If you’re looking for detailed election commentary, look elsewhere.

But in the meantime: have some pretty graphs looking at the 2006 midterms in historical perspective. I need to add the 2006 numbers, but my brain is barely functioning at the moment. But in a nutshell:

• The GOP losses at midterm are remarkably consistent with the historical expectations for presidential parties.
• However, party control will change in the 110th Congress in both chambers due to the Republicans’ failure to build a cushion—the Democrats could afford to take 20–30 seat losses on average with Democratic presidents, because they could retain the majority and regain the losses in presidential years, while the Republicans did not have that luxury.

If you buy that the GOP is a natural minority party that only occasionally will muster majorities, there is a reasonable case to be made that the GOP made no strategic errors in this election or in the process of building its slim majority. However, if the GOP does have the potential to be a majority party in the electorate over the long haul, its failure to use the redistricting process to create enough safe GOP seats is a strategic blunder.

Maybe when I’m more coherent tomorrow I’ll have some thoughts on a remedy for the GOP that would revive the “strange bedfellows” alliance that got them the House in 1994: an alliance with minority interest groups to gerrymander House seats for both at the expense of white Democrats, only this time looking to another mutually-beneficial solution than gerrymandering.