Allen did the right thing by conceding, as it was clear that the margin in the race was simply too large for him to have any ground to contest the race. Allen may yet have a political career if Sen. John Warner of VA retires in 2008 as it is expected that he will. By bowing out on a gracious note, Allen leaves himself the possibility of political redemption later on.

Bachmann did better against Wetterling than I would have expected. I suspect that both Kennedy and Wetterling were hurt by negative advertising. Going negative is always a risky political strategy, and when Kennedy and Wetterling did it as challengers, it ended up hurting them rather than helping.

The big shocker was the Gutknecht/Walz race. It wasn’t close, Walz soundly trounced Gutknecht. Obviously the early reports that MN-1 was safe were completely and totally wrong. Again, I think that turnout is key in that race. The GOP turnout was probably much lower than it should have been. Two other factors seem to have been in play. The first is that Gutknecht was far too complacent, and many Republicans are blaming him for running a campaign that was lackluster at best. He thought he had a safe seat, and while conventional wisdom would have said that was true, every smart politician runs like they’re 10 points down. Gutknecht didn’t do that, and it cost him.

The second one is that the demographics of the First are changing. Rochester is trending more and more Democratic. Immigration is changing the demographics of cities like Worthington. It’s a less safely Republican district than it has been in the last few cycles, and redistricting made it much more diverse than it was. It’s quite possible that a smart GOP candidate can knock off Walz in the next electoral cycle, but it’s going to take a lot of work.

No doubt about it, the Republicans got trounced in Minnesota, even harder than they got trounced nationally. Ron Carey hasn’t been able to pull off what his predecessor did, and that’s hurting Minnesota Republicans. The Minnesota GOP is going to have to work hard at fixing their problems and increasing turnout. Minnesota will be firmly in the spotlight in 2008, and while the GOP has suffered a major setback, that doesn’t mean that Minnesota will forever be a blue state — just that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.

Thank God Pawlenty won.

The Republicans wounds were largely self-inflicted.

Now the Democrats have to lead. Good luck with that, Speaker Pelosi.

I’ll have some more analysis later today.

Pawlenty’s lead is very tenous, but he’s managed to come up from behind, and it seems likely that Hatch will lose, if by the narrowest of margins. The Walz lead is a bit perplexing to me. The early reports indicated that the GOP had strong turnout in MN-1 — which may be true, but that turnout appears to have benefited Pawlenty rather than Gutknecht. It’s possible that Gutknecht will pull enough of a margin in his home turf in southeast Minnesota, but with Rochester and Olmstead County trending more Democratic, that’s not as certain as it may have been in past elections.

It all turns on where the remaining votes remain. Pawlenty, Gutknecht, Kiffmeyer, and Anderson all need some significant help in order to stay in office. Pawlenty seems to have good odds, but today is not a good day for Minnesota Republicans.

UPDATE – 11:15PM Central: The trends are staying steady. Pawlenty is slowly gaining. Gutknecht appears headed for a loss.

The Star-Tribune has called the auditor’s race for Rebecca Otto. Again, that’s a testament to Democratic voting strength, assuming that people are voting straight party line on those statewide positions. If that’s true, it also means that Hatch is doing poorly with DFL voters — and the county and precinct-level figures seem to point in that direction.

I’m not surprised, as the Cardin prediction seemed a little premature to me. Steele has run a very tight campaign, and the old idea that majority African-American districts will go overwhelmingly (as in 90-10) Democrat won’t hold true in this race. Steele has run a very strong campaign against the very weak Cardin, so having him beat the prognosticators would be quite satisfying indeed.

The first is that Nancy Pelosi is emblematic of the liberal left, and conservatives outnumber liberals by a significant margin. Even though I can’t stand Bill O’Reilly, he’s been harping on the difference between “San Francisco values” and mainstream American values. Pelosi stands on the wrong side of nearly every issue, and she’s a poor advocate. She’ll give the Republicans a nice punching bag for the next two years. Furthermore, the Democrats are winning based on fielding some very conservative candidates — the parties may have shifted, but the ideologies really haven’t.

Secondly, the Republicans need a kick in the ass. I’m a conservative first, and a partisan second, which is why the loss of the House doesn’t disturb me as much. The GOP lost touch with their Main Street values and got far too involved in the K Street culture. The 1994 revolution was all about cutting the size and scope of government. We have betrayed those values. We ran on improving government, and we haven’t done that.

The GOP needs to rediscover its own values. They need to rediscover the spirit and the policies that drove them into power in 1994. Again, this is not time for partisan whining. We lost, and we lost big. We can’t blame the Democrats. We have only ourselves to blame. We can win, but only by staying true to our values — which is the lesson the Republican Party needs to learn before 2008 when the slate gets wiped clean.

Bachmann has a healthy 5-point lead, and it seems like Wetterling is going down. That’s a bright spot in a dark evening.

What truly irks me is that Pawlenty is down, and not by a small margin. I refuse to believe that the people of Minnesota would elect the likes of Mike Hatch. It’s early in the evening, and the outstate votes remain to be counted, but that just is not sitting well with me. Hatch is not only a mean-spirited, thin-skinned hothead, but he’s ethically challenged as well. As a future attorney, he’s one of the stereotypical 99% that gives the other 1% of us a bad name. I don’t think that Hatch will win, I can’t believe that Hatch will win, but if he does, I will be quite irate.

UPDATE – 9:45PM: Gutknecht/Walz is down to a 2% spread — so it’s possible that Walz is still in play. I’m skeptical, and the information I’ve gotten indicates it won’t be that close, but everything is still very much up in the air.

UPDATE – 9:50PM: At least the movement with Hatch/Pawlenty is moving the right way. I really hope Hatch doesn’t win, I have to live in this state for at least the next three years…

UPDATE – 10:00PM: Pawlenty keeps closing, but I’m still worried. Surprisingly, all the other GOP statewide offices are getting hammered. Even the Star Tribune endorsed Patricia Andersen, and she’s losing by a wide margin. I’m not sure what the story is there — I suspect that a lot of GOP voters only voted for Pawlenty or alternately Hatch isn’t doing well with Democratic voters in a period of high Democratic turnout. It’s also possible that the metro areas (which get counted first) are distorting the vote. I’ve known Mary Kiffmeyer informally for a while, and she always struck me as a dedicated public servant — I would hope that she and Andersen would be able to keep their jobs. Short of abject partisanship, I see no reason why they shouldn’t have been reelected.

UPDATE: 10:20PM Central: Pawlenty is closing the gap, although Hatch is still ahead. However, Gutknecht is falling behind Walz. I’d still be somewhat surprised if Walz won, but it’s looking like this could be a night of many surprises.

I will give Klobuchar some credit, compared to the other two losers, at least she has some accomplishments to her name. Then again, that’s like being elected as the Nicest Smelling Person in the sh*t shoveling industry.

The big question now becomes which one of them takes the Mark Dayton Award for Biggest Moron in the Senate?

Double ugh…

UPDATE: 9:08PM Central — Triple ugh… now it’s closing again…

Still, this is going to be a long night for the Republicans.

TN seems to be holding for Corker, although it’s too early to call it for sure. So far, everything is going the way one would expect, which means that the Republicans are poised to lose control of the House and the Senate still hangs in the balance.

Right now it looks like undecideds are breaking towards the Democrats — that’s very bad news for the Republicans in tight races.

On the other hand, so far all the races are proceeding along the lines one would have expected. Kean was a long shot, and Santorum was long predicted to be dead meat. The real test will be the VA race — if Webb pulls ahead, the Democrats might end up in control of the Senate.

This is still going to be a nail biter…

That’s a shame, as Rick Santorum has been a great public servant and a strong voice for the voiceless across the world. This is a win based on partisanship and nothing but, and this has been a loss for the people of Pennsylvania and the country as a whole.

Montana: Turnout is supposed to be absolutely ridiculous — which is a good thing for embattled Senator Conrad Burns. Montana is a very conservative state, and while Democrats have made inroads at the local level, it’s only because they’ve fielded conservative candidates. Tester has run a strong campaign, but I’m in the camp that says that Montana residents are going to come back home to the GOP.

UPDATE: 6:64PM Central
Virginia: This one is going to be down to the wire. I’m watching the results come, and Webb is pulling just slightly ahead of Allen. However, that’s to be expected given that the larger urban areas will be the first to get counted. If Allen has enough turnout in the western and southern parts of the state he can win — if not, he’ll be in trouble.

UPDATE: 7:00PM Central
Virginia: The race has tightened again, with Webb ahead only by a small fraction. Because of the large amount of absentee votes in that race, it could be a long time before we have a definitive answer in that race.

Florida: Unsurprisingly, Katharine Harris is going down in flames. There’s a real shocker…

UPDATE: 7:15PM Central
Virginia: The talking heads on Fox are saying that Allen should have run a more ideologically-based campaign. That’s true, although I think he should have run a smarter campaign in general. Allen seems like he may just barely pull ahead, but this race should never have been this close. One certain loser is Allen’s aspirations for 2008 — after this, he’s damaged goods. He’d better hope that he keeps his seat.

Exit polls are unreliable and tend to favor the Democrats. We’ve already been warned about this — so all this says is what one particularly unreliable datapoint is saying. Everything is still in play, and it’s far too premature for the fat lady to start doing her warmups.

UPDATE: “Anything within 7 is probably a dead heat” — that seems about right to me. All these races are in play, and the exit polls aren’t worth anything. The fat lady is still firmly in her green room…

UPDATE: Mark Blumenthal (AKA the Mystery Pollster) has a good piece on why exit polling is so inaccurate.

MN-1 is becoming less reliably conservative, but a hotbed of liberalism it’s not. It’s difficult to sample a House race, and it’s even more difficult to sample a House race in a quite heterogeneous district spread out over a wide geographical area like MN-1 (which basically encompasses Southern Minnesota). There are a lot of conservative rural voters who aren’t likely to answer pollster’s phone calls but vote as a matter of obligation.

Gutknecht was supposed to be running last election cycle as well, and I remember some dire predictions for him in 2002. The adage to remember here is to always keep in mind that incumbency is a powerful thing, especially in a rural district like the First.

We’ll see if those rumors continue to play out as the night goes on…

UPDATE: Just in case, if you’re a Gutknecht voter, don’t forget to vote. It could still be close, and it’s always better to be safe than sorry.