Carol Shea-Porter Beats Frank Guinta

In what seems to be a great night for Democrats, Carol Shea-Porter beat incumbent Frank Guinta in the race for New Hampshire's first congressional district seat.   Congratulations to Carol Shea-Porter.   Thank you for bringing honor back to New Hampshire.

Thanks so much to all the volunteers and staff for Carol Shea-Porter who worked so hard.   Thanks to your donors.

Thank you to CREDO, who put up signs and made lots of calls and knocked on lots of doors and did some fun visibility.  From what I could tell they had nothing to do with Carol Shea-Porter or her campaign staff.   Their goal was to defeat their Tea Party Ten, and Frank Guinta was one of them. (I have affection for CREDO going back to my days as a Working Assets Long Distance customer in the 80s.  The bills came on brownish recycled paper.   I probably still have them in a box somewhere.)

Thanks to the incredible Obama campaign, which got out the vote in a huge way.   They brought UNH students to the polling place by the bus load and had a bunch of lawyers in suits standing by to make sure they were registered according to the rules.   Foster's reports over 3,000 new voters were registered in Durham on election day.

And especially, thanks to all the voters who, despite some obstacles, made the effort to vote.   Students don't generally care too much about state politics, but they notice when one party tries to take away their vote, and they got out in big numbers yesterday.   The students are in Democratic districts anyway, so their votes for state rep and state senate don't really make a difference.  But they sure can help in the statewide races for president, governor, US senator and US rep.   They probably have Democratic pull on the countywide races and statewide ballot questions.  No wonder Speaker O'Brien wants to disenfranchise them.

A huge thanks to my readers, both here and of my comments and posts around the web.   I have no idea if I moved any votes out there, but I feel good I tried.   I started putting links to here in my comments, mostly on Patch, which drove traffic here and also let me get an idea of how many people are reading a particular comment.   Thanks for clicking on them.

And thanks to Frank Guinta, who always maintained a civil manner that distinguished him from his Tea Party peers.   I once heard him say he tries to act as if his children might be watching him on TV, which was a nice sentiment.

Hopefully Rep. Guinta won't just run in the off year again.   We have this idea the the electorate ricochets from backlash to backlash in these two year cycles.   But it's just that a much smaller turnout in the off years lets the enthusiastic groups that always vote (mostly conservative lately) have more power.

I'll keep NotIntaGuinta.org around in case we need it again.  Time to sleep for a long time.