Watching the spin on this will make for a very amusing day.

That's one of the joys of listening to NPR. They, too, emphasized the narrow win and then brought on someone to say how rational Republicans would find this result troubling, not reassuring.

The Democrats should be more concerned that Angelides won his primary - a 'machine' candidate (i.e., a tax-eater) is not going to beat Arnold in the fall.

I wonder what the Kos Krowd is braying this morning.

I knew Bilbray won when I heard NPR lead with a story on the Governor's race.

This makes Kos 0-20 as a political consultant, I believe.

Busby's comments regarding illegals and voting?

David - As a semi-rational Republican, I found the narrowness of Bush's 2000 win troubling, but it didn't stop me from breaking out the champagne. Bush's 2%-margin 2004 victory I found troubling for a moment before I kicked up my heels, kissed my wife, and gave the kids a trip to Disney World. Bilbray's 4.5%-margin victory may have troubled me for a few nanoseconds, but I didn't notice.

Via Instapundit, Kos looks like he might be 1-19, though the one win is a primary and all the losses seem to me to be in general elections.

Check the link to RedState for the names.

You can bet your butt that if Busby had won by .01% it would have been a major victory for the Dems and a massive defeat for the Republicans and an indicator of their impending doom. But Busby lost. Busby didn't just lose, she failed to break the 46% mark, a mark she hit in the primary a few weeks ago - so she actually LOST ground in the mean time.

Sure, the GOP needs to be concerned because Congress seems to have gone out of its way in the last three months to try and tick off their base. The fact is that Bilbray won a victory against a seasoned, well financed, well known opponent who was running against a GOP candidate in a district where the former GOP representative went to jail on corruption charges - if the Dems can't win that seat, they won't win the house. Period. And that's the story that NPR and the MSM won't be talking about.

pj,
before I made it down to this entry, I posted in an earlier one that 4% of the vote went to a candidate that thought Bilbray was too liberal. The Dem candidated received about the same amount of support as her predecessor.

The Dems have no chance to win the House (and the notion that they can win the Senate is truly laughable) because they are a party in serious trouble. They have no platform to use to nationalize things as in 1994, and their insane base wants them to run solely on Out Of Iraq Now, a sure loser. So what's going to happen? Well, they're going to run on nothing, have no success, and the psychotic base is going to become even more insane. Maybe they'll be crazy enough to blow the party up. It will be fun to watch.

It'll be fun to watch unless the Republicans blow themselves up like they did in 1992. I know it's just midterm elections, but HRC is probably banking on it for 2008.

jd:

The real fun will be if the GOP wins 2 or 3 more Senate seats and holds even in the House. The Democratic primary season will be like watching hungry cannibals who are holding sharp knives. While wearing bibs. It will not be like 2004 at all.

The Dems will have vulnerable seats to defend in 2008 as well - Tim Johnson in SD, Landrieu in LA, and I think Lautenberg has to run again in NJ. By then Corzine will have trashed the state even more and the GOP might be able to compete for that seat as well.