NY-20: It's CONGRESSMAN Murphy As Tedisco Dances Off The Political Stage With An Overdue Concession Speech! And Norm Coleman?

"Norm, be a mensch for a change and think about Minnesota"

Well no word from Coleman other than the sheer joy of forcing Minnesota to get by on only one senator for at least another month or two. But ex-Republican Assembly leader Jim Tedisco just conceded that he lost the congressional race to replace Kirstin Gillibrand.

If the Republicans can't win in a district with 70,000 more registered Republican voters than Democrats, where can they win? (I mean outside the Old Confederacy?) Ironically, they might have won this one; Tedisco started with an "insurmountable" lead. Murphy, the Democrat, is some Blue Dog from Missouri who should have proven no match for Tedisco. But then Michael Steele and the RNC moved in and decided to make it a referendum on Obama. That was a bad idea. Obama is popular in the district and people like his approach and they are angry with Republicans who are being obstructionist. And that's how they painted their own candidate-- as someone who would join Boehner and Cantor and Ryan in holding Obama back. It cooked his goose. Congressional Republicans have an approval rating historically low and if you take The South out of the numbers, the approval rating for GOP leaders is so low that it can't be accurately measured.

The recount was a total bust. The more votes that got counted the further back Tedisco fell. In the end Murphy won with 401 votes. In his victory statement Murphy acknowledged that at least part of the reason he won is because of the help he got from President Obama and Vice President Biden. He said he "can’t wait to start working with the President to deliver the urgently needed recovery funds to Upstate New York." I hope that means he'll be working with Obama to pass the change agenda, not working with the Republicans-- like John Barrow, who Obama helped win in Georgia and who has consistently worked against the changes Obama promised to bring America.

Interestingly enough, a poll completed for the SEIU shows that President Obama is more popular than Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania among Republicans. Of course Specter's long overdue political demise is a special case, but it is clear that everyone outside of the Mormon theocracy and the deepest, darkest bowels of most of the former slave-holding states, voters want to see Obama succeed and resent mindless lockstep obstructionism from Republicans. Democrats feeding into this are going to get burned. If I were Blanche Lincoln and Evan Bayh I'd be trying to behave less like a Republican and more like a Democrat.

We'll let you know if Michael Steele resigns or gets fired today (or NY State GOP chairman Joseph Mondello for that matter) or they wait a little while and think of some reasonable excuse to get rid of the two of them.