Fatigue, exhaustion

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You'll have to forgive my complete lack of posting the past couple of days. That whole live-blogging thing Tuesday night really knocked me out -- seven hours or so of constant blogging. I'm still not over it.

I'll be back at it soon, and we'll have some great posts from the co-bloggers on Friday, too. So stay tuned -- and keep checking back.

Let me just say this about my predictions/projections: I got the House wrong, badly. Optimistically, I thought the Dems would do a lot better than expected, mainly because of better turnout than expected, and limit the GOP gain to 49 seats. Some extremely close races have yet to be called, but the GOP gain currently stands at 60, pretty much at the high end of the range of reasonable pre-election projections but still below some crazy conservative hopes, as well as below early projections on election night -- it looked for a time like it could be around 70. I should have known better. Youth turnout in particular was bound to be low, and an older, more conservative electorate than the one that voted in '08 ended up propelling Republicans. And I thought a few more Blue Dogs would hold on. They, in particular, did very badly.

With Patty Murray's win in Washington, though, I got the Senate exactly right, a gain of six seats for the GOP. And maybe this was because I was following the Senate much more closely than the House. And I got all the close races right. I get why Democrats in the House would lose in generally Republican districts that they won in '06 and '08, but I didn't see state-wide races going overwhelmingly Republican. I knew Blumenthal would win in Connecticut, as well as Boxer in California, but I also predicted wins for Manchin in West Virginia, Bennet in Colorado, Murray, and, yes, Reid in Nevada. I was tempted to predict a smaller gain because I thought that Sestak had a good shot of beating Toomey in Pennsylvania and that Giannoulias might pull out a win over Kirk in Illinois, but I stuck with six in case one of the others lost (like Reid, a prediction that didn't exactly have my full confidence). But Sestak didn't get the urban turnout he needed in Philadelphia (blacks didn't vote in the numbers they did in '08 either) and Giannoulias was a crappy candidate -- so six it turned out to be. Which isn't really so bad, is it? It's just too bad Feingold lost in Wisconsin. That's a huge loss for the Dems.

Alright, enough. I need sleep.

Take it easy.