And to think, my American politics lecturer said that mid-term elections were always boring.

The House of Reps is in Democrat hands for the first time in ages, the speculators are saying the Senate will fall the same way, and voter turnout is up by a reasonable amount. Wow.

Even more interesting than party control in Congress are the referenda about abortion and gay marriage that were attached to the vote in some states. While some of the results were thoroughly predictable, there were quite a few that caught me by surprise, such as in Arizona. Among the flood of blog posts about the election, Pandagon does a good job covering these issues (also pointing to how a Republican “oh no a woman will be Speaker!” campaign backfired).

So now that it’s clear that G.W. (or maybe just the protracted Iraq war) is unpopular among a good chunk of the folks who voted this time around, I wonder if that sentiment will be sustained up until the next presidential election? Or maybe this result is just because a greater proportion of left-leaning Americans got fired up enough to vote in this “small” election, and come 2008 the vote for president will lure out an equivalent number of Republican supporters …