NBC News currently projects that Democrats will hold 258 seats in the House in the next Congress – an 81 seat margin. Let’s assume that’s accurate; in any case, it won’t be far off. If that holds that will be the largest majority either party has held since 1990 – 36 years ago. It’s important to note that this was in the pre-1994 US political system in which Democrats still held large majorities based in large on incumbency in southern districts that were already strongly Republican. That changed decisively in 1994 and US politics has never been the same. The last time Republicans won a majority that large was, I believe, in 1928.

I want to again thank everyone who joined us for last night’s election night video-cast. We had a great time (with an assist from the American electorate) and we hope you did too. It’s not quite as exciting as a rerun. But if you’d like to catch a few minutes of it just to see what it was like you can check it out here. We plan to do more of these. The written word remains our primary medium. But there’s a lot more that even a small organization can do with live coverage of events through video. If you joined us, we’d love to hear your feedback.

Just before 2 a.m., I’m trying to make sense of the Senate results. If I’m making sense of this right, Democrats have clearly won 54 senate seats, appear likely to win 55 and could still win 56.

The final uncertain seat is in Mississippi. The Times calls it a toss-up with a 61% chance of Republicans winning it. But election watchers I trust seem to think it’s just a bit more likely that Colom will win. To be clear, they’re only talking about likelihoods, and it’s a bit more likely, in their view, that Colom will win. To be fair to the Times, these are models that are fully devised in advance. And this is extremely close. When it’s that down to the wire, it’s down to picayune details, idiosyncrasies of particular counties that may just be hard for a model to fully capture. The people I’m following suggest that in the key counties where votes remain the last ballots tend to lean Democratic.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for tonight’s livecast. We had about a thousand people watching through most of the evening from 8 PM to around 12:30 or so. We really enjoyed it and we hope you did too. We’re going to be doing more of these.

As I’ve noted a few times, polling is just a predictive artifact. None of all those polling questions matter now. But one thing is worth observing simply to think clearly about the unpredictability of polling error. It will take a while for numbers folks to crunch all the numbers. But simply look at the Senate races it’s clear that while some polls were accurate quite a number of them significantly underestimated Democratic strength – South Carolina, Texas, Iowa and a number of others. This isn’t an exhaustive list. I’ve been on our video-cast for almost five hours. I’m a bit fried. But again, polling error doesn’t just underestimate Republicans. It goes both ways. It’s unpredictable.