The last east coast blogger left standing

Seventy three posts and a dozen and a half graphics later, and a quick scan through the blogroll seems that the LLamas are the last ones manning the store. The Command Post is up, but the Aussies have taken over. We win!

Some thoughts about what's next:

1. There's nothing wrong legally/morally/ethically with what the Dems are about to do in Ohio---ie wanting to count all the provisionals, even though they can't realistically or unrealistically win. Wait for plenty of "the Sawx were down three games to the Yanks" blather. What the Republicans need to do is smile, act Ward Cleaver like, and just say, "we can wait."

Why? Because of the second fundamental fact of Election 2004:

2. The Republicans won the popular vote, big time. Not only did they get more votes, but they broke 50%. This is significant because Bill Clinton never broke 50%. We haven't had a President who won with more than 50% of the popular vote since 1988.

This. Is. Huge.

This changes everything, and is going to demoralize the hell out of the uber-partisan democrats. Why? Because this destroys the whole grievance structure they've built for themselves since Clinton's impeachment. And the margin is large enough to survive the inevitable conspiracy theories (although look for plenty of theories centered on the variance between early exit polls and the final results...)

The other thing is that now the Kerry folks are in a losing situation, because their entire rhetoric of "president selected not elected" works against them, because there are no provisional ballots that can make up for the 3.5M votes Bush is ahead in the popular vote.

I repeat: This. Is. Huge.

But of course, not all Democrats are teary-eyed:

3. This leads to a third point: our hypothesis back in January that the electronic futures markets on the election would be more useful than the polls was spot on right.

4. And the big losers of the night? Mikey Moore, Terry Mcaullife, and NBC News for calling Ohio of Bush but not being able to back down.

I'm going to grab a shower, eat some breakfast and then drive down to Lynchburg as I'm doing the radio show in a couple of hours. Thanks--sometime during the next hour we'll get our 100Kth visitor!

PS: Here's the post we began with 27 hours ago---how did we do?