FUZZY MATH

Well, if you don't like the hard numbers ...

An hour of vote tabulation reveals a stunning fact: Democrats won the popular vote for the Senate by an overwhelming 12.6% margin - 55%/42.4%.

...do what Tom Elia of the New Editor does -- just throw out the data you don't like and declare that the rest of the numbers prove your point:

What Eskow either forgets, or neglects to point out, is that 33 Senate seats are up for election every two years, and that among this year's seats were three in California, New York, and Massachusetts -- seats that Senators Feinstein, Clinton, and Kennedy won by about 4 million votes, most of the Dems' 6.6 million vote margin of victory in the aggregate US Senate vote.

I'm sorry -- why is that relevant?

Why couldn't Republicans have managed to mount effective challenges to the senators from those states? All three of the states currently have Republican governors. Yes, New York and Massachusetts just elected Democrats by wide margins, but only after Republicans had occupied the state houses for more than a decade. And California just reelected a Republican governor.

And the New York and Massachusetts seats are seats are held by senators who are routinely described as among the most polarizing political figures in what is routinely described as an increasingly conservative America. So why were the Clinton and Kennedy seats safe and, say, Rick Santorum's wasn't?

And if Republicans get to rejigger the math by throwing out New York, California, and Massachusetts, why don't Democrats get to throw out Texas, a populous state where a Republican incumbent, Kay Bailey Hutchison, cruised to victory?

And who decides what's a safe seat anyway? In 2000, Dianne Feinstein won 56% of the vote. Hillary Clinton won 55%. Mike DeWine won 61%. Why were the first two seats safe and the third wasn't?

Also in 2000, John Kyl won 79% of the vote in Arizona. Why didn't he win a blowout this time around?

Democrats had those safe seats, and were competitive elsewhere, because the Democratic Party now has broad nationwide appeal. The GOP, by contrast, has made itself radioactive over the last several years in large swaths of the Northeast and also in Ohio, while disillusioning large numbers of voters in states all over the country.

Sorry, Tom -- the numbers count. All of them.

(Via Memeorandum.)