Collective Conscious

The House was a rout, and slightly worse for Democ­rats than expected, but con­trol hasn’t been a real ques­tion, so we can only feel so bad there.

In other news, six pick­ups for the GOP on the Sen­ate side:

North Dakota — John Hoeven. Clearly a social­ist (he was the CEO of the nation’s only state-​​owned bank). Also the nation’s most pop­u­lar gov­er­nor. This man will be in the Sen­ate for a long time, and I don’t find that upset­ting in the least.

Arkansas — John Booz­man. We never expected Blanche Lin­coln to carry this one, so the most impor­tant change here is the new lead­er­ship of the Ag Com­mit­tee (prob­a­bly Tom Harkin or Pat Leahy). A for­mer Con­gress­man, he appears to be a fairly stan­dard Republican.

Wis­con­sin — Ron John­son. Sadly, Russ Fein­gold couldn’t pull off a last-​​minute upset, and the Sen­ate will lose the only man who voted against the PATRIOT Act. John­son will be counted among the Tea Party’s vic­to­ries for the night, and he’s an unwa­ver­ing right-​​wing vote. He sup­ports things like drilling in the Great Lakes, for example.

Illi­nois — Mark Kirk. If he ever remem­bers who he actu­ally is, he’ll be a decent Sen­a­tor. Long­time House mem­ber includ­ing serv­ing on the Appro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee. Despite being a Repub­li­can, he has an “F” from the NRA and a “25%” from the John Birch Soci­ety, while scor­ing 100% with Planned Par­ent­hood. This is Obama’s old seat, and we can expect to work with Kirk, I think.

Indi­ana — Dan Coats. This seat was a gimme after Bayh retired. Coats has been the Ambas­sador to Ger­many (appar­ently mostly work­ing on Iraq stuff for Bush) and a US Rep­re­sen­ta­tive, and it was his job to get Har­riet Meiers through the nom­i­na­tion process. He’s been Bush’s man for a decade, then, and has gen­er­ally failed at it. Don’t expect much from him in the Senate.

Penn­syl­va­nia — Pat Toomey. Very, very con­ser­v­a­tive: for­mer Club for Growth pres­i­dent and Tea Partier who actu­ally opposed Medicare Part D on fis­cal grounds. He’ll be a night­mare on social issues, but might actu­ally be a lead­ing voice for the GOP on deficit reduction.

Other new GOP­ers in the Sen­ate (fill­ing the seats of retir­ing or ousted Republicans):

Ken­tucky — Rand Paul. Not much to say here.

New Hamp­shire — Kelly Ayotte. Solid con­ser­v­a­tive, for­mer attor­ney general.

Florida — Marco Rubio. Tea Partier.

Utah — Mike Lee. Tea Partier.

Kansas — Jerry Moran. Con­ser­v­a­tive Representative.

Mis­souri — Roy Blunt. Long­time House Whip for the Republicans.

Ohio — Rob Port­man. Another bud­get man, who served on the House Bud­get Com­mit­tee and worked briefly as OMB direc­tor for Bush. Seems rea­son­ably mod­er­ate and another place to compromise.

So that’s a total of 13 new Repub­li­can faces in the Sen­ate, 5 of whom are Tea Partiers and at least 3 of whom are bud­get experts, so we can def­i­nitely expect fis­cal pol­icy to be a very big deal in the very near future. Also note that the Tea Party won only one in three of its races, so they showed worse than expected.

No seri­ous Dem pick­ups. Anywhere. Only three House seats, and not a sin­gle Sen­ate seat. How­ever, we def­i­nitely beat the odds by hold­ing Nevada, Con­necti­cut, West Vir­ginia, and Delaware (and, hope­fully, Wis­con­sin and Col­orado). Con­necti­cut was never in dan­ger, but any of the other five could eas­ily have flipped. So we really did quite well on the defense here, and cer­tainly could have lost the Sen­ate if the night had been even a per­cent­age point worse nationally.