Midterm 2010 postmortem

(Sorry for the delay, but I was wiped yesterday!)

Gloat away, friends!  🙂

Memo to President Oprompter, who now all of a sudden wants to “work together”:  We won.

Drew has a great post on why slaying a RINO in DE turned out to be a bad idea.  It’s not just “hindsight is 20/20”, but I’d say my foresight was pretty friggin’ awesome, too:

Look at how voters identified themselves by ideology…23% liberal, 66% moderate, 17% conservative. Coons cleaned up with liberals and moderates winning those groups 88 and 66 percent respectively. Do you really think those two groups were simply waiting for the ok from Karl Rove and John Cornyn to vote for O’Donnell?
…
Karl Rove and NRSC had nothing to do with O’Donnell’s defeat. In fact, as bad of a candidate as I think O’Donnell is, she had little to do with her defeat. It’s a deeply blue state that actually likes liberals. We had a chance to get a moderate-liberal Republican and passed on it. To me, that was tactically stupid. Yes, Castle would have been a pain in the ass but not as big a one when there were 47 or 48 Republicans in the House. The power of the moderates is when they are all the deciding vote, add a cushion and they are manageable. Personally, I would have like to have had another no vote on HCR in the Senate but others didn’t think that was important enough.

I seemed to recall mentioning that DE was a blue state.  Numerous times.

Rasmussen has always been a great pollster, and remarkably accurate.  But this election cycle, his polls were off.  He overestimated conservative performance in a number of races.  That allowed us to get our hopes up in places like NV and CO, where we thought our candidate was actually going to win.

A bunch of Democrat House bullies got their butts handed to them this week: Alan Grayson in FL, Ciro Rodriguez in TX (here and here), Baron Hill in IN (here), and Bob Etheridge in NC, just to name a few.  Well, Etheridge (the guy who assaulted the college kid with the camera, “Hooer you?”) is losing to Renee Ellmers by 1646 votes, and after “refined” vote totals netted him an additional 453 votes, the “refined” vote total just so happens (conveniently) to now be below 1%, which triggers a recount.  Funny how that happens with Democrats all the time, huh?

Point to ponder: Does Phil Hare (D-IL) care about the Constitution now?  😆

This election showed that with the re-election of Corrine Brown (FL) and Barney Frank (MA), among several others like them, there are indeed some unwinnable seats.  Mike Yost and Sean Bielat were, respectively, great candidates, and they both lost badly.  So let’s please resign ourselves to the reality that there are some seats that will be hopelessly blue in perpetuity.  For conservatives who live in those districts: move.

I wanted Reid’s scalp in the worst way.  But leave it to the Tea Party and Sarah Palin to screw that up for me, as they decided to back the one person in the whole friggin’ state who couldn’t beat Harry Reid 5-to-1.  While the Tea Party did have some success (Rob Portman in OH, Marco Rubio in FL, and Rand Paul in KY, among the notables), they did a horrendous job at vetting and backing other candidates (Buck in CO, Angle in NV, and O’Donnell in DE).  While I love how the Tea Party invigorated American consciousness and ignited conservative turnout, I’d prefer they stay out of the business of endorsing candidates, as their track record is inconsistent.  We would have had CO (Jane Norton), NV (Sue Lowden or Danny Tarkanian), and DE (Mike Castle) had Palin and the TP’ers stayed out of endorsing.  I know many of you may disagree, and that’s cool, but I’m convinced that CO, NV, and DE would have been ours, period.

In his victory speech, Marco Rubio was right: the public didn’t vote for the GOP.  They voted for an obstacle to Obamunism.  The GOP now has a second chance.  Don’t blow it, guys.

Had Charlie Crist taken his GOP primary beating like a man, then warmly endorsed and campaigned for Marco Rubio in the general election, then Crist would have been in a perfect position to destroy Bill Nelson in 2012.  Nelson is as unpopular in FL as Reid is in NV, and unless the GOP produces a quality opponent (and please stay the hell away from FL during our primary in two years, Mrs. Palin!), a bad Nelson will be re-elected just as a bad Reid was.  Crist could have been that guy to derail Nelson.  Instead, his ego and his blind ambition caused him to commit career suicide.  In one year, Crist went from Top Dog to In The Doghouse.

For you “Blue Dogs” who sided with Obama all the time: Now that you’re unemployed, was it worth it?

Russ Feingold lost in WI.  I’m still trying to absorb that.  The same state that voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988 actually voted for a conservative Republican to the U.S. Senate.  Dude.

We didn’t get the Senate this time.  But with a bunch of freshmen and/or red state Dems up for re-election in 2012, and since we’re only about 3-4 away from a majority, the odds are good we’ll prevail in 2012, irrespective of the outcome of the presidential election.

President Kick#ss isn’t convinced that the election was a referendum on him.  Hmmm.  A bunch of Dems representing districts (federal and 680 state) that haven’t been red in decades (and some since Reconstruction) got bounced.  The same districts have been through awful economic times, yet they kept sending back Dems.  But now, these once-blue districts are red.  And it has nothing to do with Obama?  Hey, whatever sweetens your dreams, Champ.