Minnesota’s instruments for counting votes are simply too crude to determine the winner in a race this tight. . . . Luckily, Minnesota’s electoral law has a provision for ties. After all the counting and recounting, if the vote is statistically tied, the state should invoke the section of the law that requires the victor to be chosen by lot. It’s hard to swallow, but the right way to end the senatorial race between Mr. Coleman and Mr. Franken will be to flip a coin.

This seems right to me.

Speaking for me only

Ungracious outgoing Colorado Republican Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave, who has yet to call winner Betsy Markey and congratulate her on her win in Colorado's 4th District race for Congress, made a robocall for Georgia Congressman Saxby Chambliss after her defeat. Here's the text:

Hello, I'm Marilyn Musgrave. Until last month I was the congresswoman from Colorado. Leftist special interests from around the country poured money into my district to defeat me. They overwhelmed us with money. And they smothered the truth with vicious attacks and lies.

More...

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

Requiem for a Maverick John McCain ran one of the most incompetent, schizo campaigns in history — and for that we owe him big-time

Lots of good reading here, I liked this:

In short, McCain entered this election season being the worst thing that anyone can be, in the eyes of the Rove-school Republicans: Different. Independent. His own man. He exited the campaign on his knees, all his dignity gone, having handed the White House to the hated liberals after spending the last months of the race with numb-nuts Sarah Palin on his arm and Karl Rove's c*ck in his mouth. Even if you wanted to vote for him, you didn't know who you were voting for. The old McCain? The new McCain? Neither? Both?

This is silly. Frankly, it does harm to real and legitimate claims for an Obama mandate

When your mandate measure puts anyone ahead of FDR, it is time to stop.

Speaking for me only

This is an Open Thread.

DemfromCt, who does good work on polling, blithely and unquestioningly endorses the unsupported and empty assertion from Pew:

First, the middle asserted itself. This was not a base election. Independents broke decisively for Obama, favoring him by a 52%-to-44% margin over John McCain.

I do not even know what that is supposed to mean but it worth reviewing these same numbers from 2004:

Yesterday it became clear to people who had mastered arithmetic that Ted Stevens lost his Senate race. Today, on his 85th birthday, Stevens conceded. No recount.

How nice that the senator is giving us a present on his birthday. Thank you, Tubes. If I were your judge, I would recommend your release to a halfway house 30 days before your prison sentence ends.

Actually, if Stevens would volunteer to serve 10 days in Guantanamo, I'd call it even.

The AP reports:

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens has lost his bid for a seventh term. The longest-serving Republican in the history of the Senate trailed Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich by 3,724 votes after Tuesday's count. That's an insurmountable lead with only about 2,500 overseas ballots left to be counted.

Welcome, Sen. Begich.

Republican senators were planning to vote today on whether to remove Ted Stevens from the party conference and divest him of his committee assignments. That bit drama has been postponed until Thursday in light of the uncertainty of the election's outcome. Mark Begich holds a narrow lead and there are still tens of thousands of absentee and other uncounted ballots waiting to be tallied.

Although Jim DeMint says there are enough votes to kick Stevens out of the conference, "Senate Republican leadership aides said it was unclear if DeMint had enough votes to approve the resolution." While it would be fun to see if Republican senators really want to pal around with a convicted felon, it would be more reassuring to learn that Alaska's voters didn't actually send a felon back to the Senate.

Flipping through the various broadcast and cable news networks on election night, I was struck by two things. First, the remote control is the greatest technological advancement since indoor plumbing. Second, Chris Wallace and Karl Rove on Fox News, desperate to find a silver lining in the public's wholesale rejection of Republican governance, loudly proclaimed throughout the night that the United States was still a center-right country, based on exit polls showing more voters who identified themselves as conservative than liberal.

The "center-right nation" theme has been picked up by other conservative pundits since November 4 (unsurprisingly, since most of them can't think for themselves and need Uncle Karl to hand them their daily talking points). Turns out, it's not true. [more ...]

This is a silly parlor game of course but I like Poblano's post about it so I will discuss it here:

If America had woken up last Tuesday morning and magically found Hillary Clinton's name on the ballot in lieu of Barack Obama, might she have won by 11 points? Perhaps. She certainly proved herself to be an exceptionally compelling candidate, even if her execution and staffing decisions were sometimes wanting. But what would Clinton's numbers have looked like if she had actually endured ... you know ... a campaign?

More . . .

Ruy Texeira looks at the exit polls:

First, a few words on how well the Democrats did with the white working class (WWC). They lost these voters by 18 points, a significant improvement over 2004 when they lost them by 23 points, but somewhat worse than I thought they'd do based on preelection polls. In my paper with Alan Abramowitz, The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class, we allowed as how Democrats needed to get the WWC deficit into the 10-12 point range to be assured of a solid victory. As it turned out, they were able to achieve a solid victory even with a higher deficit than 10-12 points. This is because the simulations we were working with made pretty conservate assumptions about white college graduate support for Democrats and about minority turnout and support for Democrats. As it turned out, minority turnout and support were through the roof and white college graduates also exceeded our conservative assumptions. So an 18 point WWC deficit was in the end adequate for a solid victory, rather than a squeaker as I thought. And a 10-12 point deficit would have translated into a true landslide.

[More . . .]

Detractors of Howard Dean's work as chair of the Democratic National Committee (all he did, after all, was to deliver strong Democratic victories in two successive elections, ultimately helping the Obama campaign flip red states blue and turn much of the formerly red west a nice shade of purple) won't have Dean to kick around any more.

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who rose to national prominence during a failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, will not seek a second term as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, clearing the way for a loyalist of President-elect Barack Obama to be named to the soon-to-be vacant post. ...

Dean's future remains cloudy although he has been mentioned as a possible choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services in an Obama Administration. Former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) is also being mentioned for that job.

Chris Cillizza handicaps Dean's possible successors.