A lot happened last night. So if you weren’t keeping score…here are the highlights…

• Moderate Arlen Specter lost to liberal Joe Sestak in PA…
• Conservative/Libertarian Rand Paul captured the Republican nomination in Kentucky from the establishment’s candidate…
• Dem Blanche Lincoln didn’t get enough votes to prevent a runoff in Arkansas…
• However, in the special election to replace the late John Murtha in PA’s moderate 12th District…which went for McCain in 2008…Dems easily won the seat…

And, before that…

• Bob Bennett lost the Republican primary in Utah…
• Charlie Crist switched to Independent because Marco Rubio was leading in Republican primary polling…

So what do all of these things signal?

Basically…don’t accept the “conventional” wisdom that we’ll see a wave election with Republicans sweeping into power. The signs just don’t point towards that, especially since the only thing that people don’t like more than Congressional Democrats are Congressional Republicans.

So, to all of you weak incumbents…watch out.

Steve Benen provides some additional perspective…

For those keeping score, there have been seven special elections for U.S. House seats since the president’s inauguration 16 months ago: NY20, IL5, CA32, CA10, NY23, FL19, and PA12. Democrats have won all seven.

Scott Brown aside…there really haven’t been many surprises for Dems. In fact, Republicans have had a lot more to be concerned with since many of their incumbents are being challenged, ousted, etc.

More as it develops…

Heard about this? Well, you will.

Basically, open primaries are where the top two vote getters move on to the general, with the hopeful net result being that Dems and Repubs wouldn’t have to appeal to the more extreme elements of their party to get to the big show.

Here’s more…

So, no more party primaries. And that has folks on both sides up in arms.

Republicans think it would result in general elections where you have Democrat vs Democrat instead of Republicans vs Democrats.

Others are worried that it would mean that whoever spends the most money in the primaries will get the most votes and proceed to the general.

Still others think that this would actually crowd out 3rd parties.

Here’s what the Center for Governmental Studies found in their report…

The Center for Government Studies has issued this 102-page report on California’s Proposition 14, the “top-two” ballot measure on the June 8, 2010 ballot. The study, by Molly Milligan, studies whether Proposition 14 would create more moderate California politicians. The study suggests that the measure would tend to create more moderates in the State Senate.

The study also finds that campaign spending would increase, because many candidates who now have a completely safe primary process would need to spend enough money to win twice before the entire electorate. The study also says, on page 17, in footnote 11, that in the Massachusetts special U.S. Senate election of January 2010, if Massachusetts had used top-two, Scott Brown would not have qualified for the second round. In the real world, Brown won the election.

Finally, the study concludes that there would be a good share of legislative races, and some U.S. House races, in which the November election would be between two Democrats. However, the study does not believe there would be November elections between two Republicans.

So what do you think? A good idea?

The vote is in June.

First things first….obviously most conservatives don’t believe this. However, Ann Coulter has said something very similar.

The audio…

And here’s a partial transcript…

DERBYSHIRE: Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I’ll say this – if it were to be, I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep.

COLMES: We’d be a better country if women didn’t vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Probably. Don’t you think so?

COLMES: No, I do not think so whatsoever.

DERBYSHIRE: Come on Alan. Come clean here [laughing].

COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.

DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably.

Did you note how Derbyshire said he’s in favor of freedom later on in the interview? Wow.

Seriously…how can these folks hate the government so much that they’ll say such inane, bigoted, ignorant stuff like this? Amazing.

I feel dumber for having seen this, but it’s so hilariously clueless that I couldn’t stop watching.

(Stolen from BTB. Thx Doug!)

This is BIG news as it’ll ensure that a lot more people participate.

From Des Moines Register:

Sources from both the Iowa Democratic Party and Republican Party of Iowa say they are getting ready to jointly announce a date for the 2010 Iowa caucuses. For the first time, they’ll be held on a Saturday afternoon in January. (editor’s note: Jan. 23 at 1 p.m.) [...]

Both parties have a good track record of working together to make decisions regarding the caucuses. This one is a good example that should help secure Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status for 2012.

Still, some are worried that this will disenfranchise Jewish voters…

Paulee Lipsman, former House Democratic caucus director, who is Jewish, says she and some others called the state party to complain two years ago when she heard Saturday caucuses were being considered. “We have enough trouble with schools scheduling tests and homecoming on Jewish holidays,” she said. She notes, though, that some Jews will attend Saturday events, just like some Christians go to football games on Sunday instead of to church. “No matter when you do it, you’re disenfranchising people,” she said.

Agreed. Any day will disenfranchise folks, but Iowa isn’t exactly a state with a massive Jewish population, and I predict the amount of Jewish voters lost by having it on Saturday will be offset by the number they gain.

Now if we can only get the national election day declared a holiday…. (ahem!)

The Obama administration has undoubtedly breathed a sigh of relief after the pro-western coalition won yesterday’s parliamentary vote in Lebanon. After the president’s big speech about improving relationships between America and the Mid-East, a Hezbollah win in Lebanon would have been seen by many as a strong rebuke to Obama.

Of course, calling the election an Obama win might be overstating the matter:

Obama’s outreach did not appear to have resonated with the electorate as much as a last-minute appeal from head of the influential Maronite Catholic Church. Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir warned voters on the eve of the election of what he called an attempt to change Lebanon’s character and its Arab identity, a clear reference to Hezbollah and its Persian backer, Iran.

The makeup of the Lebanese parliament will remain largely unchanged from the outgoing legislature, meaning it’s unlikely the political situation in Lebanon will dramatically change. In fact, tensions may increase as the ruling coalition has vowed not to give the Hezbollah led coalition veto power over major government decisions – a power they previously negotiated after nearly provoking a civil war.

We’ll see what the future holds. At least for now, Obama’s hope for a better relationship with the Mid-East remains viable.

Earlier today I posted about Jindal’s suspect Hurricane Katrina story and now his handlers are revising the record.

First, the clip…

And now, the truth from Politico:

The spokeswoman, Melissa Sellers, said the story Jindal told in his response to Obama actually took place some days later in Lee’s office — though still in Katrina’s chaotic aftermath — as Lee was “recounting” his frustrations with the bureaucracy to someone else on the telephone.

“It was days later,” Sellers said. “Sheriff Lee was on the phone and the governor came down to visit him. It wasn’t that they were standing right down there with the boats.”

She said she didn’t know who Lee, who died in 2007, was on the phone, about the incident with the boats when the governor described him as yelling into the phone.

UPDATE: I’d initially misunderstood Sellers to be saying Jindal and Lee didn’t meet while rescue efforts were still underway. In fact, she said, the conversation took place in the aftermath of the storm, but after the boat incident.

“Bobby and I walked into Harry Lee’s office – he’s yelling on the phone about a decision he’s already made,” Jindal chief of staff Timmy Teepell recalled. “He’s saying, ‘This is a decision I made, and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me.’”

As I said before, this was a dumb unforced error.

Moving on…

However, Norm Coleman is going to the courts to add even more rejected absentee ballots. Still, to overcome a 225 votes deficit at this point seems extremely unlikely.

Here’s more from the Star Tribune…

DFLer Al Franken held an unofficial lead of 225 votes over Coleman, according to a newspaper tally of the officials’ count of the absentee ballots. Franken had led unofficially by 49 votes going into the day and gained a net 176 votes from the new ballots.

With the recount complete, focus immediately shifted to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which continued to consider a request from the Coleman campaign to alter the process and add more absentee ballots to be reconsidered. But by early evening there was no word from the state’s highest court as to when it would rule or hear arguments. [...]

Under state law, an election certificate formally naming a winner cannot be issued until all legal disputes are resolved.

The lawsuit, called an election contest, is expected to center on the issue of the excluded absentee ballots as well as disputes over ballots the Coleman campaign believes were double counted and a decision to use Election Day machine totals, rather than recount totals, in a Minneapolis precinct where more than 100 ballots went missing.

How bleak are things for Coleman?

Nate Silver explains…

Either way, a number of legal stratagems that might have seemed appealing to the Coleman campaign might now be somewhat mooted. For instance, even if all 130 ballots that the Coleman campaign claimed were double-counted for Franken were removed from his tally (but no ballots at all had been double-counted for Coleman), Franken would maintain a significant advantage. With Franken doing so well among the absentee ballots that were counted today, moreover, any Coleman attempts to get more absentee ballots counted would seem to have a high risk of backfiring.

So I think the best shot Coleman has right now is to try and get a reelection…which seems highly unlikely given the new margin of victory Franken has.

More as it develops…

(Thanks to Jake Dahn for the tip.)

What looked completely unlikely just a few weeks ago has turned around for the funnyman as he has won some key decisions in the past week and is now ahead by just 46 votes.

That’s right…46 votes.

From the Star Tribune:

A state Supreme Court ruling Wednesday narrowed the options available for Sen. Norm Coleman to erase a slim lead held by DFLer Al Franken in the Minnesota election dispute, and Coleman’s campaign threatened a court battle that could leave the Senate seat vacant for a month.

The Supreme Court denied a bid by the Coleman campaign to prevent local and state canvassing boards from tallying votes that the incumbent says may have been counted twice. Most of the votes at issue are from DFL strongholds.

The justices said the campaign’s claim of double-counted ballots is better resolved in a court hearing where evidence can be presented, instead of by canvassing boards.

The order allows those disputed ballots to remain in the vote totals, at least for now.

So what options do Coleman have left?

According to FiveThirtyEight, not many…

Although Franken’s lead over Coleman is narrow — 46 votes — the only substantial group of ballots remaining to be counted are rejected absentees. But both campaigns have been operating under the assumption that those absentee ballots are more likely to add to Franken’s margin than subtract from it.

I have to hand it to Franken…he stuck in there and took the appropriate legal routes to swing this back in his favor. And in a race that I think we can all agree was a tie, the guy with the best lawyers wins.

More as it develops…

In fact, it’s the widest margin ever for any non-incumbent who has won the POTUS.

Check out these numbers…

So maybe it really was a landslide?

Still, as Nate Silver points, if you slice this onion a different way and look at the votes as a % of the total registered voters, Reagan comes out on top…

By this metric, Reagan’s win in 1980 is still somewhat more impressive than Obama’s — he won by 8,425,115 votes out of 159,635,102 available, or 5.3%.

By contrast, Obama won by 9,124,522 votes out of 213,005,467 available, or 4.3%.

However, Obama’s fraction is slightly better than George H.W. Bush’s in 1988, who won by 7,077,121 votes out of 167,701,904 available, or 4.2%.

So yes, Reagan’s shadow still looms large, but it seems like Obama has enough electoral ammo if he wants to try some more progressive ideas for the economy and beyond.

The plot thickens…

The state’s five member Canvassing Board, which oversees the recount, is meeting to decide how to deal with thousands of absentee ballots that are not included in the recount. Franken’s campaign says the ballots were wrongly rejected, and that about 6,400 ballots were wrongly disqualified. Coleman’s team says the board doesn’t have the authority to include the disputed ballots in the recount.

The hearing comes as the number of ballots being challenged by both camps grows. Just over 80 percent of votes cast in the state’s Senate race have been recounted, in a process that could continue into next month.

Unofficial results from the November 4 election put Coleman, a freshman Republican senator, just 215 votes ahead of Democratic challenger Al Franken, known across the country from his days on Saturday Night Live and from his years as a talk show host on progressive radio network Air America. The slim margin for Coleman, far less than one-half of one percent, triggered an automatic recount, the first time there’s ever been a recount of a U.S. Senate race in Minnesota.

Recently, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight said that Franken would win by 27 votes without these absentee ballots, but I don’t think that’s likely given that Coleman is up by more than 100 with very little of the actual ballots left to recount. So it makes sense that Franken is trying try to challenge whatever he can, but as I’ve said in the past about this election, the winner will most likely be the candidate with the best lawyers.

Ultimately, I think it’s sad that we can’t know for certain how many votes were cast for one person or another in tight races like this. There has to be a better way.

With more than 3/4ths of the precincts counted, it looks like Franken will fall short, barring some wild turn around in how these votes are shaking out.

Still, FiveThirtyEight thinks there’s a chance…

The Star Tribune now puts Coleman’s lead at 180 votes, and the Secretary of State, 167 votes. (The Star Tribune’s tally appears to be inclusive of all of the Secretary of State figures and is probably the more authoritative estimate). Coleman’s lead had been 215 votes before the recount process began, but had become as small as 115-120 votes at other stages of the recount process.

It is unclear, however, whether the running counts provided by the Star Tribune and Secretary of State are any longer providing useful information. This is because the percentage of challenged ballots has now reached epidemic levels. Among the relatively small number of ballots added today to the Secretary of State’s nightly estimate, the Coleman campaign challenged 14.2 ballots for every 10,000 cast, and the Franken campaign 12.2 for every 10,000 cast. This rate of challenges was almost twice that observed in Friday’s counting, and 4-5 times as much as in the first two days of ballot counting on Wednesday and Thursday.

So let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that these contested ballots shake out in a pretty even fashion. That leaves Franken to contest absentee ballots that have been thrown out because they weren’t legal. And even if he can get those back into play…it’s still a long shot.

But what if this strategy worked? Franken gets previously illegal ballots back into play and it swings it for him so he barely wins. Does he really want to get into office that way? Especially when he’s basically saying that he’s the second coming of Paul Wellstone?

Sure, history is written by the winners, but Franken can regroup and challenge Coleman in the next election and probably win. And for a candidate like him, how he comes into office is actually extremely important.

Still, this thing isn’t over so I’ll keep you all updated.

I’m following the Minnesota recount pretty closely because we could potentially have the makings of a super majority on our hands if Franken wins the recount and Jim Martin is able to beat Saxby Chambliss in Georgia.

In any event, after the first day Franken had cut Coleman’s lead from 215 to 172. And today Coleman has lost an additional 36 net votes.

FiveThirtyEight has some details…

Coleman’s lead over Franken is now 136 votes after two days and 46% of the ballots recounted. 30% of votes have been recounted in heavily Democratic Ramsey County, 36% in Democratic St. Louis County, and 42% in Democratic Hennepin County.

Six relatively small counties are set to begin counting tomorrow. More are set to begin counting next week, and the challenge adjudication phase of the process can begin as early as December 6, but likely Monday December 8.

Dakota County, which went for Coleman decisively, has produced a net gain of 32 for Franken. Coleman has lost 40 votes to Franken’s 8, so perhaps this is where Franken challenges have stepped up.

It’s still anybody’s ball game at this point, but Franken didn’t keep up his pace from yesterday and he’ll need to gain a lot more if he hopes to overtake Coleman.

Basically, if Coleman’s lead was 215 at the start, and Franken has only gained 79 so far (43 the first day, 36 the second day), he’s 19 behind the pace he needs to be at with 46% of the recount completed or 98 votes. So my gut tells me that Franken will ultimately fall short by about 40 votes.

More as it develops…

The Hardball panel dissects the weirdness going on up in Minnesota.

Long story short, whoever wins has the best lawyers…much like Florida in 2000.

As I noted last night, the Minnesota recount is under way and Al Franken made up some serious ground in the first day.

Still, why is he contesting the above ballot?

More from StarTribune:

The bubble beside Norm Coleman’s name appeared to have both an X and a squiggle in it, but the Al Franken campaign wants the state Canvassing Board to rule on whether it should count. That’s the only challenge in the special envelope in Plymouth so far, according to Sandy Engdahl, the city clerk and the official running the city recount. [...]

Eight of the 24 precincts had been counted by 1:45 p.m., and the only challenged ballot, in Engdahl’s view, was clearly a vote for Coleman. Nevertheless, the Franken campaign was allowed to seek a second opinion.

True, this is just one ballot, but one ballot can become a symbol of “not getting it” in much the same way that auto execs flying in private jets to Washington to ask for bailout money has become a symbol.

Again, don’t be greedy Al. Take the high road. Because you know you’d be jumping all over Norm Coleman if he tried to pull something like this.

Well, my home state definitely took its sweet damn time announcing this, but now it’s finally official that we picked Mac, which means we’ve picked the loser for only the 2nd time in the past 100 years.

Here’s more…

The narrow McCain Missouri victory, by just 3,902 votes out of 2,888,000 cast, means that Missouri sided with the presidential loser for just the second time in the last century.

Missouri also “got it wrong” in 1956, when it delivered a narrow 3,984-vote win to Democrat Adlai Stevenson over Republican incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The state had remained unclaimed this year as election officials awaited final results from four locales — the city and county of St. Louis, Jackson County near Kansas City and from rural Montgomery County. Those tallies arrived Wednesday at the Secretary of State’s office.

McCain gained 31 votes in the final returns, while Obama actually lost 235 votes. Election officials found that a figure for the Illinois senator had been improperly entered and corrected the error in the new totals, said spokesman Ryan Hobart.

One thing’s for sure…when we’re wrong we’re not wrong by much. Less than 8,000 in the past 100 years? Wow.

And sure, Obama could contest the results, but there’s no point to that.

So that means the final electoral tally is…

Obama: 365
McCain: 173

And scene.

Stevens had a 3,200 vote lead on election night, but that has completely evaporated.

Yesterday, Doug posted that Mark Begich led by only 3 votes.

Today that total is up to around 800.

Begich: 132,196
Stevens: 131,382

And the Dems inch closer and closer to a supermajority…

Two days ago I asked the question “Where are the 130M votes?”

Well, it seems like my basic math skills beat the predictions.

2004 Vote Total: 121,069,054
2008 Vote Total: 122,145,887

That’s a far cry from the projections of 130M+ we were told on Wednesday, and even with all the absentee and provisional ballots floating around out there, I doubt we’ll see any total larger than 123M.

The reason why Obama won by 7% is that he was able to turn out a lot more Dems and voters who had never gone to the polls. So it was basically 2004 again, only the Get-Out-The-Vote brilliance was on the side of the Dems. Looks like McCain could have used a little more Karl Rove in his GOTV efforts.

More here.

We’ve been told today that yesterday wasn’t just a win for Obama…it was a win for American democracy. People were finally energized to come out to the polls and both candidates broke records for the amount of votes they received.

However…where are the totals proving this?

First, the claims from Politico:

More than 130 million people turned out to vote Tuesday, the most ever to vote in a presidential election.

With ballots still being counted in some precincts into Wednesday morning, an estimated 64 percent of the electorate turned out, making 2008 the highest percentage turnout in generations.

In 2004, 122.3 million voted in what was then the highest recorded turnout in the contest between President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).

However, right now with 97% reporting CNN has the vote total as such…

Obama: 63,493,372
McCain: 56,142,078
Total: 119,635,450

MSNBC shows virtually the same total with 97% reporting…

Obama: 63,497,950
McCain: 56,145,889
Total: 119,643,839

Where are the final numbers that affirm this 130M+?

That’s the word from their CNN’s exit polling, and that number is CRAZY.

Oh note, first time voters make up about 10% of the registered voting population.

Amazing.