The Plum Line

For at least a year now, it's been an open question whether the Tea Party is a force for good or ill within the GOP. On the good side of the ledger, it's served as an energizing and rebranding force, and kept up pressure on GOP leaders to hold the line against Obama and Dems, which clearly served them well.

But the flip side is now coming into focus, and with the results just in from the Colorado Senate race, we can now declare that it may have cost the GOP its only shot at a 50-50 Senate. The picture is complicated, but in raw numbers this appears to be the case.

The math is pretty straightforward. Right now, after last night, the GOP has 46 seats, and is expected to add one more in Alaska, bringing the total to 47. Washington State is still outsanding, but many expect it to remain in Dem hands.

Meanwhile, Tea Party candidates cost the GOP three seats they otherwise would have won. News orgs in Colorado have now declared that Senator Michael Bennet has defeated Tea Party candidate Ken Buck. Christine O'Donnell cost the GOP the Delaware seat, which they would have won in a walk if she hadn't prevailed in a fluke primary victory. And Harry Reid was widely written off as a dead Senator walking -- until Sharron Angle's victory in her primary gave him his only opening to retain his seat.

Those three seats would have brought the GOP to 50.

Now, as Josh Marshall notes, the picture is a bit more complex than this. Beyond costing the GOP those three seats, Tea Party energy surely helped buoy other GOP Senate and other candidates to victory.

But in terms of raw numbers, the GOP's failure to gain a 50-50 Senate really does appear to vindicate the argument by the establishment GOP and the NRSC that these candidates couldn't win general elections -- an argument that earned that establishment a tremendous amount of abuse from the right.

That said, last night's results also clearly vindicate the Dem argument, too. The NRSC and establishment GOP proved unable to control the unpredictable, unpolished and extreme candidates the Tea Party foisted upon them -- which is exactly what Democrats predicted would happen.

Adam Serwer is a staff writer with The American Prospect, where he writes his own blog.

Among the silver linings for Democrats -- and society, really -- in the massive victories won by Republicans yesterday is that there is a very clear price to pay for exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment for political purposes. As Elise Foley notes, Colorado gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo, California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, and most infamously Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle went down in defeat after running campaigns that promised to crack down on immigration.

Whitman started trailing in the polls after Latino voters began deserting her for Democrat Jerry Brown in the aftermath of a scandal involving Whitman having knowningly hired an illegal immigrant. Whitman had actually been far more active in wooing Latinos than her opponent, but the details of the scandal, and the fact that Whitman had been campaigning on pursuing harsher punishments for employers who knowingly hired unauthorized immigrants, put her in a difficult position.

Tom Tancredo has been an alarmist on immigration for years and actually ran an ad in Colorado attacking Democrat John Hickenlooper by blaming him for the death of a child who was killed by someone who was in the country illegally. Tancredo ran an explicitly anti-immigration campaign and actually had a chance of winning despite dubious arguments assembled by extreme anti-immigrant groups.

Sharron Angle, however, ran an even more reprehensible race-baiting campaign. Her ads frequently portrayed Latinos as dangerous criminals intent on exploiting hardworking whites, and at the ballot box in Nevada yesterday, she paid a price for it among the state's Latino voters. Reid won about 70 percent of the Latino vote, according to CNN's exit polls. Latino voters also made up the same percentage of the Nevada electorate in 2010 as they did in 2008, possibly because of Harry Reid's extensive outreach campaign but likely also because Angle was running a campaign that was outright hostile to Latinos.

Other candidates with hardline views on immigration won their races yesterday -- including David Vitter, who was running in a state with a small Latino population and ran some very ugly racialized ads. But these three contests show that exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment is hardly a silver bullet, and there's a price to be paid for crossing the line.

Another potential big win for Dems as the Denver Post calls the Colorado Senate race for Michael Bennet:

Appointed U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet will be elected to the U.S. Senate after pulling ahead of challenger Ken Buck this morning.

Long after most Coloradans -- including the candidates and their supporters -- had gone to bed, returns from Denver and Boulder moved Bennet past Buck and into the lead, 47.5 percent to 47.1 percent.

A recount would be required if the difference between the two candidates' vote totals is less than one-half of 1 percent of the highest vote total, or about 3,900 votes based on current tallies.

Bennet leads by nearly 7,000 votes with an estimated 30,000 still to be counted in Boulder County.

The major news orgs haven't called this race yet, so proceed with caution.

Overall the Tea Party has probably been a force for good in the GOP, energizing the grassroots, helping rebrand the party and pressuring GOP leaders to hold the line against Obama. And it's true that Rand Paul, the first Tea Party candidate to ascend to major office, defeated Jack Conway by double digits.

But Dems were never going to win the Kentucky Senate race. And Tea Partyer Sharron Angle's loss yesterday to Harry Reid, who everyone had long written off as dead, cost the GOP a major prize. And now, if Ken Buck does lose to Bennet, the unavoidable conclusion will be that the ascension of eccentric and unpredictable Tea Partyers as general election Senate candidates did, in fact, cost the GOP on the Senate map in a big way, perhaps even depriving them of control of the Senate.

UPDATE, 10:38 a.m.: KDVR in Denver has also called it for Bennet.

UPDATE, 10:46 p.m.: And I forgot to mention Christine O'Donnell!

With the full extent of last night's damage slowly coming into view, the consensus appears to be that last night's Dem losses of roughly 60 House seats effectively wiped away the geographic and demographic gains Dems made in their 2006 and 2008 wave elections.

This kind of analysis isn't really my thing, so let's turn it over to Ron Brownstein:

In a geographic reflection of Obama's weakness among blue-collar white voters, a partial count showed that Republicans captured the seats of at least 35 House Democrats in districts where the percentage of whites with a college degree lags the national average of 30.4 percent. House Democrats elected in 2006 and 2008, when George W. Bush's weakness allowed the party to expand deep into traditionally Republican terrain, also suffered heavy losses.

Geographically, Democrats were especially hard hit through the border states and industrial Midwest: The party lost five House seats in Ohio, five in Pennsylvania, three in Tennessee, two in Indiana, and at least three in Illinois. Meanwhile, Republicans captured governorships in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio, flipped Senate seats in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois, and easily held an open Republican seat in Ohio.

But the election's blast radius extended well beyond those highly-vulnerable categories. Besides the freshman and sophomore Democrats, the election also claimed veteran House leaders such as Ike Skelton of Missouri, Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania and John Spratt of South Carolina. While the House losses were greatest in downscale blue-collar districts, Democrats also lost white-collar suburban seats in New Jersey, New Hampshire, and the Philadelphia suburbs, and failed to carry the suburban seat vacated by Mark Kirk, the successful GOP Senate challenger in Illinois. Those losses also extended the Democrats' vulnerability beyond swing states to reliably blue states that have been cornerstones of the party's coalition since the 1990s.

George Bush's stratospheric levels of unpopularity dating back to 2006, followed by the historic nature of Obama's candidacy and an economic crisis that shattered confidence in the GOP among swing voters, allowed Dems to dramatically expand their geographic and demographic reach in a way that created an artificial sense of transformation.

What we will now debate endlessly is why voters gave Dems only two years to win them over before reverting back to their original pattern. The answer to this question (or answers; a bruising debate lies ahead) will help determine how Dems should proceed as they pick their way out of the wreckage.

UPDATE, 10:03 a.m.: Obviously Dems have controlled Congress for four years. What I meant was that the voters who moved towards Dems as part of the 2006 and 2008 waves only gave them two years of one party rule before reverting rather dramatically back to their previous pattern.

Huge win: Multiple news orgs are calling the Nevada Senate race for Harry Reid over Sharron Angle.

On a very difficult night for Democrats, this is a major victory. The Nevada race represented perhaps the starkest showdown in the national battle between the Tea Party insurgency and the Obama/Dem vision, with Angle unabashedly arguing for dramatically scaled back or even non-existent government against Reid, the leading enabler of the Obama agenda.

Outside groups led by Karl Rove and others pumped a boatload of money from undisclosed donors into the race. All to no avail.

Reid was written off for dead for months by Beltway commentators. But Reid's team refused to accept this, going to work very early on to select the challenger they wanted to face by launching a brutally hard hitting campaign against Sue "chickens for checkups" Lowden in order to ensure that she lost to Sharron Angle in the GOP primary. And former Reid staffers rallied around.

Once Angle got in, this became in one sense the most important race in the country for what it said about the state of the electorate and what sort of views are now considered acceptable in a candidate for higher office. On a very dark night for Dems, this is a glimmer of light -- a very clear rebuke to the ascendent Tea Party right.

Okay, so as expected, Republicans are on track to take back the House by what appear to be very big margins.

There's no quibbling with it: In pure political terms, Republicans deserve major props for their performance. Whatever you think of their ideas and the strategies they were willing to employ to retake power, they have proven themselves to be a tough, very tenacious bunch who showed bottomless political stamina in fighting for what they appear to believe in and in doing what it took to fight back from the dead.

Consider how dark the landscape must have looked for Republicans in the winter of 2009, amid the euphoria greeting Obama's victory and the Dems' second straight big Congressional win in a row. Though there was a brief flirtation with the idea that the only way out of the wilderness was working with Obama, the stimulus drove them to settle on a strategy that has, quite simply, worked brilliantly.

Republicans calculated correctly that if they cast themselves as an across-the-board check against runaway Dem spending, the electorate would over time forgive their past failings and overlook their unwillingness to compromise as voters turned on Dems, particularly if Dems got drawn into a long, bruising fight over health care and the economy didn't improve.

This was not easy to foresee at the time. People were widely predicting that Republicans were condemning themselves to an eternity as a regional party. But their patience worked. The Tea Party deserves credit, too. For all its excesses and disorganization, it got its voice heard. And surely it played a key role in persuading Republicans to stiffen their spines and hold the line against Dem policies.

Here's hoping that Dems take a lesson from the GOP's refusal to compromise and refusal to tack to the "center" as they orchestrated their comeback.

A take on what this means for Dems coming soon.

10:44 p.m.: Wow, that was fast: Tea Party kingmaker Jim DeMint is already putting the GOP establishment on notice about the victorious Tea Partyers headed to Washingon: Deal with us, or else.

10:38 p.m.: Or maybe not. MSBNC projects that Tea Partyer Ron Johnson has won a sizeable victory over Russ Feingold. He's leading 57-42 with just under a third reporting. His loss is one of the ironies of the cycle: Though he's always been a thorn in the side of Washington Dems, Johnson was able to paint him as a D.C. insider.

And Feingold had been one of the few who tried to aggressively defend his vote in favor of health reform.

10:14 p.m.: Al Kamen asks: "Who gets the first subpoena in a GOP controlled House?" Thinkin' ahead...

10:10 p.m.: Polls are closed in Nevada. Now the fun really begins.

9:47 p.m.: Brian Beutler reports that Wisconsin Dems are holding out hope that Russ Feingold could still pull off a win against the odds, based on exit polling and other data.

That would certainly be a big deal and a big surprise for liberals, though the fact that folks are holding out for this indicates that there aren't many bright spots to grab onto tonight. We'll see.

9:18 p.m.: Alan Grayson's crushing loss by nearly 20 points, a rapid flame out in a promising career, is a sign that the cable coverage and blog love lavished on ideological warriors creates a false sense of security and doesn't protect you from the voters of your own district.

9:07 p.m.: From Rand Paul's victory speech: "Tonight is a Tea Party tidal wave." Who's the target audience for that, Dems or Republicans in Washington, or both?

9:04 p.m.: MSNBC projects that the GOP will win the House, 236-199, a net gain of 57 seats.

8:49 p.m.: More exit poll numbers that portend a very bad night for Dems:

Independents are breaking for Republicans in the House races, 55-40.

A surprising 13 percent of Obama voters are supporting GOP House candidates.

The youth vote is way down: Only 10 percent of voters are aged 18-29 in the early exit numbers; in 2008 the number was 18 percent.

And women, a reliable Dem-supporting group, are splitting evenly between Dem and Republican candidates.

Caution: These numbers are preliminary and will change.

8:30 p.m.: Grim for the White House: Dem Rep. Tom Perriello is losing to challenger Charles Hurt by 10 points, 54-44, with nearly half reporting.

While Perriello was written off early on, and he kept it close through sheer force of will, it's still important, because Obama had invested himself in the race with a last minute visit to Perriello's district. It's also a referendum on whether it's possible to win a tough district by sticking up unapologetically for the Obama/Dem agenda.

8:06 p.m.: Chris Coons wins. From Christine O'Donnell's concession speech: "I'm you, as long as you're not the person who won the Delaware Senate race."

Also: I'm told she plans to resume her studies at Oxford.

8:04 p.m.: Incumbent Dems Joe Donnelly and Baron Hill of Indiana are trailing by double digits in two bellwether House races, though considerably less than 50 percent have reported in both. Keep an eye on these races.

7:35 p.m.: More striking numbers from our exit polling. The ideological makeup of voters this year is the most conservative on record: 41% conservative, 39% moderate, 20% liberal.

The percentage of conservatives is up from 34% in 2008 and 32% in 2006. The previous high-water mark for conservatives in exit polling going back to 1976 was 37%.

7:15 p.m.: The Aqua Buddha smiles on Rand Paul as he wins the Kentucky Senate race. In all seriousness, this is a big deal: He was the first candidate to prove the Tea Party a force with his victory in the GOP primary, and now he's the first Tea Partyer to get elected to major office.

6:49 p.m.: A word about Chris Van Hollen, who was just on MSNBC, gamely sticking by the message that it ain't over 'till it's over with only hours left until the public's verdict is known. Van Hollen has had an extremely difficult job in recent months: He has been the public face of Dem optimism amid a tidal wave of skepticism, despair and predictions of Democratic doom.

Van Hollen, who played a major role in pushing the ill-fated DISCLOSE Act, was also perhaps the most vocal of Dems criticizing the wave of corporate money washing over the midterms. While some will argue he was the wrong messenger for this, because his electoral role allowed Republicans to cast the DISCLOSE Act as a partisan maneuver, he did elevate the issue and infuse it with some urgency.

If Dems lose big tonight, no doubt Van Hollen and his role in crafting the Dems' national message will take a beating from many quarters. But few would argue that Van Hollen didn't take on an extremely difficult, unenviable task and execute it with about as much optimism and good humor as you could possibly expect under the circumstances.

6:32 p.m.: Some early indications from exit polls we've got: Big majorities say the economy is the number one concern and believe the nation is on the wrong track. Independents seem to be breaking away from the Democrats, with very high disapproval among indys of Obama.

Also: A solid majority overall says government is doing too much. It all suggests the GOP message is driving the election.

6:15 p.m.: Ed Schultz reports a "quiet confidence" in the Harry Reid camp, which is what I'm picking up, too.

5:57 p.m.: Key race to watch for liberals, amid the expected Dem debacle: New Hampshire's second district, where progressive darling Ann Kuster (who defeated a LieberDem in the primary) is challenging former GOP Rep. Charlie Bass.

If Kuster wins, groups like Progressive Change Campaign Committee will point to it as proof that the lefty candidate was the better general election choice, and to push back against moderate Dems who will argue for the party to move to whatever it is we're suppposed to call the "center."

5:45 p.m.: Since little nuggets of news and information are going to be coming in all night, and since you all will surely have stuff to say about all of it, I thought this format made the most sense.

Let's get started. Long night ahead.

ABC News sends over the letter that Andrew Morse, the chief of their digital division, has sent to Andrew Breitbart, pulling the plug on their much-discussed, widely-parsed-over invitation for him to join in their election night coverage:

Dear Mr. Breitbart,

We have spent the past several days trying to make clear to you your limited role as a participant in our digital town hall to be streamed on ABCNews.com and Facebook. The post on your blog last Friday created a widespread impression that you would be analyzing the election on ABC News. We made it as clear as possible as quickly as possible that you had been invited along with numerous others to participate in our digital town hall. Instead of clarifying your role, you posted a blog on Sunday evening in which you continued to claim a bigger role in our coverage. As we are still unable to agree on your role, we feel it best for you not to participate.

Sincerely,

Andrew Morse

Cue up conservative sh*tstorm...

UPDATE, 4:56 p.m.: Media Matters releases a statement congratulating ABC News but not taking any credit for the decision.

UPDATE, 5:25 p.m.: ColorOfChange.org, which pressured ABC to nix Breitbart, also issues a statement.

It's common enough to hear Dem strategists lament the fact that Dem enthusiasm is way down in comparison to the euphoric levels of 2008, but did you know it's also down compared to 2006?

That's what we find in Gallup's final enthusiasm numbers:

The percentage of Dems that are more enthusiastic than usual this year is at 44 percent -- nine points lower than the 53 percent who said that in 2006, the year of the last midterm elections. At that point, of course, Bush was still in the White House.

By contrast, GOP enthusiasm is off the charts at 63 percent, nearly twenty points higher than during the 2006 midterms. Now, of course, Obama is in the White House.

Gallup's polling has been pretty bearish on Dem prospects for quite some time, and reports from all over are indicating that turnout is pretty robust. So who knows -- maybe the "enthusiasm gap" won't manifest itself at the polls in as pronounced a way as many have predicted.

But if this holds, perhaps the real conclusion to be drawn is this: The one thing that really drives up voter enthusiasm more reliably than anything else is to have a bogeyman from the opposite party -- a figure that concentrates angst, fear, and loathing -- in the White House.