James Taranto sums the day’s results nicely in OpinionJournal:
“It was not a referendum on Iraq. One of the most pro-Iraq lawmakers in Congress, Sen. Joe Lieberman, ran as an independent and trounced anti-Iraq Democratic nominee Ned Lamont. Meanwhile, of the five remaining Republican members of Congress who voted against Iraq’s liberation, three lost: Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R.I.), Rep. John Hostettler (Ind.) and Rep. Jim Leach (Iowa). Only two anti-Iraq Republicans will return to the 110th Congress: Reps. Jimmy Duncan (Tenn.) and Ron Paul (Texas).
“The Associated Press reports that while “three-fourths of voters said corruption and scandal were important to their votes, . . . Iraq was important for just two-thirds.” Both groups tended to favor Democrats….
“It was not a victory for the left. Lieberman’s victory over Lamont should be sufficient to establish this, but also, as we noted last week, the Democrats nominated many moderates for Congress, including Heath Shuler in North Carolina and Bob Casey and Chris Carney in Pennsylvania. (Carney, who beat Rep. Don Sherwood, got an endorsement from Richard Perle at a cocktail party we attended last month.)….
“Victory may prove cathartic for the Angry Left. America’s liberal left, and the Democratic Party more broadly, has been in an unhealthy emotional state ever since Bill Clinton’s impeachment eight years ago. The 2000 election controversy made things much worse for them, and led them to respond to their string of election losses since by lashing out and claiming the elections were stolen.
No one on the left will claim the 2006 election was stolen. They won fair and square, partly because of GOP complacency and partly because the Democrats got smart about candidate recruitment.”
Read the whole thing, especially James’ link to the left’s “turgid, self-pitying” efforts to spin Michigan voters’ resounding rejection (By 58 percent to 42 percent) of affirmative action in public higher education and government contracting.