End-the-war energy fueled the success of "Bring Our Troops Home" ballot initiatives in communities throughout Wisconsin, Illinois and Massachusetts on Tuesday.

In Wisconsin, voters supported the initiatives by a margin of more than two-to-one. In Illinois, even counties that were won by George Bush in 2004 voted to bring the troops home. And in Massachusetts, 36 legislative districts – representing 139 communities – voted on a resolution to "end the war in Iraq immediately and bring all United States military forces home." All 36 districts voted in the affirmative.

Not only did voters support explicit peace initiatives such as these, but they also came out in droves to vote for candidates who promised to bring our troops home.

"I don't think the voters could make themselves any clearer," said Steve Burns, Program Coordinator for the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice. "The voters get it – they know that the best thing for the American people and the Iraqi people is for us to bring our troops home from their country. Now it's time for our government to listen."

But getting our governent to listen will be no mean feat.

Tom Hayden suggests in a post today, "The Administration will continue the conflict into the 2008 election year…. The peace movement therefore needs to gear up for the 2008 elections, by establishing anti-war coalitions that no candidate can avoid in the primary states. The first four states – Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina – have large peace-and-justice constituencies."

Despite the clear verdict on Tuesday – that democrats, independents and many republicans want this disastrous war to end --and end now – many would-be leaders in both parties will shrink from the challenge of ending the bloodletting.

When these would-be leaders stand down, we must continue to stand up for peace.

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Few people thought there would be a competitive race in Iowa's 2nd Congressional district, including myself--and I grew up there!

The local Congressman, Jim Leach, was an old-school liberal Republican who'd been in Congress since 1976 and opposed the war in Iraq. If anyone could withstand a Democratic wave, it would be Leach. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) took a poll a week before the election and found Leach comfortably ahead.

But his challenger, Dave Loebsack, an antiwar international relations professor at Cornell College in Cedar Rapids, blanketed Eastern Iowa with signs reading "Had Enough?" When the results came in, Loebsack won by 6,000 votes. Hawkeye Democrats also picked up an additional Congressional seats in the 1st District, both state Houses and the Governor's mansion.

Elsewhere in the Midwest, former Republican pharmaceutical exec Nancy Boyda knocked off GOP Rep. Jim Ryun in another shocker in Kansas. Nobody believed Ryun was in trouble until the DCCC launched an ad against him a week before the election. The surprise attack worked, with Boyda winning by 4 percent.

Other upsets came in states like New Hampshire, where two antiwar Democrats knocked off Republican incumbents, in Kentucky, where liberal newspaper publisher John Yarmurth bested Anne Northup and in Pennsylvania, where rising Republican star Melissa Hart lost by ten thousand votes to 38-year-old healthcare exec Jason Altmire in Pittsburgh.

President Bush got one thing right about the elections. The "prognosticators" aren't always right.

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By a large margin -- sixteen percentage points --Michigan voters have rejected some forms of affirmative action. State Proposal 2 forbids the use of race and gender preferences in university admissions as well as in government hiring and contracting. It was a victory for the angry white people behind the cleverly-named Michigan Civil Rights Initiative(MCRI), headed by Jennifer Gratz, who after being rejected from the University of Michigan in 1995, cried reverse discrimination and sued the school. The U.S. Supreme Court took her side, in part, striking down the racial preference programs at Michigan's undergraduate school of Literature, Science and the Arts (my alma mater, by the way), but in a related case, the court allowed the use of race in admissions to the UM Law School. Hence Jennifer Gratz's continued campaign. You may wonder why this doesn't backfire -- why Gratz doesn't come off as a whiny, sore loser who should get over her college rejections just as the rest of us have done. But the answer lies in the hostility that so many white people have to affirmative action. This really is a tough issue to organize around .

There has also been rampant fraud in the MCRI campaign. According to an opinion by federal judge Arthur Tarnow last August, after a suit brought by pro-affirmative action group By Any Means Necessary alleging dirty tricks in the petition drive, that "the evidence overwhelmingly favors a finding that the MCRI defendants engaged in voter fraud." Voters say they were told that the petition would defend affirmative action. That's shameful and the MCRI shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. But the huge margin of Proposal 2's victory shows that a whole lot of white Michiganders don't support affirmative action. I'm just guessing, but maybe quoting Malcolm X isn't the best way to convince them.

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Who says elections don't change anything?

On the day after Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and, by all indications, the Senate, word comes that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is going to leave the position he has held since the Bush administration took office in 2001.

Just a week ago, Bush said he wanted Rumsfeld and the Vice President to serve out the last two years of the second term.

The voters said different.

They elected Democrats who made Rumsfeld the poster boy for many of the Administration's failures in Iraq. And those Republicans who survived in close races often joined Democrats in calling for Rumsfeld's resignation.

The question now is whether Rumsfeld's exit will mean anything. He carried out policies favored by President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Has the President decided simply to get rid of one man with a bad reputation, or is he thinking about changing course now that the American people have made clear their position?

The answer is likely to come in the confirmation hearings for the man Bush is proposing as a replacement for Rumsfeld: former CIA director Robert Gates. The Gates confirmation hearings should be the most significant that the Senate has held in a long time. The fact that Gates is a member of the bipartisan committee that is studying the Iraq War -- a committee headed by former Secretary of State James Baker and former US Representative Lee Hamilton -- could make him a transition figure if the committee comes in with a recommendation of a policy shift.

But don't bet the farm on that happening quickly.

Bush defended his Iraq policies at an early-afternoon press conference. The President made conciliatory noises, but he indicated that, while "the elections have changed many things in Washington," he did not sound like he was preparing an exit strategy.

The Democrats, with their more recent experience of popular sentiment, ought to be doing so.

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The wave -- and make no mistake, it's a global one -- has just crashed on our shores, soaking our imperial masters. It's a sight for sore eyes. As all of us look ahead, here are five "benchmark" questions to ask when considering the possibilities of the final two years of the Bush Administration's wrecking-ball regime:

Will Iraq Go Away? The political maneuvering in Washington and Baghdad over the chaos in Iraq was only awaiting election results to intensify. Desperate call-ups of more Reserves and National Guards will go out soon. Negotiations with Sunni rebels, coup rumors against the Maliki government, various plans from James Baker's Iraq Study Group and Congressional others will undoubtedly be swirling. Yesterday's plebiscite (and exit polls) held an Iraqi message. It can't simply be ignored. But nothing will matter, when it comes to changing the situation for the better in that country, without a genuine commitment to American withdrawal, which is not likely to be forthcoming from this President and his advisers anytime soon. So expect Iraq to remain a horrifying, bloody, devolving fixture of the final two years of the Bush Administration. It will not go away. Bush (and Rove) will surely try to enmesh Congressional Democrats in their disaster of a war. Imagine how bad it could be if -- with, potentially, years to go -- the argument over who "lost" Iraq has already begun.

Is an Attack on Iran on the Agenda? Despite all the alarums on the political Internet about a pre-election air assault on Iran, this was never in the cards. Even the hint of an attack on Iranian "nuclear facilities" (which would certainly turn into an attempt to "decapitate" the Iranian regime from the air) would send oil prices soaring. The Republicans were never going to run an election on oil selling at $120-$150 a barrel. This will be no less true of election year 2008. If Iran is to be a target, 2007 will be the year. So watch for the pressures to ratchet up on this one early next year. This is madness, of course. Such an attack would almost certainly throw the Middle East into utter chaos, send oil prices through the roof, possibly wreck the global economy, cause serious damage in Iran, not fell the Iranian government and put US troops in neighboring Iraq in perilous danger. Given the Administration's record, however, all this is practically an argument for launching such an attack. (And don't count on the military to stop it, either. They're unlikely to do so.) Failing empires have certainly been known to lash out. As neocon writer Robert Kagan put the matter recently in a Washington Post op-ed, "Indeed, the preferred European scenario [of a Democratic Congressional victory] -- 'Bush hobbled' -- is less likely than the alternative: 'Bush unbound.' Neither the president nor his vice president is running for office in 2008. That is what usually prevents high-stakes foreign policy moves in the last two years of a president's term." So when you think about Iran, think of Bush unbound.

Are the Democrats a Party? If Rovian plans for a Republican Party ensconced in Washington for eons to come now look to be in tatters, the Democrats have retaken the House (and possibly the Senate) largely as the not-GOP Party. The election may leave the Republicans with a dead presidency and leading candidate for 2008 Senator John McCain is wedded to possibly the least popular war in our history; the Democrats may arrive victorious but without the genuine desire for a mandate to lead. Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats in recent years were not, in any normal sense, a party at all. They were perhaps a coalition of four or five or six parties (some trailing hordes of pundits and consultants, but without a base). Now, with the recruitment of so many ex-Republicans and conservatives into their House and Senate ranks, they may be a coalition of six or seven parties. Who knows? They have a genuine mandate on Iraq and a mandate on oversight. What they will actually do -- what they are capable of doing (other than the normal money-, career- and earmark-trading in Washington) -- remains to be seen. They will be weak, the surroundings fierce and strong.

Will We Be Ruled by the Facts on the Ground? In certain ways, it may hardly matter what happens to which party. By now -- and this perhaps represents another kind of triumph for the Bush Administration -- the facts on the ground are so powerful that it would be hard for any party to know where to begin. Will we, for instance, ever be without a second Defense Department, the so-called Department of Homeland Security, now that a burgeoning $59 billion per year private "security" industry, with all its interests and its herd of lobbyists in Washington, has grown up around it? Not likely in any of our lifetimes. Will an ascendant Democratic Party dare put on a diet the ravenous Pentagon, which now feeds off two budgets -- its regular, near-half-trillion-dollar Defense budget and a regularized series of multibillion-dollar "emergency" supplemental appropriations, which are now part of life on the Hill? What this means is that the defense budget is not what we wage our wars with or pay for a variety of black operations (not to speak of earmarks galore) with. Don't bet your bottom dollar that this will get better anytime soon, either. In fact, I have my doubts that a Democratic Congress with a Democratic President in tow could even do something modestly small like shutting down Guantánamo, no less begin to deal with the empire of bases that undergirds our failing Outlaw Empire abroad. So, from time to time, take your eyes off what passes for politics and check out the facts on the ground. That way you'll have a better sense of where our world is actually heading.

What Will Happen When the Commander-in-Chief Presidency and the Unitary Executive Theory Meets What's Left of the Republic? The answer on this one is relatively uncomplicated and less than three months away from being in our faces; it's the Mother of All Constitutional Crises. But writing that now, and living with the reality then, are two quite different things. So when the new Congress arrives in January, buckle your seat belts and wait for the first requests for oversight information from some investigative committee; wait for the first subpoenas to meet Cheney's men in some dark hallway. Wait for this crew to feel the "shackles" and react. Wait for this to hit the courts -- even a Supreme Court that, despite the President's best efforts, is probably still at least one justice short when it comes to unitary-executive-theory supporters. I wouldn't even want to offer a prediction on this one. But a year down the line, anything is possible.

So we've finally had our plebiscite, however covert, on the failing Outlaw Empire of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But what about their autocratic inclinations at home? How will that play out?

Will it be: All hail, Caesar, we who are about to dive back into prime-time programming?

Or will it be: All the political hail is about to pelt our junior caesars as we dive back into prime-time programming? Stay tuned.

For more on these matters, see "Outlaw Empire Meets the Wave" at Tomdispatch.com.

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Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel say they are happy to share credit for the Democrats' electoral success, but not everyone in the party is feeling as generous. Progressive bloggers, who often promote and criticize the Democratic Party with equal vigor, want their props. MyDD blogger Chris Bowers concluded that netroots activists were crucial to victory--long before the votes were counted. Last month, he wrote that "most, if not all, of the significant improvements Democrats have made from 2004 to 2006 were generated primarily within the netroots and the progressive movement." Yet the election results suggest the netroots' scorecard is decidedly mixed.

The blogs' most famous candidate and top fundraising beneficiary, Ned Lamont, lost his bid to unseat Senator Joe Lieberman. One of the campaign's senior advisors, former Clinton White House counsel Lanny Davis, said the victory "proved the blogosphere is all wind and very little sail." Bloggers tell a different story: the unusual, three-way race should not be judged strictly by who won but also by its success in helping "make Iraq the center of this electoral season," as Joel Silberman wrote on FireDogLake. If Lamont's loss is counted as a symbolic effort that beat expectations, his performance fits a pattern. Many of the netroots' most popular House candidates beat expectations this week, but ultimately lost.

While there is no single, authoritative list of netroots candidates, ActBlue.com, a Democratic fundraising clearinghouse, lists the candidates nominated by top blogs and ranks them by total donors. Looking at their top 20 Democratic House candidates, so far ten have lost, three have won and the other seven are in races that are still too close too call at the time of writing. The netroots' lost races include national names, such as FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley in Minnesota and New York's Eric Massa, the popular former aide to Gen. Wesley Clark. Winners include attorney Paul Hodes in New Hampshire and two veterans, Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania and Tim Walz in Minnesota. (Bloggers also provided critical early support to long-shot Senate challengers Jon Tester and Jim Webb, who were locked in races that were also still too close to call on Wednesday morning.)

Yet regardless of the remaining results and recounts, the fact is the netroots' favorite candidates did not perform as well as the Democrats targeted by party leaders. And they were never supposed to. Many of the bloggers' picks were aggressive Democrats in long-shot districts who were neglected by the Beltway establishment. There is no doubt that bloggers leveraged money and political buzz to make races more competitive and put Republicans on the defensive, but it was simply not the decisive factor in the elections

John Aravosis writes AmericaBlog, which raised over $100,000 from about 1,900 activists this cycle, but on election night he resisted attempts to measure the netroots' impact. "It's too hard to define who did what. We could have defined quite easily that John Kerry lost it for us if he had not shut up after two days, but to know whether blogs [had a bigger effect than] unions is like saying was Rahm Emanuel more effective than Howard Dean? I don't know," he told The Nation. That sentiment is probably shared by many netroots activists, who are more focused on the Democratic victory than parceling out credit.

The more interesting question, Aravosis argues, is how will the blogs adapt to working with "Democrats who actually have power." In the short term, he hopes to hammer home the message that the election proves Americans think conservatism is "inherently wrong," rally support for voting rights reform, and support the House Democrats' new agenda. Other bloggers are more interested in crafting the agenda: Arianna Huffington's top blog on election night chastised Howard Dean for backtracking so far on Iraq in a CNN interview that he sounded like he was pitching "the president's plan."

Mr. Davis, a self-described "liberal Democrat" who repeatedly tangled with bloggers during his work on behalf of Joe Lieberman, said on election night that the blogosphere must evolve in order to have a broader impact. "If the blogosphere is to have an impact on changing the country as opposed to talking to each other, the Lamont campaign is a lesson in exactly what not to do. They came out of a primary and they continued to wage a primary," he said, "but they weren't talking to unaffiliated voters and moderate Republicans." Davis told The Nation he has a new proposal that the blogosphere establish voluntary rules for "fairness, accuracy and accountability," requiring writers and commentors to provide their real names, phone numbers and addresses, and forbidding anonymous comments offering misleading or personal attacks. He argues that Democrats cannot change the minds of people voting against their "economic self-interest" by offering "words of hate" or "anonymous attacks."

Benjamin Rahn, President of ActBlue.com, believes online activists have already cleared that hurdle, because they are part of the offline political dialogue across the country. "In many ways the netroots are just the most visible part of the nationwide grassroots movement. The conversations happening online, in the blogosphere, and by e-mail from friend to friend to friend, are also happening in bars and coffee shops and PTA meetings. We just don't happen to mike them and put the audio online for everyone to hear," he explained via e-mail. "And the people who used ActBlue to fundraise are also the people who made phone calls with MoveOn's call to change, and waved signs at street corners today, and helped out at polling places. And those are the people who are going to wake up tomorrow and say "Damn, that felt good. Let's do it again."

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The Northeast is now to Democrats what the South has recently been for Republicans: an absolute political stronghold.

"A Category 5 political storm hit the shores of the Northeast on Tuesday, realigning the region from a moderately competitive terrain between the two parties to solidly Democrat," wrote Chuck Todd of National Journal.

In 1994, Republicans won sixteen House seats in the South, claiming a majority of the old confederate states for the first time since Reconstruction. In 2006, Democrats picked up ten seats in the Northeast, a third of their new 30ish seat majority.

In Pennsylvania alone, Democrats won four new House seats and added two more each in Connecticut, New Hampshire and New York, according to the latest figures.

Sam and I spent the last three days before the Election in suburban Philadelphia (for an upcoming Nation video), talking to swing voters in three tightly contested Congressional districts. These voters, a significant number of them longtime Republicans, were fed up with George W. Bush and the GOP Congress, angry about the war in Iraq and deeply unsatisfied with the direction of the country.

Exit polling released by CNN confirmed what we'd been hearing over and over anecdotally. Sixty-eight percent of voters in the East disapproved of Bush and the job he was doing. Only 35 percent approved of Republican leaders in Congress.

National issues were of particular relevance here. Sixty-eight percent of voters said that Iraq was extremely important or very important to their vote, an issue trumped only by the economy, which a majority described as "not good" or "poor." Sixty-five percent believe it's time to start bringing our troops home.

Self-identified moderates outnumber both liberals and conservatives by a 2-1 margin in this region. It was these voters, on the streets of suburban Philadelphia, in upstate New York, in rural New Hampshire, in middle-class Connecticut, who deserted the GOP in droves. It may be a long time before they come back.

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It now looks as if voters approved all six of the state-level minimum-wage initiatives. In addition to Missouri and Ohio--which you read about on the Notion last night--the measures also passed in Arizona, Colorado, Montana and Nevada. That amounts to a rejection en masse of right-wing economic ideology; when asked, Americans obviously think hard-working poor folks deserve better. Most also required adjustments for inflation or changes in the cost of living. The overwhelming margins in most of the races were also exciting: more than two-thirds of voters approved the initiatives in Montana, Nevada, Missouri and Arizona.

These increases, small as they sound, will have a far more direct effect on the daily lives of Americans than many of the other matters so hotly debated and horse-raced in election season. That alone is reason for celebration. But the other question, of course, is, Did they have a broader impact on the elections? Was minimum wage the gay marriage of the left? That is, did these initiatives help turn out the Democratic base and help the Democrats win? We'd need more analysis of the data to say for certain, but it looks like they may have helped. Democrats took Senate seats in Ohio, Missouri and most likely Montana.