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Politico has an interesting article, looking back at some of the worst mid term predictions made by political pros who should have known better, Here are a few: Senator Chuck Schumer: “Well, I think we will hold the Senate. You know, I know all the pundits are saying Republicans will take the Senate. Democrats are going to prove the pundits wrong on Election Day when we keep the Senate, three reasons. First and foremost, economic issues predominate. Ebola's in the news, ISIS is in the news, but the average voter, every poll shows far and away, cares most about economic...

There are ninety-eight partisan state legislative chambers in our nation. (Nebraska has a unicameral and nonpartisan legislature.) Not all state legislative chambers had elections this November, but of the seventy-seven state legislative chambers that did have elections, Republicans gained seats in sixty-one, while losing seats in only ten. This translated into shifting control of ten legislative chambers from Democrat to Republican: the State Senate in Washington, Colorado, Nevada, Maine, and New York and the State House of Representatives in New Mexico, Nevada, Minnesota, West Virginia, and New Hampshire. Republican power in state legislatures is at the highest point in a...

I am well aware that Wendy Davis lost the Texas governor’s race by a wide margin. It’s salt in a very personal wound. Her campaign meant a lot to me, and to so many other Texas women — thousands of whom stood in line for hours to cast their ballots in support. Greg Abbott won anyway, and he won by a lot. But he didn’t win by a lot across the demographic landscape. I went to the Texas Tribune first for a dissection of the election results, and one piece of information struck me as particularly… wrong. The Tribune cited...

OK, let’s not mince words. It was abject slaughter in Texas. Republican Greg Abbott beat Democrat Wendy Davis by 21 points [59/38]. Then again, the pro-abortion Davis never really had a chance to win this election in the first place. Yet, from the darkened lair that is Salon.com, comes a horrid story of the “erasure” of votes cast by women of color in Texas, or something. Jenny Kutner, the editor who wrote about her plans to have an abortion, wrote this [emphasis mine]: I am well aware that Wendy Davis lost the Texas governor’s race by a wide margin. It’s salt in...

Here we are, the day of the great liberal Facebook hangover, crushed policies, placebo-like petitions driven before you and the lamentations of men and women. Obama’s victories over the last six years aside, this is a familiar spectacle for left-leaning Americans, enough so that the breast-beating is almost as enervating as all of those defeats. Act like you’ve been here before, people. Because – to paraphrase a cable show about a bunch of elites living in a militarized society that addressed populist concerns only episodically and embarrassingly until everyone finally found themselves on a completely screwed-up planet – all of...

Memo to the GOP. You had a great night on Tuesday. But remember: You didn’t win it. The Democrats lost it. This is not to say that you didn’t show discipline in making the election a referendum on six years of Barack Obama. You exercised adult supervision over the choice of candidates. You didn’t allow yourself to go down the byways of gender and other identity politics. It showed: a gain of probably nine Senate seats, the largest Republican House majority in more than 80 years, and astonishing gubernatorial victories, including Massachusetts, Maryland and Illinois, the bluest of the blue,...

For Democrats, the 2014 election was not the 2010 Republican landslide. It was worse. Four years ago, the economy was still ailing, and a new wave of conservative activism in the form of the tea party was roiling politics. This time, the economy was better, ideological energies on the right had abated — and Democrats suffered an even more stinging defeat. They lost Senate seats in presidential swing states such as Iowa, Colorado and North Carolina. They lost governorships in their most loyal bastions, from Massachusetts to Maryland to Illinois. After a defeat of this scope, the sensible advice is...

Wednesday morning, Cosmopolitan magazine hailed the fact that 100 women are going to serve in Congress for the first time ever. The only problem? The magazine rooted against a fifth of them – or at least ignored them. The fashion magazine for some reason decided to jump into politics this year and endorse candidates for the 2014 midterm elections. Surprise, surprise, all of the politicians they endorsed were pro-abortion Democrats. Here were just a few: Amanda Renteria, Jeanne Shaheen, Alison Lundergan Grimes, Mary Burke, Carol Shea-Porter, Michelle Nunn, Staci Appel, and everyone’s favorite candidate, Wendy Davis. In the House races, specifically, conservative, pro-life...

This map, which originated with National Journal, has been making the rounds on Twitter. It it similar to the one that was popular a few years ago that showed the United States as red or blue, by county. But this map shows the Congressional districts based on the just-completed election:

This map, which originated with National Journal, has been making the rounds on Twitter. It it similar to the one that was popular a few years ago that showed the United States as red or blue, by county. But this map shows the Congressional districts based on the just-completed election: In a sense, maps like this one are misleading because the small blue areas are basically the cities, where lots of people live. But what this map does reveal is that the Democrats are no longer competitive in rural and small-town America. It is now rare for a district dominated...

Dear President Obama, It’s not us; it’s you. It’s all you. In the election in which you sought and gained ballot access while repeatedly disregarding pleas of the actual Democrat candidates- candidates who wanted nothing to do with you-- and just wanted you to sit down and shut up, you got beat. And now Democrats know how Chicago feels. Just like you did with your “hometown,” you used the Democrats to build a legacy for yourself. And then left them to burn and rot. How’s this for a legacy? In addition to losing Libya, Egypt (only for a time), Iraq,...

Because of the way the news business works, I am writing this column before the close of the polls in the so-called midterm elections, and hence as I write, I do not know their outcome. Will the Republicans or the Democrats control the U.S. Senate for the next two years? Will it make a difference? The two major political parties are more alike than they are different. On the two paramount issues of our day -- war and debt -- they are identical. With the exception of Democratic progressives and Republican libertarians, the two parties stand for perpetual war and...

Of course it was only by happenstance that former Mayor Thomas Menino died just days before the 2014 election, and that his funeral at Most Precious Blood Parish in Hyde Park coincided with the closing hours of all the campaigns whose outcomes would be decided on Tuesday. But that unplanned juxtaposition couldn't have illustrated more vividly the emotional extremes we resort to when it comes to political figures.A newcomer watching the local TV news broadcasts in Boston early Monday morning might reasonably have concluded that the former mayor had been a hero of mythic proportions, a saint and a superstar whose goodness...

Part of the allure and fascination of politics is that you don't know what's going to happen until election night is over and all the votes have been counted. It is real-life, high-stakes drama. In the 1970s, it was volunteers who would call in the vote tallies from the precincts. They would be written on the blackboard and the totals calculated as the votes were called in. Nowadays we rely on the Internet to give us information on where the races end up. Unless you know what counties come in first, it's hard to decipher the status of the races....

Does Tuesday night’s GOP blowout presage anything for the presidential election that starts in earnest on Wednesday? The conventional answer is probably still no. First, as a million pundits have correctly noted, midterm voters are older, whiter and thus more Republican-leaning than voters in presidential races. Second, the key 2014 Senate races were disproportionately located in red states (although Democrats fared poorly in purple ones too). Third, the GOP trained its fire on President Obama, who won’t be on the ballot in two years. But despite all this, there is one big takeaway from tonight’s Republican landslide that should worry...

The 2014 election was a successful one for marijuana legalization. Referendum initiatives legalizing recreational marijuana passed in Alaska, Oregon, and the District of Columbia. Florida’s legalization amendment (which was limited to medical marijuana) failed, but only because victory required a 60% supermajority (it got just over 57% percent). A medical marijuana initiative did pass in the Pacific island territory of Guam. Coming on the heels of the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington in 2012, this is a further sign of pro-legalization momentum, and perhaps of dissatisfaction with the War on Drugs more generally – even among some conservatives.

I watch election results to gauge whether America has become freer or more tyrannical. It's hard to know whether Tuesday's results will make much difference. Often, individual liberty erodes in ways that neither major political party much cares about. Last weekend, I suffered through the New York Marathon. I suffered not because I ran 26.2 miles but because I live near Central Park, and at Marathon time, officials turn my neighborhood into a little police state. Four thousand police officers, 20 boats and four blimps "guarded" the Marathon. Barricades, bomb-sniffing dogs and surveillance cameras were everywhere. This is new. Marathons...

While experts predicted a good night for Republicans, the 2014 Midterm Elections turned out to be a stampede exceeding even the most optimistic hopes of conservatives. In addition to taking control of the US Senate and increasing its majority in the House of Representatives, Governors mansions and State Legislatures across the country, Republicans established themselves as a legitimate "big tent party" with ground-breaking firsts from coast to coast. The GOP gained majority control of the US Senate by sweeping close races through the country, holding a 52-47 advantage as of press time, with tight contests in Alaska and Virginia still...

The heated debate over voter fraud and illegal voting has largely occurred without reliable data on the extent of the problem, but that may be changing with a new study that is gaining significant attention, including Guy Benson’s piece on Townhall. The study publicized by The Washington Post has shown that noncitizen voting may be much more common than most people probably suspect, and could have changed the result in close elections. Those findings also call into question other aspects of an electoral system that is effectively policed by the “honor system,” as Hans von Spakovsky has argued elsewhere.Federal law...

Before the election results are in, and keeping in mind that there may be some unpleasant surprises for one party or the other -- or both -- it's possible to assess how the Democratic Party has fared under the leadership of President Obama. To summarize the verdict: not so well. By one metric it has done very badly indeed. When Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, there were 257 Democrats in the House of Representatives. Going into this election there are 201 (including two vacant Democratic seats). Psephologists universally agree Democrats will suffer a net loss of...