus to Tom DeLay.

One other race was decided today. In Ohio District 15, a thorough recount was completed, and incumbent Republican Deborah Pryce beat Mary Jo Kilroy by a whisker, only 1,062 votes. The victory was not surprising, but the thin margin was, and Kilroy seems likely to try a rematch in 2008.

The only undecided race for a Congressional seat now is in Florida District 13, where Republican Vern Buchanan has been certified the winner by 369 votes. But Democrat Christine Jennings has challenged the results, due to an undervote of 18,000 in Sarasota. That race may be decided in the courts, or perhaps by the House of Representatives itself. It is also possible, given such severe problems, that a second election may be conducted. That's what Howard Dean is calling for.

But even if Buchanan manages to take office, Democrats now have a 31-vote advantage in the House. Republicans never achieved that large a majority at any time during their last 12 years of control. In fact, you have to go back to the election of 1946 to see the GOP do better than Democrats have done this year.

So let's give three rousing Spanish cheers for the heroes of the hour:

¡Viva Rodriguez!

¡Viva Emanuel!

¡Viva Dean!

Bad Design Steals a Florida Election

The disputed House race in Florida's 13th District keeps getting more and more interesting. A statistical study of the razor-thin Republican advantage by Vern Buchanan over Democrat Chrisine Jennings (369 votes) indicates that the 18,000 undervotes in Sarasota County:

• probably resulted from confusing ballot design on the screen of the voting machine
• would certainly ("100 percent chance") have given Jennings the victory if they had been properly recorded as voters intended
  

Three professors of political science, Michael C. Herron (Dartmouth and Rochester) and James Honaker and Jeffrey B. Lewis (UCLA), with the assistance of Laurin Frisina (Rochester), wrote "Ballot Formats, Touchscreens, and Undervotes: A Study of the 2006 Midterm Elections in Florida" and published it on December 3 (PDF here). On the basis of their analysis of the election results, they write:

The 2006 midterm elections in Florida have focused attention on undervotes, ballots on which no vote is recorded on a particular contest. This interest was sparked by the high undervote count— more than 18,000 total undervotes out of 240,000 ballots cast—in Florida’s 13th Congressional District race, a race decided by a total of 369 votes. Using a combination of ballot-level and precinct-level voting data, we show that the high undervote rate in the 13th Congressional District race was almost certainly caused by the way that Sarasota County’s electronic touchscreen voting machines placed the 13th Congressional District race above and on the same screen as the Florida Governor race. We buttress this claim by showing that extraordinarily high undervote rates were also observed in the Florida Attorney General race in Charlotte and Lee Counties, places where that race appeared below the Governor race on voting machine screens. Using a precinct-level statistical imputation model to identify and allocate excess undervotes, we find that there is a 90 percent chance that Sarasota undervotes were pivotal in the 13th Congressional District race. With more precise estimates that use ballot data, we find that there is essentially a 100 percent chance that Jennings would have won the CD 13 race had Sarasota voters voted in Charlotte County.

In other words, they argue that the undervotes were not the result of

• hardware malfunction
• software malfunction
• features of the candidates themselves (such as negative campaigning)
• the office they were contesting (as contrasted with other races on the ballot)
• specific features of the Buchanan-Jennings campaign ("protest undervotes")
• intentional fraud

Instead, the reason that an anomalous 15% of voters failed to cast a vote in that race was the specific layout of the ballot in Sarasota County, which differed from the layout used in other counties:

[O]nly in Sarasota was the CD 13 race itself placed on the same ballot screen with the Governor’s race which included six alternative candidates plus a write-in line. In other counties and on Sarasota’s absentee ballot, the CD 13 race appeared on its own ballot screen, next to (in a horizontal sense) the Florida United States Senate race, or along with a large number of other races in the case of optical scan ballots.

In Charlotte and Lee counties, the confusing list of gubernatorial candidates appeared on the same screen as the state attorney general race, and (sure enough!) the AG race showed a large number of undervotes. The AG race was not close enough for these undervotes to make a difference in the outcome, but the effect was the same as in the Sarasota CD 13 results. In both cases, a confusing screen containing two races apparently caused many voters to overlook the more compact listing of the nongubernatorial race.

The conclusion is that Democrat Jennings should have won the race:

Jennings would have received a net advantage of between 3,068 and 3,359 votes if Sarasota voters had voted in Charlotte precincts–far more than the roughly 400 required to reverse the election.

Buchanan did not really win. However, it would be difficult to say that Jennings won either, since most voters (and all election officials) would be uncomfortable deciding an election after the fact on statistical evidence alone, no matter how compelling.

The case is before the courts, but that path to resolution would likely take many months. Clearly there is only one proper course of action: Florida should invalidate the November 7 results for CD 13 and conduct another election as soon as possible.

Update: The Last House Races

The midterm elections are finally drawing to a close, as this week one more Republican squeaked by to retain his seat in the House. Three races are still undecided; Republican incumbents retain a slight advantage in all three. The projected total remains unchanged: Democrats 232, Republicans 203.

Robin Hayes has represented North Carolina 08 since 1999, and earlier in the year he was expected to win easily. But Democratic challenger Larry Kissell, a high school teacher in his first political foray, almost pulled off an upset. When the last votes were counted on November 30, Hayes won by only 329 votes out of 120,000. Kissell conceded, but he promises to run again in 2008.

Of the three undecided races, the one in southwestern Texas will be decided by a runoff between Republican incumbent Henry Bonilla and Democrat Ciro Rodriguez, a former congressman. The boundaries for Texas 23 were modified this year by the Supreme Court, which ruled that Tom DeLay's 2003 redistricting scheme diluted Latino voting strength and violated the Voting Rights Act. GOP Governor Rick Perry set the runoff for December 12. Democrats charge that Perry chose that day because it is the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the holiday (special to Mexican-Americans) is likely to reduce Democratic voter turnout. (Update, 12/5: A new poll shows Bonilla ahead of Rodriguez 53%–46%.)
 

In Ohio 15, after all the provisional and absentee ballots were counted, incumbent Republican Deborah Pryce was still leading Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy, but by only 1,055 votes, 50.2% to 49.8%. A recount will begin this week, and it may be completed by December 8. If Pryce holds on to her lead, Columbus, which is heavily Democratic, will continue to be represented by three Republicans, since the GOP-dominated legislature split the city (and surrounding Franklin County) into three districts, all of which include heavily Republican areas in neighboring counties.

The tight race in Florida 13 may not be decided for weeks, though state officials (including the president's brother) have already declared fellow Republican Vern Buchanan the victor over Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes, despite an enormous undervote in the race, apparently due to malfunctioning—or misprogrammed—electronic voting machines. Jennings has filed suit, calling for a new election, and she has added Election Systems and Software, the machines' manufacturer, to the suit. Several good-voting organizations have filed a second suit. 

Voting machines were tested last week, but the results were inconclusive, and testing will continue this week. If the winner is not determined when Congress convenes in January, the House could refuse to seat Buchanan until the lawsuits are resolved or until another election is held. In fact, it could decide, without waiting for a court decision, to seat Jennings.

In the meantime, fun and games continue in Jeb Bush's electoral wonderland.

Democracy in Florida

Last week Republicans eked out wins in two more House races, in central New Mexico and southwestern Ohio. Both races were extremely close, although a few weeks ago both had been expected to be easy Republican wins.

Four House races remain undecided, three with GOP candidates in the lead—Florida 13, North Carolina 08,  and Ohio 15—and one, Texas 23, with the Republican candidate favored in a December 12 runoff. (One other runoff, in Louisiana 02, is between two Democrats.) The projected total remains Democrats 232, Republicans 203.

New Mexico's 1st District was decided by 879 votes out of a total 211,000. Incumbent Heather Wilson ran behind Democrat Patricia Madrid in Bernalillo County, which includes Albuquerque (and 90 percent of the district's voters), but Wilson gained enough votes to win in the outlying suburbs, which are more conservative. Though the difference is less than one-half of one percent, New Mexico law does not require a recount. Madrid has conceded, but the state Democratic Party will probably request a partial recount, though it would be very unlikely to change the result.

Ohio's 2nd District also remained with the Republican incumbent, barely. Though Democrat Victoria Wulsin has not yet conceded, she now trains Jean Schmidt by about 3,100 votes, with only a few provisional ballots remaining to be counted. (Update, 11/28: Wulsin has conceded.)

Among undecided races, incumbent Republican Deborah Pryce is still leading Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy by about 3,700 votes in Ohio's 15th District, but almost 20,000 provisional and absentee ballots remain uncounted. They are all from Franklin County (Columbus), which is the most Democratic-leaning portion of the district. Kilroy would need about 61 percent of the remaining votes to win; if the final tally is within one-half of one percent, a recount would be conducted. (Update, 11/27: The count was completed today, and Pryce is still 1,055 ahead.  A recount will begin shortly and will be completed sometime before December 8, but it is unlikely Kilroy can pick up enough votes to change the outcome.)

North Carolina's 8th District is much tighter, and the winner will not be determined until Thursday or later. Incumbent Robin Hayes is just 329 votes ahead of Democratic challenger Larry Kissell, and Hayes's margin has diminished by 150 as counting has continued. Elections officials will manually inspect a sample of ballots on November 29 and 30, and they may then decide to pursue a complete manual recount.

But the real scandal is in Florida's 13th District, where Governor Jeb Bush and his cronies have declared Vern Buchanan the victor over Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes, despite an unexplained 18,000 undervotes  in Democratic-leaning Sarasota County (15 percent of the total), apparently due to malfunctioning electronic voting machines. Jennings has filed suit, calling for a new election, and a second suit has been filed by Voter Action, People For the American Way Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Florida American Civil Liberties Union.

Voting machines are being tested, and the dispute may well remain unresolved when the House convenes in January; the House could refuse to seat Buchanan until the lawsuits are resolved or until another election is held. According to the Orlando Sentinel, the precincts with the most serious problems tend to be those that voted heavily Democratic in other races.

It may be mere coincidence that District 13 has been represented by Katherine Harris, or it may be the doing of the Bush brothers and their henchmen. Harris, of course, was the Florida secretary of state who blocked the counting of Democratic votes in 2000, allowing partisan members of the Supreme Court to select George Bush over Al Gore, who won the popular vote. This time Democratic votes were apparently not even recorded electronically, and no paper ballots or other paper trail exists. Since a recount cannot discover votes for which no record exists—even when the intent seems clear from the pattern of voting for other offices—the only remedy for this Republican fraud is a new election.

Update, 11/27: Paul Kiel at TPMMuckraker has the latest details. Florida state workers are conducting an audit of FL-13 voting machines today and tomorrow, but they are testing backup machines that were not used in the election. Furthermore, only four machines are being tested, and the proprietary source code is off limits; Jennings's advisors see this test as essentially meaningless. On Friday, further tests will be conducted on actual election machines that had high undervotes. Kiel concludes:

Of course, lurking in the background to all this is that Jennings has until December 20th to contest the results in the House of Representatives, which has ultimate jurisdiction over the dispute. That move could take the fight out of the court's hands altogether. [Jennings's lawyer, Kendall] Coffey, however, said that Jennings hasn't "reached that stage of deliberation yet."

Triumph of the Dixiepublicans

Once upon a time, racist white Southern politicians were all members of the Democratic Party. Now most racist white Southern politicians have migrated to the Republican Party, and they have completely taken it over, a development epitomized by Trent Lott's reemergence in the Senate GOP leadership. That takeover has been a long time coming. Now, with last week's midterm elections, almost every moderate Republican has been driven out of public life, and Southern reactionaries run the party. As a result, the purged Republican Party is likely to find itself in the minority for decades.

From 1932 t0 1968, the Democrats had a Big Tent, which included segregationist Dixiecrats (as they were called), along with blacks and big-city unionists and Midwest farmers and populist Northerners, all together in the New Deal coalition. The Solid South was the foundation of Democratic power, and anyone who wanted to win in the states of the old Confederacy ran for office as a Democrat.

The first cracks in the Democratic coalition became visible in 1948, after Harry Truman integrated the armed forces and then ran for reelection on a civil-rights platform: Strom Thurmond led a rebel group of Dixiecrats against Truman and won 39 electoral votes in the deep South that year. But most white Southerners returned to the Democratic Party, and the Big Tent held together until the sixties. That's when Lyndon Johnson enacted the Great Society programs, intended to eliminate poverty and racial injustice.

Richard Nixon took advantage of the ire of many racist voters to ride a "Southern Strategy" to victory in 1968, and over the following  decades Republicans became the dominant party in the South, first in presidential voting (as Nixon and Reagan conveyed a whites-first message), then moving down the ballot (with defecting representatives and senators like Thurmond). The process culminated with the radical congressional realignment of 1994, led by Newt Gingrich, and the last traces of moderate Republicanism were purged in this year's election.

Racism in the South can no longer be promulgated overtly, since for decades most Americans have found direct appeals to racial discrimination unacceptable. Therefore, politicians use code words to communicate their support for white supremacy, and the code words have shifted over time as their intent became clear to nonracists. First it was states' rights (the Dixiecrat Party was officially called the States' Rights Democratic Party), then law and order, opposition to welfare and school busing and affirmative action, and most recently support for low taxes and small government.

These latest euphemisms for racism are the most dangerous, because many Americans genuinely do not understand their racist meaning. "Low taxes and small government" mean, in Republican practice, low taxes for the rich, small government for social services with big government for the military-corporate complex, and enhanced power for business owners against workers (with no governmental intervention). The direct effect of this class-warfare strategy is greater discrimination against blacks, Latinos, and other minorities. In short, racism.

As racists have migrated to the GOP, the heirs of Abraham Lincoln have been purged. After last week's election, liberal Republicans, Rockefeller Republicans, are few and far between. As Thomas F. Shaller writes in the New York Times:

[T]he majority of defeated House Republicans were purged from the liberal third of the G.O.P. caucus. Ten of the 28 most liberal Republicans lost, including four of the top 12: Jim Leach of Iowa (No. 1), Nancy Johnson of Connecticut (No. 3), Simmons (No. 7), and Charlie Bass of New Hampshire (No. 12). Sherwood Boehlert of New York, sixth on the list of most liberal Republicans, is retiring from Congress, and the Democratic candidate won the race for his seat.

In their place we have Trent Lott back as the Senate minority whip—the Mississippian who in 2002 praised Strom Thurmond on his 100th birthday:

I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.

"All these problems" clearly refers to the decline of white supremacy, the platform on which Thurmond ran in 1948. Lott is "proud of it," proud of being racist and sorry that the rest of the country is not as racist as he and his Dixiecrat hero. Following this inadvertent truth-telling, Lott lost his Republican leadership position, since George Bush knows that in the 21st century "low-tax" racism is easier to sell than the overt variety. But now Lott is back, chosen by his fellow Republican senators as their number 2 leader.

And it's not as though Lott has learned anything in the last four years. His obliviousness extends to Iraqis, too, as he recently made clear:

Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.… I always had trouble understanding -- Iraqis look like Iraqis, and Americans look like Americans.… Methodists, Baptists and Catholics live in my hometown. They all look the same to me, they all look like Americans.

Any Jews in Pascagoula? Any Muslims? And what about the blacks in Lott's hometown—does he really think they have rights and opportunities equal to the whites?

George Bush's party is Trent Lott's party is Strom Thurmond's party—the Dixiepublicans.

All Democratic Incumbents Win!

John Barrow retained his seat in the 12th District of Georgia by 864 votes, and his opponent will not seek a recount. He was the final Democratic incumbent in the House whose reelection was in doubt, and he had many obstacles to overcome. Last year, the Republican-controlled Georgia legislature tried to redistrict him out of a seat in its mid-decade shell game, but even depriving him of his liberal hometown Athens was not enough—Barrow moved into the reconfigured district, and started introducing himself in the new counties. The vicious Washington-directed ad attack was not enough—he attacked as good as he got. Finally, he managed to eke out a win over former Congressman Max Burns, a right-wing ideologue who relied on the usual GOP strategy: a call for smaller taxes and bigger military muscle.

By winning, Barrow and Jim Marshall, his fellow Democrat in the 8th District, thwarted Georgia Republicans' 2005 redistricting ploy, which had been intended to shift the state's House contingent to 9 Republicans and 4 Democrats. Instead, in this deep-red, Old-South state, Democrats still have 6 seats, Republicans 7. The Democratic wave reached all the way to northeast Georgia.

But the biggest triumph is that nationwide not one Democratic seat in the House, in the Senate, or among the governors' races went to a Republican. This may be the first time since the Civil War that a party has enjoyed both incumbent immunity and open-seat immunity—I could not find any other election with 100 percent retention.

Voters in every part of the country expressed revulsion toward George Bush and his culture of corruption, incompetence, greed, and irresponsibility. New England, once the wellspring of Republican thought, was left with only one congressman of 22 in the GOP; both New Hampshire districts turned blue, and two in Connecticut. Just to the west, New York switched three seats and Pennsylvania four. Elsewhere, three in Indiana, two in Iowa, and one in Kansas. (What's the matter with Kansas? Nothing!)

In the Senate, liberal Republican Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island lost, merely because he lined himself up on the Republican side of the aisle. Pennsylvanians tossed out homophobe Rick Santorum; Virginians, racist George Allen; Ohioans, corrupt Mike DeWine; and Missourians, talentless Jim Talent. Many websites neglected to mention the candidates' Republican connection, but the omission didn't do any good.

In the Wyoming House race, Republican Barbara Cubin won by 1,012 votes over Gary Trauner yesterday, and today Trauner decided not to ask for a recount. That leaves six House races undecided, five with Republican candidates leading—Florida 13, New Mexico 01, North Carolina 08, Ohio 02, and Ohio 15—and one, Texas 23, with the Republican candidate favored in a December runoff.

When these campaigns started, GOP candidates were heavily favored in every one of these races; it is another triumph that they have been so closely contested. Even if all six districts finally remain red, Democrats will have as large a majority in the House as Republicans held at any time since they took control in 1994.

That's very good news—definitely good enough to break into song—like FDR in '32:

Happy days are here again,
The skies above are clear again,
So let's sing a song of cheer again,
Happy days are here again!

All together shout it now,
There's no one who can doubt it now,
So let's tell the world about it now,
Happy days are here again!

Another Republican Gone

It could hardly have been closer. Democratic challenger Joe Courtney (photo) won in eastern Connecticut, 50.03% to 49.97%, and now the Republicans have only one representative left in all of New England, Christopher Shays. AP reports:

Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz made it official Wednesday, announcing that Democrat Joe Courtney won by 90 votes in Connecticut's close 2nd Congressional District race.

A recount that lasted nearly a week confirmed Courtney's victory over three-term Republican Rep. Rob Simmons, Bysiewicz said. The results will be officially certified Nov. 28.…

On Election Day, Courtney led by 167 of nearly 250,000 votes cast. But recounts in the district's 65 towns uncovered some flaws, including a 100-vote mistake in the small town of Lebanon that lowered the margin to a mere 66 votes at one point.

Courtney, who lost to Simmons in 2002, is the second Connecticut Democrat to oust an incumbent from Congress this year. State Sen. Chris Murphy defeated 12-term Rep. Nancy Johnson last week in a Democratic surge that ended 12 years of GOP control of the House and Senate.

Courtney's win is a bonus for national Democrats, who already had all of the seats they needed to reclaim the House.

Simmons conceded this afternoon. This race is proof positive that every vote is important. I started to phrase that differently, writing that every vote counts, but it seems that some votes don't count in Sarasota County, Florida. The undervote there (no vote recorded) in the tight 13th District race was 13%, compared to 2.5% among absentee ballots. Therefore, it seems likely that there was a systemic error in the electronic voting machines—or perhaps confusing electronic ballot design—and as many as 18,000 intended votes were not recorded. Democrat Christine Jennings trails Republican Vern Buchanan by just 377 votes, so a manual recount has begun.

If Jennings were to receive the same percentage of those 18,000 votes as she did in the votes already counted in Sarasota County (52.7%) , she would pick up almost 1,000 votes and win the race. The county's voting machines, however, do not leave a paper trail, so the only record of voters' intent is the electronic record, and a recount consists merely of rechecking that electronic record. Jennings is challenging the results, and she is attending freshman orientation for House members in Washington, but chances for success are slim. Florida Republicans, it seems, have stolen another election.

Eight days after the election, party control also remains undecided in eight other races:

• Georgia 12 (update 4:30 PM): Democratic incumbent John Barrow leads Max Burns by 864 votes. Burns may request a recount. If Barrow holds on, Democrats will not have lost any seats in either the House or the Senate.
• New Mexico 01 (update 11/16): Republican incumbent Heather Wilson leads Patricia Madrid by 1,487. A complete count is expected by Friday, 11/17, and a recount is possible.
• North Carolina 08: Republican incumbent Robin Hayes is ahead of Larry Kissell by 465, with provisional ballots to be counted on Friday. If the margin is within 1 percent, a recount could take place November 20 or 21.
• Ohio 02: Republican incumbent Jean Schmidt leads Victoria Wulsin by 2,865. Thousands of provisional ballots remain to be counted.
• Ohio 15: Republican incumbent Deborah Pryce leads Mary Jo Kilroy by 3,536, with 10,000 provisional ballots to be counted next week.
• Texas 23: Republican incumbent Henry Bonilla got 48.6% of the vote, but he needed 50% to avoid a runoff. He will face Democrat Ciro Rodriguez, probably in December.
• Wyoming At-Large: Republican incumbent Barbara Cubin was certified as the winner today over Gary Trauner by 1,012 votes, but Trauner can call for a recount in the next two days if he pays for it. He has said that he is concerned about voting irregularities.

TPM Election Central has a list of results from Senate races and competitive House races here, and CQ Politics has a complete list of Senate, House, and gubernatorial results here (PDF file). If all races are won by the person who currently leads, House membership in the 110th Congress will be 232 Democrats and 203 Republicans.

Burner: Close, But No Cigar

In suburban Seattle, Democrat Darcy Burner fought the good fight but fell a few votes short in Washington's 8th District. Curt Woodward of the Associated Press:

Republican Rep. Dave Reichert survived a strong challenge from Democratic newcomer Darcy Burner, winning a second term Monday amid a Democratic wave that swept his party out of power in the House.

Reichert said Burner called to congratulate him on a second term, and the two shared their frustrations about the slow pace of Washington's largely vote-by-mail elections.

"Finally, something we agree on," Reichert told The Associated Press in a phone interview from Washington, D.C.

Burner did not publicly concede Monday night, but called a news conference Tuesday in Bellevue.

Her loss ended the Democrats' best hope for claiming a Republican House seat in this left-leaning state. Burner turned heads early by building a large campaign treasury, but in the end she could not capitalize on a strong tide in favor of Democratic candidates.

New returns posted Monday night put Reichert's lead at 4,727 votes, or 51.1 percent to Burner's 48.9 percent. Overall, 208,225 votes had been counted in the race.

Seven seats in the House remain undecided, with Democrats ahead in two and Republicans in five. The projected final totals are unchanged: Democrats expected to finish with 232 seats, GOP with 203.

What Kind of Dem Are You?

Democrats sliced George Bush and his party to ribbons in last week's elections—but what kind of Dems were they? The answer provided by the GOP spin machine was that they were conservative Democrats—perhaps even Republicans in Democratic clothing. Therefore, went the story, Bush and his party were not really repudiated; true, a few corrupt GOPers were thrown out of office, but the Democrats who replaced them don't actually have different ideas about how the government should be run.

Commentators and columnists across the ideological spectrum accepted and spouted these talking points for several days, as Alex Koppelman explains, and Fox News will no doubt repeat them until the next election. But they are not true, emphatically not true. These new members of Congress disagree with Bush and Dennis Hastert and Mitch McConnell on nearly every significant issue, across the board. Media Matters for America checked five policy positions held by 27 Democrats (the first 27 to win their races for Republican-held House seats) and found that every one of them supports raising the minimum wage, advocates changing course in Iraq, and opposes efforts to privatize Social Security. On other issues, 25 of 27 support embryonic stem cell research, and only 5 of 27 describe themselves as "pro-life." This is a group of Democrats at least as progressive as the current minority caucus in the House.

As for new senators labeled conservative by the Republican spin machine, Atrios demonstrates their progressive bona fides. Jon Tester of Montana supports funding renewable energy, raising auto mileage, repealing the Patriot Act, protecting public lands, providing affordable health care, and implementing several other key Democratic issues. And James Webb of Virginia, who was once a Republican, said:

There were a lot of misperceptions about why I got into this race. I was watching on election night some of the analysts and one of the frequent things that was being said about this campaign was that I came to the Democratic party purely on issues regarding the Iraq war.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I think I and a lot of people like me had aligned themselves with the Republican party on national security issues but were always concerned about issues of economic fairness and social justice.

In other words, Webb always thought that Democrats were right about domestic issues but Republicans were better on international issues. Now he's changed his mind: Democrats are right about everything.

Then there's Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire (in the photo, celebrating her victory), who came out of nowhere to beat the entrenched Jeb Bradley; the 1st District was so red, I did not even follow the race there until election night. As Matt Yglesias points out, Shea-Porter emphasizes civil liberties, pushes for income tax increases for the rich and Social Security tax levies on all income, wants much more money to help education and to fight global warming, and excoriates Bush for his failed policies in Iraq and against terrorists. That's no Republican!

There's also my neighbor and hero Jerry McNerney. Last June, he was considered too progressive to get support from the Democratic National Congressional Committee for the party's nomination in California 11. When he won the primary anyway, he placed the environment at the center of his campaign and ran away from Richard Pombo, the establishment incumbent, by 6 points!

Yes, Democrats really did win on Tuesday. And yes, they really are Democrats.

The Macaque Factor

The Senate is now in Democratic hands, Donald Rumsfeld is on the ash heap of history, and a crew of pragmatic Republican adults has been dispatched to clean up Dick Cheney's mess and rein in the juvenile president. George Bush's out-of-control government, conceived in macho posturing and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created gullible, will now face checks and balances from both sides. The Democratic Congress will not be so ready to indulge Bush's penchant for frivolous lawmaking and ruinous spending; Nancy Pelosi will make sure of that. And those gray-haired GOP emissaries from Poppy Bush—James Baker and Robert Gates and friends—will impose their world-weary realism on W, searching (we hope) for the least harmful exit strategy from Iraq and forbidding (we implore) further military adventures against Iran and Syria.

We have Senator George Allen to thank for the Senate. Thanks, Whitey! A few weeks ago, he had a 16-point lead for reelection and his eye on the presidency in 2008. But his opponent, the pragmatic ex-Republican Jim Webb, kept plugging along, hoping for a miracle. And then it happened: Allen's virulent racism erupted into full view. He had usually kept it hidden behind the acceptable GOP masks of low taxes and small government, but under the pressure of the campaign it appeared in all its ugliness. First, in an insult probably learned from his mother, who grew up speaking French in North Africa, Allen called a young Indian American "macaca," the pejorative French-colonial term for blacks, which refers to macaque monkeys. A few days later, confronted by a reporter with his previously hidden Jewish ancestry, Allen accused the reporter of  "making aspersions." He knew that he was Jewish, and his response showed that he thought calling someone Jewish was an insult. Allen later apologized to the Indian American and claimed to "embrace" his Jewish heritage, but with no credibility.

Allen has found racism congenial ever since he was a young man. Born in Southern California and raised there and in Chicago, he nevertheless identified himself with Southern white racists and adopted the Confederate battle flag as his symbolic banner. Several college friends reported that he often disparaged blacks and habitually referred to them as "niggers." Again, he denied the charges. But in fact Allen the politician always traded on the usual Republican wink-and-a-nod racism to win in Virginia. He presented himself to voters as one of the boys—the old white Southern boys who would be sure to keep the swarthy races in their place—and many of his supporters recognized his racism and approved; for example, the audience in the small town of Breaks, Virginia, for whom he joshed good-naturedly about the odd "macaca" in their midst.

Richard Nixon set the Republican Party on its racist course in the 1960s when he initiated the "Southern strategy"—and the party of Lincoln, which freed the slaves in the 1860s, became the party of Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott and George Bush and George Allen, racist demagogues all. Allen's defeat (following his display of naked racism) is a hopeful sign that many Southern whites no longer respond to such politicians—and that the Nixonian poison is fading.

Unfortunately, there is evidence that it still has some power in the South. One factor in Bob "Whitey" Cocker's defeat of Harold Ford in Tennessee was the Republican's sleazy TV ad that showed a bare-shouldered white woman asking Ford to give her a call—the mere thought of sex across the racial divide apparently continues to affect some voters. But most indicators are that the times they are a-changin'. George Allen is defeated, George Bush is diminished, and the party of hypocrisy and fake morality may now discover that racism is a losing strategy. In this time of victory and renewed hope, I fervently hope so.

Thanks to Brad DeLong for the macaque photo.