And whilst a defeat, it is hardly a "bloodbath".
Right. A Dem majority of 1-4 seats in the House is not a bloodbath. If the Senate holds, and it should, they can stop anything coming from the House and Bush might actually grow a spine and veto if he has to. No way to overturn those at this stage unless the GOP get even wimpier.
The Dems don't have the guts to try and unfund the war ala Vietnam. They'll have way too many people angry at them and we can create a new voter bloc buzzword: pissed off military moms!
Frankly, the GOP did a lot of this to themselves. The ground game obviously wasn't as good as they thought even though turnout in areas was pretty high. Also, a lot of GOP candidates ran lousy campaigns like Allen. Corker was awful but should pull it out. Pennsylvania is a Dem state and they did vote against Bush but Santorum also was warned by the "conservatives" that he would pay for backing Specter and that might have played a role.
Face it...voters wanted "change" regardless of why or even if they truly understand the issues. The economy is good but they don't care. They care more about TV shows.
I doubt Iraq really dragged the ticket down and without really good exit polls we'll never know if the GOP base stayed home in some states but overall voting numbers will tell us something.
But considering history it's not as bad as the average losses for the party in power in a 6th year for a president except Clinton had his 6th year losses in his fourth year.