First Democratic congress-critter elected since the Grant administration.
Down Goes Hoffman! Down Goes Hoffman!  Down Goes Hoffman!
Here’s where Drudge puts that election down, by the way:
REPUBLICAN TAKES NJ BY 5%...
Dem Wins New York House Race...
ABCNEWS: Vast Economic Discontent Spells Trouble for Dems in 2010...
White House: Obama 'not watching returns'...
Michelle Takes First Tweens to Miley Cyrus Concert...
NYC: BLOOMBERG...
Maine voters reject gay-marriage law...
Atlanta's race for mayor heads to runoff...
Votes fall along racial lines...
Considering the elements coming together to push for Doug Hoffman, if NY-23 had gone the other way, would that have popped up first, instead of just a tidge ahead of Michelle taking his daughters to see Miley Cyrus?
I heard Roger Stone, Republican hack, at the start of the ballot counting just after the voting was done in NY23, sell the results for the district. First of all, and I don’t understand the point in party hacks getting up to sell that “I think we’ll win this one” — not in the circumstances of 2009 where there aren’t major elections coming down the pike West-wise that might be tamped down in vote turn-out. But Roger Stone saw the results: there obviously wasn’t anything to suggest the fait accompli of a victory, yet he spun that direction anyways.
Next, I saw Roger Stone sell the concept of the district as a Democratic vote-getter. Obama narrowly won the district. Fine, cool, great. I gather the first Democratic presidential victor in the district? (I know that FDR never won his home-turf in upstate New York, which I further gather is even less Democratic than these parts of New York.) The other one was to point out the state-wide Democratic office-holders who won this district — Schumer in his last election, and Spitzer. Those politicians won the state in a landslide — the district edged forward.
But you choose your facts to fit your storyline. This, I think, is a more fitting fact storyline. In the end, this race became a referendum on the strategies of the “Talk Radio” conservative and narrowly defined “Tea Party” audience. They lost. It’s not a political strategum employed by the two great Republican victors of the night who had broader electorates to appeal toward (and generally skirted the matter in the election of whether this was a referendum on national politics). So, they can keep their Bachmans, as New York 23 would rather have someone tending to their parachiol matters.