So, we in the United States had another Erection...er...Election Day yesterday. It's a necessary ritual, and in some cases honestly instructive and interesting. But really, this year's election produced no surpises, and while some people will be looking for any signs -- any signs whatsoever -- for hope that our long national nightmare is nearing an end, this election really didn't provide it.

On the off-chance that anyone from outside the US is reading this, this year was what we call an 'off-year' election, meaning that it was focused entirely on local and state business, rather than federal business. School board elections, local tax referrenda, mayor and city council races, ballot initiatives, a couple state governor races, that sort of thing.

It's the sort of Election Day that pundits hope will give some guidance toward the next federally-focused election -- in this case, November 2006, when all of the US House of Represenatives and 1/3d of the US Senate go back to the polls. Specifically, there are an awful lot of people hoping for signs that the next great political revolution is coming and that the Bush Doctrine of cronyism, executive privilege, warmongering and lying about it, is about to be trashed out by the American Electorate.

For those of you wondering just how much hope there is for this sort of thing, I refer you to this editorial from 8 November 2005's New York Times, in which we have the interesting specatcle of one of the world's most respectable newspapers coming right out and saying that the king and his cronies are finks. No beating around the bush (pun intended) here. They're all but openly calling for Bush and everyone associated with him to resign. They know it won't happen, but the gauntlet was thrown.

The point here is that, for good or ill, no such signals got sent by yesterday's election.

[Click 'read more' below to, well, read more :-D ]

Some commentators will undoubtedly be playing up the Democratic victory in the New Jersey and Virginia state houses, but there's really nothing to these. New Jersey's governorship tends to all-but-alternate between the parties. Corzine was favoured by 10-12 points all along, and despite one of the nastiest, ugliest, dirtiest campaigns for any office ever, he won by 10 points. This was not a statement about federal politics. This was New Jerseyans having already decided which crook they liked better, and he happened to be a Democrat. As for Virginia, let us not forget that the Democrats used to own the south for decades, and that recent strong showings by Republicans are a novelty.

A Democrat won for mayor of Detroit, but that hardly makes any difference, since no Republicans bothered to run. Same in Minneapolis.

In Saint Paul, voters soundly trounced DFL Mayor Randy Kelly (the Democrat party in Minnesota is actually the Democratic Farmers and Laborers party, a union of previously separate entities) as a revolt against his endorsement of President Bush. This would seem to be the sort of sign pundits are looking for, except that it's been expected since Kelly made his endorsement, by just about eveyrone except Kelly. Kelly's endorsement was an act of political cowardice (in that he believed that to endorse John Kerry would have been to guarantee four years of Saint Paul being sent to the back of the Congressional pork-barrel queue). He probably saw it as an act of political bravery (defying party lines to do what he thought was best for his city). He never stood a chance. His opponent was another DFLer. Like Detroit, there was no point in a Republican even bothering to run.

Michael Bloomberg, a Republican, handily won a second term in New York. Again, no surprise there. He's a good mayor. There are Democrats in New York who which the City were more like Detroit, where Republicans don't even feel like they have much right to run for office. They're outraged not only that Bloomberg won, twice, and got voted for by lots of Democrats (because he couldn't win otherwise in that town), but that he was even a candidate. But win he did, and there was, again, never any real question.

California's ballot initiatives all failed, which is a blow to Arnold, certainly, but it's not much of an indicator of how the nation will break really. Arnold is an anomaly in his state, and he knows it. His election was not the result of some conservative sea change in California politics. It was purely an expression of popular anger at an incompetent governor, with Arnold presented as an unlikely candidate for the lesser evil. Jesse Ventura got more of a break here in Minnesota because he wasn't part of either political machine, and it took three years before both parties decided the hated him more than they hated each other. Arnold never had that honeymoon, because the Democrats always hated him, and they control the rest of the government.

Kansas established Intelligent Design. No surprise there. No hope there.

Texas outlawed anything but straight marriage. Well, actually, as many commentators have already noted, they outlawed marriage, but we all know it will never get interpreted that way in reality. No surprise there. No hope there.

In the end, this election was a wash. With the exception of Saint Paul, it broke almost entirely on local issues that are unlikely to have much play in the 2006 Congresscritter elections. Folks hoping to see a significant change in the tenor of the Federal Legislature are going to have to work for it.