Elephant graveyard watch
If at the national level, Republicans were given a “thumping”, what would you call what happened to New York State Republicans? They lost the four statewide races by an average of 28 points and the party has already kicked Stephen Minarik to the curb. It looks like the numbers are against them (of course, numbers have a well-known liberal bias, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert)
“This was a rough year to be a Republican,†said Representative Peter T. King, who fended off a formidable Democratic challenge on Long Island. “But I’m just wondering if the demographics have changed so much. There is no Republican base anymore.â€
(snip)Republicans have slipped to less than 27 percent of the state’s 11 million registered voters and Democrats outnumber them by nearly 2.4 million. The suburbs shifted hugely — the county executives of Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk are Democrats — and even reliably Republican counties upstate, some of them crippled by declining population, can no longer be taken for granted.
Old Senator Pothole weighs in with what we’ve been saying about the State Senate:
“The party’s not dead, but if the Democrats take the Senate out, it will be pretty close to dead,†said Alfonse M. D’Amato, a former United States senator.
And don’t think for a minute we’ll be able to redistrict as long as the GOP does control the State Senate:
William T. Cunningham, who has advised candidates and elected officials from both parties, warned that Senate Republicans could not afford to cede their veto over redistricting to a nonpartisan commission, despite pressure for reform.
“That will hurt them in the public perception,†he said, “but politically it’s a mandate or their party may be in the wilderness for many years to come.â€
Update: btp here. This statistic from the article was interesting to me as well:
In 2002, there were 160,000 more enrolled Republicans than Democrats outside New York City. By last week, their edge had shriveled to fewer than 3,000.
I assume Dems in the NYC exurbs are counterbalancing the GOP enrollment in our parts. So Dem advantage shows up more in the statewide races than locally. For now. 
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