Now that the real election is almost over, the Spin Election will begin. The Spin Election will be the Right’s effort to persuade America that what happened last night didn’t actually happen, or if it did happen, it didn’t count. If the past is our guide, the Left will get flustered and do some foot-stamping, but they will be unable to mount a unified counter-propaganda campaign.

However, this time, it may not matter.

British America-watcher Martin Kettle writes,

Many conservatives will be in denial about these results this morning. They will be as angry in defeat as they have so often been angry in victory. They will try to dismiss them as a poor performance, falling short of Democratic expectations and thus in some bizarre way a vindication of the administration. But these elections have been a decisive rebuff not just to the president but also to the arrogance that has increasingly been the hallmark of both the Bush administration and the Republican congressional leadership.

Ugly triumphalism has been a central feature of the past dozen years. Too many Republicans have too often spoken and behaved as though their earlier electoral victories entitled them to ride roughshod over the very idea that large numbers of Americans passionately disagreed with their approach. The redistricting on which these elections have been fought was a case in point – a blatant gerrymander designed to prevent ethnic minorities and liberals from being properly represented in Washington.

Don’t forget that Republicans made a major effort to redraw districts in a way that would ensure future victories for the Right. Don’t forget that Republicans have worked overtime to find (increasingly outrageous) ways to suppress votes. Breaching these defenses required more desire for change than election numbers alone reveal. And I suspect that rightie spin — in effect, telling voters that their votes didn’t really mean anything — will just piss off voters even more.

Talk about sour grapes; in today’s WSJ Opinion Journal I see no acknowledgment of what just happened. Instead, the mouthpieces for the VRWC grumble about negative campaigning (“Ultimately, the reaction to this ceaseless negative barrage, if it continues unchecked, will be the rejection of both major political parties.”) and a smug report that Acorn, “a feisty, union-backed activist group … is finally coming under scrutiny.” They’re preparing a “vote fraud” excuse, it seems.

Many on the Right (and so-called Center) are comforting themselves by declaring that last night’s Democratic winners are, on the whole, not really a radical bunch. “[M]any of the Democrats at the vanguard of today’s political ‘revolution’ are not exactly left-wing zealots,” Arthur Brooks wrote yesterday. David “The Cabbage” Brooks writes, “[T]he voters have voted for change, but they haven’t gone overboard. They did not choose the Ned Lamont wing of the Democratic Party.”

In other words, having constructed a straw man extremist Left to scare voters into keeping Republicans in office, they are relieved that this figment of their own imaginations hasn’t materialized.

David Brooks even expresses relief that the High Priestess of Moonbattery, Nanci Pelosi, “seems to understand” her humble place in the political cosmos. “All in all, an end to the era of base-mobilizing politics and a victory for the center (albeit with a Democratic tilt). Nancy Pelosi seems to understand this. She’s striking a bipartisan pose, not a triumphalist one.” Never mind that she’s been making nothing but bipartisan noises for the past several weeks, to the consternation of many lefties.

So, in the next few days the Rightie Echo Chamber will be claiming this election doesn’t mean anything because the Dems that won were not the barking moonbats that pre-election rightie propaganda had made them out to be.

However, as Stirling Newberry documents, yesterday’s election signaled a decisive turn away from the constrictive and toxic ideologies of the extreme Right and toward real progressivism.

And consider: Last night some Republican incumbents were re-elected to Senate and House seats and governor’s mansions. But as of this morning no such seats or mansions switched from Democrat to Republican. A few contests have yet to be decided. A couple of elections were won by Independents. But right now, the Republicans are shut out. This is rare. If the trend holds, it may be unprecedented. We’ll see.

Billmon writes, “It’s going to take Adam Nagourney a while to spin this as a Democratic failure, but I’m sure he’ll give it the old college try.” Heh.

Update: Credit to us bloggers. Also, Ezra channels Mahablog.

Update update: Glenn Greenwald —

The notion that this is a victory for some sort of mealy-mouthed, Bush-lite, glorified centrism is absurd on its face. Democrats won by aggressively attacking the Bush movement, not by trying to be a slightly modified and duller version of it. The accommodationist tack is what they attempted in 2002 and 2004 when they were crushed. They won in this election by making their opposition clear and assertive.

Many of the Democrats who won were exactly those candidates who were supported most enthusiastically by the most liberal blogs. Atrios, for instance, raised money for only a handful of challengers and many of them won — against Republican incumbents in previously red districts: Jon Tester, Patrick Murphy, Joe Sestak, Nick Lampson, Chris Carney. The same is true for the FDL/C&L list of candidates (Amy Klobuchar, Ben Cardin, Sherood Brown, Kirsten Gillibrand) and the Daily Kos/MyDD list (Jim Webb, Tim Walz).

Liberal blogs tend to support underdog Democratic candidates who are challenging Republican incumbents or open seats, i.e., the races that are most difficult to win. And yet a huge bulk of the winning Democratic candidates who won in those races were the ones supported by liberal blogs. And many blog-favored Democrats who lost were ones running in very red districts against GOP incumbents — such as Angie Paccione (against the heinous Marilyn Musgrave) and Victoria Wulslin (against the equally horrible Jean Schmidt) — and they came very close to winning.

Given those facts, the idea that this was some great repudiation of the blog-wing of the Democratic Party or that it was an endorsement of Broder-like, plodding centrism is purely wishful thinking on the part of those who wish it were so. The Democrats who won have one thing in common — aggressive and unapologetic opposition to what the Republicans have become.