Okay, John, I didn’t think of doing it, but just for fun, here goes.

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I know we just got done with the 2006 election. (Well, almost.) Still, 2008 is right around the corner, which means we’ll be electing a new President, assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t decide to just assign one to us again.

As you start thinking about your favored candidates you might want to check out this handy site setting forth the major candidates’ or hopefuls’ positions on Iraq.

(Hint: it’s hard to feel too optimistic)

We’re all pretty happy about the election results across the river in New Hampshire, but it’s not that long ago that the Republicans in New Hampshire, with help from the RNC, were deep into election fraud by jamming the Democrats’ GOTV effort with thousands of robo-calls. You’ll recall that it was so bad that James Tobin of the national Republican Party was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison for the scheme.

Now the Democrats are suing the Republican Party for damages, arguing that the Republican phone-jamming effort trespassed on their personal property and deprived them of its value. There’s only one thing: the two parties have different views of the value of the damages the Dems suffered. The Republicans claim that their efforts only cost the D’s a few thousand dollars, about what it cost them to rent the phone service for the day. The D’s, on the other hand, say, “He, the whole point of all the money we spend on setting up our GOTV campaign is so that we can make GOTV calls on Election Day. If we can’t do that, we’ve wasted all of our investment in setting up the GOTV system. That’ll be four mill, please.”

It’s too soon to tell what will happen, but we’ll be following the story. Meanwhil, here’s hte link to the story in the Times Argus.

Meanwhil, down in the sunny South, remember Katherine Harris?

Yes, that’s her, the Bush hatchet woman with the scary makeup who made a fool of herself in her Senate run.

Well, when she ran for Senate her House seat was open, and in a hotly contested race the Republican who was running to replace, Vern Buchanan, her won by 369 votes.

But wait, it is Florida, and Katherine Harris’s home district, so it couldn’t be as easy as that, could it? No, indeed. In Sarasota County, which the Democratic candidate Christine Jennings carried, there was an undervote of over 18,000 votes. Missing voting machines, people being told their votes didn’t register, the whole litany of things that can go wrong with touch screen voting.

The recount’s over, Buchanan is demanding that Jenings back off, but it ain’t over yet, folks.

If this is what they call democracy here at home, what do the R’s think qualifies as democracy in Iraq?

Watch the news tomorrow. Salmon’s recount petition has been drafted and will be filed in Montpelier tomorrow. He’d really be crazy not to since he only has to pick up 69 votes to win.

We obviously have a lot to celebrate this year, both in Vermont and nationally, and we should. We should also take this opportunity to learn from what happened, and to try to figure out what to do next time. I have several thoughts about this and I’m sure I’ll have more. Still, here’s a start:

1. The Fifty State Strategy worked. It was just a few months ago that I was asking whether the Fifty State Strategy was nuts, and now here we are, winning Senate and House seats all across the country. It certainly appears that Howard Dean was right in arguing that we should be building the Party and contesting elections all over the country.

But . . .

2. The Fifty State Strategy worked. Look around at the winners, and we can just take the last two who were declared, Jon Tester and Jim Webb as examples, and we see that a lot of the new Democratic Senators and Representatives are not the kind of Democrats that we here identify with. The D’s will organize both houses of Congress, and get all the committee chairs, but liberal Democrats won’t necessarily be happy with everything they do. Among other things, this will mean we need to keep the pressure on them. It also means, of course, that the wingers who keep claiming that the Democratic Party has been completely taken over by bomb-throwers whose politics run from Howard Dean to Fidel Castro have always been either lying or self-deluded.

3. Rove isn’t as smart as everyone claims. Sure, the wingers were all over the place in the last few weeks before the election, proclaiming their confidence that the R’s were going to hold the House and the Senate. That was clearly just spin, and there is no way that they actually believed it. On the other hand, they didn’t fire Rummy until the day after the election. This seems like pretty good evidence to me that they either thought they were going to win, or they thought they had a good shot at it. If they thought they were going to lose they would have had to figure that firing Rumsfeld might help, and yet they didn’t do it.

4. John Odum was right about what it would take to defeat Douglas. The problem was partly that the Parker campaign didn’t do it, but partly that there was’t enough time. Douglas has held statewide office all but two years since 1980, which means he had many years to give people the impression that he was a reasonable, moderate guy. Maybe that used to be the truth, but the new Douglas, Douglas 2.0–gubernatorial model, is entirely different. He is not either moderate or well-intentioned, and his competence appears limited to campaigning. If you talk to almost anyone who works in state government, at any level, they can tell you how his appointments have weakened the administrative agencies and have often been at odds with the mission of the agencies themselves. We have two years to get the truth out, but it’s not going to happen if we wait until 2008.

5. Moveon.org is great, and needs to get even better. Moveon members made literally millions of calls across the country to mobilize support for Democratic candidates. This is a tremendous grass roots resource, and we need to strengthen ties between the Democratic Party and Moveon.org. They clearly had the message that we’ve always needed that you can’t stop campaigning until it’s over: on Tuesday night, probably after midnight, I logged on and they were having me call Alaska to get supporters. I thought this was just great.

On the other hand, they seemed to be a bit lacking in the LOS research. Even on Tuesday the scripts I was getting for calls were persuasive scripts, whereas here in Vermont we were doing purely GOTV calls to known supporters. It’s hard to believe we were going to change anyone’s mind on their way out the door to vote, so the last day push should have been all GOTV. Maybe that’s one of the next steps.

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s what’s right at the top of my head.

Good work, everybody!

AP, NBC, and Reuters have called Virginia for Webb!

I don’t know what the results are going to show in other parts of the state, but turnout in Montpelier was fantastic. We have 6200 people on our checklist, but 800 of them are due to be dropped as inactive for two years. We had 4200 votes case, so if you exclude the people who aren’t really active voters that gives us a turnout of over 75%

This is good overall, and a good reflection on our GOTV effort. Great work, Andrea Stander and the whole coordinated campaign!

Matt Dunne is conceding right now. He won a great campaign, and he gave us all the idea that he just might pull it off in the last couple of weeks, but it’s not happening this time. He’s definitely talking about running again, and I’ll be interested in seeing if other candidates take up his idea of service politics. I’m not that sure that it’s an effective strategy; on the other hand, it can be so hard to attract publicity, and this might be a good way to do it.

On CNN they’re saying that the South Dakota anti-abortion referendum (actually, I’m not sure if it’s a referendum or an initiative) is going down to defeat. This is great news.

Wolf Blitzer is saying right now that we have picked up the fifteen seats we need, so that gives us control of the House, and Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, John Conyers chair of Judiciary.

Denny Hastert isn’t quite conceding right now, but he doesn’t sound optimistic.