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But I'm not sure it was just the 'R' people were voting against in these races. Remember how Brown played up his anti-conservative as well as anti-Republican credentials. I don't think Strickland's and Brown's victories would have been as sweeping as they were if it were simply an anti-Republican vote. I remember reading on election night posts talking about how poorly Blackwell was doing in normally strong Republican districts. If there wasn't an anti-conservative component to the dynamic to reinforce the anti-Republican trend, I don't think that would have been the case. There were many races where voters were showing both non-conservative and non-Republican tendencies. If we write this clobbering off as simply an anti-party vote, we may be placing ourselves at greater risk than we would otherwise.

The liberals and 'Rats are going to be energized for '08 in a manner that hasn't been seen for awhile. They're going to take this momentum they've built and use it to dump more conservatives and/or Republicans the next time around simply because they'll be reading the message that we're overlooking. I know this is a message we don't want to hear, especially on FR, and the natural, understandable tendency will be to blow it off and try to spin it away (as well as kill the messenger with name-calling and taunts like "Defeatist!", or "Go back to DU!"). But, I'm telling you, if we insist on trying to fool ourselves yet again, we're going to be going down the same path, or worse, in '08.