Cuccinelli, right? That is the bullet you dodged? Here in WA I think the threshold for a manual recount is when the difference is less than half a percent of the vote cast.
Back to Cuccinelli. I just looked at the election page at
Politico for Virginia. Wow, there are about 6 million voters in the state and almost that many counties! Look at this map!
That's what the victory for McAullife map looks like. I think it's also representative of where the population centers are. The difference between the top two candidates is about 50k votes, which seems quite close. I think this is good for VA, and good for the country because Cuccinelli and his Tea Party fellows are chock full of bad ideas; I'm happy to see them lose.
But I also think the race was close enough to give them hope, indeed, I've been listening to Rush Limbaugh this morning and the whining (today) has been about how the Republican party leadership doomed Cuccinelli's campaign by starving it for money. So, they're not disheartened, just mad. I think this will simply prolong the internal fighting on the conservative side of the country's party structure. This will not bode well for Rs in coming national elections. I think Christie (R) from NJ would be a much more competitve candidate for the Republican side, but the TP faction won't back him any more than the mainstream Rs will back Cuccinelli. Stalemate. D victory.