Jerry Brown will be the next Governor of California, and Barbara Boxer has kept her Senate Seat. Hopefully this bodes well for Prop 19.

America lost a great Senator tonight. Russ Feingold has been defeated in Wisconsin.

The other Republican wins tonight, modest in number, were expected. Losing Feingold is unexpected and disappointing.

We've got so few progressives in the Senate to begin with. Losing even one hurts, but this one especially. Feingold didn't always toe the Democrats' line. He supported gun rights. He was the lone vote against the Patriot Act. He opposed FISA. He was a maverick and he fought tirelessly for his positions.

Wisconsin has voted out one of the country's finest Senators. It not only shot itself in the foot, it hurt us all.

Politico has good maps.

Democrats won their Senate races in Connecticut and West Virginia. Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas and Brad Ellsworth in Indiana lost.

Republicans need to gain 10 Senate seats to take control. I don't think they'll do it.

Update: Marco Rubio wins the Florida Senate seat.

Kentucky and Indiana are mostly closed and votes are being counted. Should be easy Senate wins for the GOP in those 2 states. Dems have vulnerable House seats in both.

Florida mostly closes at 7 but stays open until 8 in the Panhandle (Central time there.)

I'll update periodically.

Rubio wins in FL. Coons wins in Delaware. Paul wins Kentucky. Coats wins in Indiana. No early surprises.

Blumenthal beat the WWE in CT.

Manchin wins in West Virgina.

Here are mine:

GOP captures House winning 63 seats. Prominent losers include Grayson in Florida and a slew of Blue Dogs, including Adler in New Jersey, Altmire in PA, Childers in Mississippi, Shuler in North Carolina, Perriello in Virginia, and many many more. Surprise loss will be Frank Pallone in New Jersey.

Pelosi retires.

GOP picks up 9 in the Senate. In the prominent races, the GOP dominates- Rand Paul (KY), Marco Rubio (FL), Pat Toomey(PA), Mark Kirk (IL), Ken Buck (CO), Joe Miller (AK), Sharron Angle (NV), Dino Rossi (WA), and Ron Johnson (WI) all win. Joe Manchin become a virtual Republican to hold off Raese in West Virginia.

Harry Reid's political career is over. More importantly, so is Russ Feingold's.

In the governor's races, the only big win in a close race will be Alex Sink in Florida. Strickland goes down in Ohio and so on. California (Brown and Boxer) is the lone Dem bright spot outside of Alex Sink.

I voted straight Democrat except for one race - the Florida Senate race. I voted for Crist over Meek.

On the issues, based on the candidates' stated positions, Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek would be my choice. But Crist will be Specter-like, imo, if he wins (maybe if he loses too. He's done as a Republican.) The last polls of the race have Meek with no chance and Crist with a slim one of beating Republican Marco Rubio.

Here's the question - does stopping Marco Rubio matter enough to vote for the candidate who agrees with me less? In terms of what happens in Congress for the next 2 years, not really I think. But what about the 4 years after that? Moreover, Rubio as an incumbent will be hard to beat. He's a good pol. And he will be a conservative Republican. The consequences in Senate races last longer.

I promise to work for Meek in his next race, but I'll vote for Crist in this race and hope he can somehow pull it out. Meek has no chance. (As for my election predictions, I'll wait until the end of the day to give you mine.)

UPDATE - I voted and the post has been edited to reflect that. I voted against all the constitutional amendments as well. I hate constitutional amendments by referendum. Hell, I hate referendums period.

Speaking for me only

No more polls, it's E-Day. My personal predictions:

• Voter turnout will not be much higher than usual for mid-term elections.

• The Dems will keep the Senate.

• The predictions of huge sweeps and upsets by tea-partiers on a national level, or across the board, won't happen. Any "landslides" will be localized, and more a reflection of the peculiarities of the particular race than a indicator of a trend or a movement. [More...]
  

Nate Silver:

Dawn breaks over New York City on Wednesday, Nov. 3. Democrats catching the early train to work are thinking about adding a little whiskey to their morning coffee. Because the headlines they are reading are truly terrible.

[. . .] Pundits are running out of metaphors to describe what just happened. Not a wave, a hurricane. Not a hurricane, a tsunami! Not a tsunami; a tsunami from a magnitude 9.5 earthquake. Or by a meteor strike!

Democrats knew it was going to be bad. But they didn’t think it was going to be this bad. So, what happened?

In typical Silver style, he's not saying this is his prediction, just a possibility (that's why he gets the big bucks!) As long as we are all hedging, I fall back on my tried and true cliche - time will tell.

Speaking for me only

9News, Denver's local NBC affiliate, has pulled an ad against Congressman Ed Perlmutter for being "a whopper." The ad was placed by "American Action Network, an outside group founded by GOP operatives."

The ad suggests that because U.S. Rep. Perlmutter voted for health care reform, he supported convicted rapists' access to Viagra.

The Denver Post and 7News also called the ad false and "fiction."

Convicts out of prison are allowed by law to purchase any health care plan they choose. Some of those plans cover Viagra prescriptions, and some don't. There are no provisions to either prohibit or protect the prescription of erectile dysfunction drugs for qualified health plans in the Act.

More good news: After 9 News yanked the ad, the group canceled all its ads with the network. [More...]

The Brown Willie Horton ad:

* Reference here.

Speaking for me only

NYTimes Editorial:

[I]n three terms, [Feingold] has distinguished himself for trying to bring fairness to campaign finance and decency to national security, among other achievements. He has routinely crossed party lines to work with Republicans and has had the courage to break with his own party more often than almost any other senator.

He voted against confirming Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary, citing Mr. Geithner’s personal tax issues. He refused to support the Wall Street reform package because it did not go far enough. He was the only senator who voted against the misguided Patriot Act in 2001. He has supported gun rights — more than we like — and has opposed hate crime measures.

[. . .] Mr. Feingold is one of the very few [Democrats] with the self-confidence to offer a full-throated defense of his votes. [. . .] Mr. Feingold is making the case that there is a choice to make on Nov. 2 and that there is a need for thoughtful voices in Washington.

If you can, give Russ some cheddar.

Speaking for me only

Via the National Journal: Captured on video in March (about 1:50 in):

Questioner: "If you were the chief executive of New York, what would your response be to the attorney general of the United States deciding to hold terrorist trials in New York?"

Paladino: "F*** him. F*** him."

His audience laughed.