Today, the Democrats have a lead of 255-178 in the House of Representatives. The general consensus seems to be about a +50 for the Republicans, which is going to result in roughly 230-205 (assuming the two vacant seats go GOP). This puts the Rs in control of the House, albeit with a majority one-third the size of what the D’s have. Not that it matters immensely, because with a strong Speaker, the House pretty much does whatever the majority wants.
In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t nearly as big a blowup as 1994. Nobody was expecting what happened in ’94, especially given that the Ds had run the House for four decades straight. The GOP has only been on the outs for four years, and was on the wrong end of two huge blowouts – meaning that at least twenty seats and maybe more are normally Republican seats that are reverting to the mean. Factor in the economic conditions generally, plus the fact that the Republicans have been running this race for two years nonstop and the media called it in August, and what happens tomorrow is pretty much what you’d expect from the surrounding circumstances.
More interesting is the Senate – if it tips sides, things are really out of whack – but one interesting possibility is that the Democrats retain control but Harry Reid loses. At that point, the question becomes who takes control of the Senate in the absence of the feckless catamite that has been the Reid leadership, and that tells us a lot about where things go in the next two years.
The really discouraging thing is that it worked – the GOP ran harder to the right, obstructed nonstop for two years, and are poised to reap the rewards – despite the fact that the general public is less approving of the Republicans on almost every particular. But the likely voters are the Republicans who have spent two years chomping at the bit to try to undo what happened in 2008, and after twenty-four months of priming, the opportunity to vote against Obama is going to drive the base to the polls in ridiculous numbers.
And as always, we wind up with the government we deserve.
(NB: this is day one of National Blog Posting Month, and I’m going to go for it this year – having done NaNoWriMo last year, I am completely out of inspiration for anything that would sustain 50K words. We’ll see what happens if I nub it in 30 days at a time…)