Conservatives & Republicans

Wednesday afternoon, supposed polling genius Nate Silver tweeted that "Turnout was down from 2010 in almost every state." Silver's readers and clients had better hope that Silver is usually better at counting — and analysis (HT Twitchy):

On Tuesday, former Saratoga Springs, Utah mayor Mia Love become the first black Republican woman in Congress. Politico, overdoing its apparent grief at Tuesday's national results, is acting as if Love won in a walkaway. Alex Isenstadt's pity party post-election report on the Democrats' substantial House losses claimed that Love's was a seat "Democrats conceded long before Election Day." The…

On Wednesday's Anderson Cooper 360, CNN's Dana Bash pointed the finger at Senator Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans for the "dysfunction" in the federal government. Bash asserted that "Democrats probably rightly have a complaint that the reason the Senate isn't working is because Mitch McConnell and the opposition made it so."

The Esquire blogger contends that the GOP won the upper chamber because hard-right Tea Party candidates masqueraded as traditional conservatives.  "What the Republicans managed to do was to teach the Tea Party to wear shoes, mind its language, and use the proper knife while amputating the social safety net."

On Thursday's NBC Today, White House correspondent Chris Jansing blamed Republicans for upsetting the supposed conciliatory mood in Washington following Tuesday's GOP midterm wave: "Well, what looked to be at least a temporary truce between President Obama and Congress lasted less than 24 hours. Republican leaders now say the focus of the new Congress will be to repeal the President's signature…

TVNewser's Mark Joyella spotlighted in a Wednesday post how MSNBC managing editor Ilyas Kirmanireacted with disgust to the reelection of the Sunshine State's attorney general, Republican Pam Bondi. Kirmani posted the word, "Gross," on a Facebook thread started by Miguel Fernandez, an executive producer at CBS's Miami affiliate, WFOR.

During MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes on Wednesday night, the show’s panel fretted over the droves of Democrats that ran campaigns against President Barack Obama in the midterm elections (instead of embracing him) and that led The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel to wonder if such a tactic affected turnout among certain demographics due to “the dissing of a President.”  Vanden Heuvel first …

Participation in youth football is down. As economic ignoramus David Leonhardt of the New York Times explained yesterday at the paper's "The Upshot" blog, this is particularly pronounced in "the highly educated Democratic-leaning areas of major metropolitan areas." Yesterday, as he was interviewing Leonhardt about his post on NPR's "The Takeaway" program, John Hockenberry asked, "Are you…

"So yes, we got spanked," wrote Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas. He bitterly claimed that many Latinos and Asians sat out the elections to punish Obama for wimping out on an executive order forcing immigration reform.

On Wednesday's CBS This Morning, co-host Norah O'Donnell fretted that the newly elected Republican Congress would dare to pass legislation: "If you look at a number of these new senators, they're quite conservative. Why wouldn't they go along with what Rand Paul has said? They're gonna send bills up to the President, as he told Charlie Rose last night, 'We're going to keep sending bills up to the…

MSNBC and CNN zeroed in on the supposed radical right-wing views of Senator-elect Joni Ernst during their live election night coverage. Just after 2 am Eastern on Wednesday, MSNBC's Luke Russert played up how Ernst was "able to have these rather extreme Tea Party views; and then, moderate them closer to the election." Just over two hours earlier, CNN's Dana Bash gave the Iowa Republican a similar…

Following the big Republican wave in Tuesday's midterm election, on Wednesday, Today co-host Matt Lauer immediately demanded that the new GOP-controlled Congress capitulate to President Obama: "Republicans have control of the House and Senate for the first time in eight years....In January, voters are gonna say,'What are you going to do with the power?' Opposing the President's policy is not a…

Early Wednesday morning, liberal CNN political commentator Cornell Belcher groaned during CNN’s midterms elections coverage that the Democratic Party’s top campaigner in President Barack Obama was unable to defend attacks against his record and help Democrats on the campaign trailer because he “was basically locked away in the White House."

During NBC News’s 10:00 p.m. Eastern midterms elections coverage, NBC News political director and Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd emphasized that the 2014 midterms were not a Republican wave, but changed his mind within the hour to stating the possibility that it may indeed be a GOP wave. At 10:04 p.m., Todd told Brian Williams in response to his request to walk through “how the Republican…