Just got home from vote count-observing in Orange County, California, which was an educational, if excruciatingly boring, experience.
Great news coming out of one of the bastions of the national conservative movement, the very place where Reagan Republicanism was spawned and incubated.
As of the last count, Democrat Lou Correa is up by 783 votes in his bid for State Senate. That makes it almost certain that he will defeat Republican Lynn Daucher. If this were a federal race, the networks would be calling it right now.
For those of you not from California, this race has been at the razor's edge from Election Day until this very moment. This, you may recall, is the county (if not the race) in which a Republican Congressional candidate was implicated in a scandal involving a letter that went out to 14,000 Latino registered voters telling them that if they're immigrants they can be imprisoned for voting, and in which almost a dozen Republican operatives were indicted for re-registering Democrats as Republicans without their knowledge.
At the County Registrar of Voters where the vote count is taking place, the Republican observers, I'm told, had their "You all did a great job, we'll get it next time" huddle about an hour ago, and are probably packing their hotel rooms and getting ready to fly back to Sacramento about now.
Great to know that the national Democratic groundswell lifted even the bedrock of grassroots Republican power.