THIS is what democracy looks like

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A Very Good Night for Democrats

Democrats had a very good election night on Tuesday.

Their cherished causes prevailed, they kept their statehouses, and they saw one of the Tea Party’s biggest champions unexpectedly lose a recall election in Arizona.

Though it’s easy to read too much into the sparse data points of an off-year election, liberals were jubilant as the returns came rolling in Tuesday night, and the trend, in nearly every contested race across the country, was too obvious to ignore:

* The Republican governor and legislature in Ohio saw their attempt to roll back collective bargaining for public employees soundly repudiated by the state’s voters.

* Mississippi’s “personhood’ initiative, which would have defined a fertilized human egg as a person and created a new front in the abortion wars, went down to defeat by a wide margin, despite leading in pre-election polls.

* Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear sailed to reelection — though widely anticipated, his win showed Democrats can still prevail in red states with good candidates and campaign strategy.

* Russell Pearce, Arizona’s state Senate president and the author of that state’s controversial anti-illegal immigration law, lost a recall election to a Republican challenger who portrayed Pearce as an extremist.

Democrats also hung onto the Iowa state Senate and appeared poised to at least hold the GOP to a tie in the Virginia Senate. As of late Tuesday, Virginia Republicans had gained one seat and led by less than 100 votes in another, but needed to gain three to take over the chamber. And in Maine, voters threw out the legislature’s attempt to tighten voting restrictions.

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Every so often we have an election. The winners are jubilant. The losers suck it up and wait until next time.

The country swings to the left, then back to the right, then back to the left again, then back to the right again, over and over. The world doesn’t end.

In 1932 the Democrats won the White House and took control of both houses of Congress. Franklin Roosevelt led the nation out of the Great Depression and through most of WWII.

In 1952, exactly twenty years later, the Republicans won the White House and took control of both houses of Congress.

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