Post-Election Jitters

[kniedzw]

Thankfully, Nate Silver's predictions for the presidential race on fivethirtyeight were largely accurate. The biggest of my nightmares - another Republican administration - proved unfounded.

Unfortunately, there were four races / issues other than the presidency that I cared about, two of which appear to have gone the opposite direction I'd hoped, and two which are still up in the air.

1. Michele Bachmann held on to Minnesota's Sixth congressional district, despite channelling Joe McCarthy on MSNBC's Hardball.
2. California's Proposition 8, amending the state constitution to make same-sex marriages illegal. ...which is doubly hard to take, given that Proposition 4, which would have required parental consent for minors to have abortions (and is thus arguably an even more bitter pill for social conservatives to swallow) failed.

The two undecided contests:

1. Al Franken vs. Norm Coleman for the U. S. Senate seat that's up for grabs there. The official results had Franken trailing by less than 500 votes out of approximately three million, well under the half-percent margin that triggers an automatic recount.
2. Darcy Burner, whose candidacy I followed closely partly because her politics are very close to mine, partly because she's a giant geek, and partly because she, like me, was a co-chair of HRSFA. Her race is neck-and-neck, and her district is apparently stupidly slow at counting their votes.

So as a result of all this, I'm still jittery. Not nearly as much as I was earlier this week, when my body was literally rebelling and figuratively falling to pieces, with sprained muscles all over the place, but still nervous and somewhat mellow.

That said, I point you at my friend Rob MacDougall, who you should all be reading anyhow. I really dig his (Canadian) view on the presidential election.