Remember that 51 senators is substantially different from 50. Big picture, 50 Senate seats plus Vice President Harris’s tie-breaking vote made Chuck Schumer the Majority Leader. He and his caucus controlled the calendar, what came to a vote. But the committees had equal numbers of Democratic and Republican members. That meant issuing subpoenas required agreement between the parties. Nominees couldn’t be voted out of committee on straight partisan votes. There were workarounds for some of these issues. But they were complicated and time-consuming. So in addition to decreasing the clout of Senators Manchin and Sinema and positioning Democrats marginally better for retaining the Senate in 2024, the difference between 50 and 51 senators is a big deal on the basic nuts and bolts of running the Senate, getting judicial nominees confirmed and more.

Something came home to me last night that I’ve realized for a while but crystalized for me in a new way. If you’re into elections and want to watch results on election night you should never watch them on TV. Ever. If you were watching last night’s election on TV you probably had the sense the race was a close run thing with the lead bouncing back and forth, with Herschel Walker possibly mounting a comeback after weeks of coverage that made Raphael Warnock appear a favorite to win a full term. If you watched the results through my curated Twitter feed of election number crunchers, though, you saw something very different: from the very first returns it looked likely — and then with growing clarity — that the results would roughly bear out the polls, which showed Warnock with a modest but significant lead. The final results this morning show Warnock beating Walker by just shy of three percentage points, almost on the dot of what the consensus of polls predicted.

I’m a bit of a broken record on this. But it’s true enough to bear some repeating. Raphael Warnock and Mark Kelly are two incredibly able politicians. Until 2018 and 2020, Democrats hadn’t been elected to Senate seats in Arizona and Georgia for decades. They’ve now both done it twice, in two consecutive cycles and under dramatically different political conditions. Of course, these aren’t feats of superhuman political powers. This is the direction of these states. But they are only on the cusp of being purple states. To chalk up two consecutive wins you need to be doing everything right. And both of them did.