The day after Election Day

Yesterday was a day for primary and special elections in lots of states.
The two I have been following the most closely were the race for Montana Senate and CA-50.

Montana Senate
There was a candidate, the state auditor, who had strong financial backing and the support of the centrist (wimpy, republican lite) DLC. Then a progressive organic farmer from a town, Big Sandy, with a population of 710. The farmer, John Tester, was nearly unknown two years ago. MyDD says:

Tester had only 20% in a poll back in January.

Here were yesterdays primary results:

	Party		Votes	Pct
	Tester, Jon		Dem	64,464	60.84
	Morrison, John		Dem	37,516	35.41
	Richards, Paul		Dem	1,602	1.51
	Candee, Robert		Dem	1,449	1.37
	Marcure, Kenneth		Dem	921	.87

Amazing.
It's a fantastic feeling to have a guy who I gave to months ago as a longshot become a serious contender to join the US senate.


CA-50
MyDD has great coverage of the Busby-Bilbray race:

In 2004, Busby lost the CA-50 by 22.0%. Today, it looks like she will lose by around 4.5%. And that was with the NRCC spending $4.5M on the race. If Republicans want to spin losing 18 points after spending $4.5M of committee money as a good thing, go for it. After all, spin is basically why they spent so much money on this race. By blowing their wad in a solidly Republican district, they wanted to change the media narrative on the election in their favor. It will probably work, given how subservient and generally inaccurate the media tends to be when it comes to Republicans and elections. In reality, for a Republican candidate to pull 49.5% of the vote in a district with 44.5% Republican registration is shocking. Given those numbers, Bilbray probably managed all of 20% of the vote among independents.

No matter what the media says, no Democrat should be mistaken about this result. First, this is a huge, seismic shift in our favor that bodes extremely well for November. If we receive an 18% shift nationwide, we will win the House easily. If Republican candidates are pulling only 20% of the independent vote, the Indycrat realignment is still on.

So in short, we'll have another shot in a few months, let's hope Busby wins.

Lastly, Califronia Governor will be a hotly contested race in November. The dems had a tight primary where Angelidies edged Steve Westly. I have very little idea what the difference is. Anyone know?