Red Faced

Everyone I know is getting drunk in downtown Seattle. While my friends and coworkers toast the election results—it's 9:20 p.m. and the Democrats have taken back the House and the networks have called it for Cantwell (and Tester is ahead in Montana)—I'm stone-cold sober and sitting, I kid you not, next to Tim Eyman and Stefan Sharkansky and a guy in full military uniform who's complaining to his girlfriend that Webb is even with Allen.

I'm at the Bellevue Hyatt at the GOP victory party.

Nobody's toasting much of anything here. Indeed, a seriously angry Reichert staffer tried to chase me away from the press table. I told her I was press and what did she think about the fact that the Republicans just lost the House. She told me she wasn't the spokesperson, and stalked off.

I've set up camp in this hostile territory tonight because every election I've covered has always ended with glum handwringing from Democrats. The stories the next day are packed with morose quotes from Dems about what went wrong and what they could have done differently and how can they sharpen their message and "Fuck, those damn Republicans are so good at sound bites," and only if...

Anticipating a blue wave, if not a blue hurricane, I hung out in the Hyatt's ballroom and chatted up McGavick volunteers, Reichert supporters, College Republicans, and Republican staffers. I wanted to turn the tables and enjoy some public handwringing from the GOP.

It wasn't hard. They were eager to bitch. Scott Schille, a 27-year-old intern for the state party complained that the Democrats did a better job "sticking us with the Abramoff scandal." Neil Strege, a Republican staffer with King County, told me that "People were just set against Bush from the start," adding that, "the war is unpopular." I ran into the Hardison family from Federal Way, all three in red McGavick T-shirts, who acknowledged that mistakes had been made in Iraq. "Quite frankly," Frost Hardison said, "the war has not gone too well. It was good after 9/11, but then after Abu Ghraib... well..." and he trailed off.

Up on stage, with a giant TV screen behind her beaming in Cantwell's big numbers (56 percent), Republican King County Council Member Kathy Lambert sounded like a Democrat grousing about Republicans: "We have to stop letting simple sound bites shape elections," she told a crowd that was thinning out and barely listening. A few Republicans tried to put a clever spin on the evening: Sharkansky told me that gridlock is good because it stops government spending; a staffer for Republican Attorney General Rob McKenna told me the Dems have blown their momentum for more important 2008 because now they'll be blamed for all the problems.

And so it went in GOP land on Tuesday night. I asked the Republican faithful what they could have done differently. The only one who had much of an answer was Schille, who told me the GOP should have responded better to all the Democrats' attacks. He, for example, liked the "Playboy" ad against Ford. "That ad stuck," he said. "It wasn't racist, but it was sleazy. And politics is sleazy. The Democrats do it too."

Absolutely, I thought, as I headed back to Seattle to join the victorious Democrats.

josh@thestranger.com