After Tuesday night, Republicans' main objective is clear: Convince Oregon Measure 88 to run for president.
Measure 88 won more votes than anything else on the Oregon ballot. More votes than pot legalization. More than the incumbent governor, the incumbent senator or any of the six other ballot measures. The widely popular, landslide vote on Measure 88 prohibits illegal immigrants from getting driver's licenses.
In the nightmare scenario for MSNBC, by midnight Tuesday night, Republicans had 52 Senate seats -- 53 with their probable win in the Louisiana runoff in December, 54 if they win Alaska and 55 if they win Virginia. And I'm not even counting Democratic flips.
Don't you wish all these new Republicans were joining Republican senators Richard Lugar, Mike Castle and whatever Republican was running against Todd Akin? How about Rob Simmons in Connecticut, who would be the senator from Connecticut if self-serving GOP consultants hadn't gone for the money-bags, unelectable candidate instead?
Without tea party challenges and greedy Republican consultants, Republicans would be looking at 59 Senate seats in the next Congress. Maybe 61 with Democrat flips.
One more wave election, and it wouldn't matter who the president is.
And what if the money and energy wasted this year saving incumbent senators Mitch McConnell, Thad Cochran and Pat Roberts from tea party challenges had been spent on Senate elections in New Hampshire, Virginia or Minnesota? These guys weren't Arlen Specter! They weren't even John McCain or Marco Rubio.
(The only person who had a worse night on Tuesday than MSNBC's Rachel Maddow was Marco Rubio, who just lost the only argument for not primarying him in 2016.)
Republicans won every possible Senate and governor's seat, but one: long-shot, come-from-behind Scott Brown in New Hampshire. A month ago, no one thought we'd even be talking about New Hampshire on election night.
But Brown was such a fantastic candidate, aggressively denouncing amnesty and open borders, that he managed to single-handedly turn a safe seat for the Democrats into a bloodbath. He is surely responsible for at least one Republican Senate win by forcing Democrats to divert precious resources to New Hampshire.
Without many silver linings, all of MSNBC's bitterness election night was directed at Scott Brown.
An angry Rachel Maddow repeatedly told her little joke about Brown being the first man to lose to two women in two states. Hey, Rachel: Martha Coakley just became the first woman in the same state to lose to a man in two elections for two different offices -- senator and governor!
It was a tough night for Rachel. For those of you who haven't seen her show, words cannot capture the giggling, smirking, cutesy antics that accompany her remarks.
Exactly two months ago, Rachel was hyping Princeton's Sam Wang, who, in 2012, "correctly predicted all 33 U.S. Senate races"! I don't remember those being that hard to predict, but it impressed Rachel. "According to Sam Wang`s calculations," Maddow smirked on Sept. 3, "the odds of the Democrats holding onto the Senate nationwide for the whole country, those odds move to 85 percent."
Election results by midnight Tuesday:
-- Senate Republicans: 52
-- Senate Democrats: 44
Less than a month ago, Rachel devoted several shows to a complicated argument about how the Democrats could win the Senate election in South Dakota. "Now, today, the new unthinkable," she began. "The Democratic Party today just announced that, hey, South Dakota is hereby a contested race. South Dakota. Democrats all of a sudden think they can maybe win in South Dakota. ... Woo-hoo!"
Tuesday night election results in South Dakota:
-- Republican Mike Rounds: 51.1 percent
-- Democrat Rick Weiland: 29 percent
One month ago, Rachel was gloating about Kansas governor Sam Brownback heading to defeat because of his experiment with "massive" tax cuts. "The result of Sam Brownback's experiment," she said, "is, number one, that Kansas is broke. Number two, that Sam Brownback is losing his re-election bid to a centrist Democrat who warned that Kansas couldn`t afford those cuts."
Tuesday night election results in Kansas:
-- Sam Brownback: 49.9 percent
-- Paul Davis: 46.1 percent
Rachel on Arkansas, earlier this year:
"Basically the unanimous Beltway common wisdom was Mark Pryor, Democratic senator from Arkansas, was definitely going to lose this year. ... Except that it is not at all what happened. Check this out. Mark Pryor has been polling 10 and 11 points ahead of this Tom Cotton guy who is running against him. Senator Pryor is up in this race by double digits."
(Translation of "this Tom Cotton guy": magna cum laude graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School; second lieutenant in the U.S. Army; infantry officer and platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq; U.S. representative from Arkansas.)
Tuesday night election results in Arkansas:
-- Tom "This Guy" Cotton: 56.5 percent
-- Mark Pryor: 39.5 percent
And what ever happened to A-Star-Is-Born, Wendy Davis? MSNBC spent all of 2013 telling us she was going to be the next governor of Texas.
Rachel began referring to Davis' opponent, Greg Abbott, as the man "best known as the Republican running for Texas governor against Democrat Wendy Davis." On June 26, 2014, Rachel spent airtime commemorating the one-year anniversary of Davis' filibuster for abortion!
Tuesday night election results in Texas:
-- Greg Abbott: 59.4 percent
-- Wendy Davis: 38.9 percent
I could go on and on. Rachel sneering about Thom Tillis, Rachel giggling about Mitch McConnell, Rachel laughing at Nathan Deal, Rachel mocking Rick Scott, Rachel dismissing Scott Walker.
Instead, let's review a few of Tuesday's highlights:
-- A former House impeachment manager is now governor of Bill Clinton's home state of Arkansas.
-- The deep blue states of Maryland and Massachusetts will now have Republican governors.
-- Republicans have just elected: the youngest member of Congress (Elise Stefanik of New York); the first black female representative from Utah (Mia Love); the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction (Tim Scott). The two black senators from the South before that were also Republicans, as was the first black senator from the North, Edward Brooke.
-- Americans really don't want driver's licenses for illegal aliens.
-- Sandra Fluke lost.
