My two cents are to echo Marco Rubio:
"We make a great mistake if we believe that tonight these results are somehow an embrace of the Republican Party," said incoming Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. A rising GOP star, Rubio seized his new role as a party leader and potential presidential candidate, casting the results as "a second chance for Republicans to be what they said they were going to be not so long ago."
Similar from Jay Cost:
This is not an endorsement of the Republican party, but much more of a rejection of the Democratic party, specifically the claims the Democrats have made since 1996 to be broad in its appeal and moderate in its policies.
Democrats built a congressional majority in 2006 and 2008 by persuading Bush voters to cross the aisle to support them, with an implicit promise of bipartisanship and moderation. The party under Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi did not deliver on that promise -- and thus they lost the support of these Republican-leaning districts.
Related, how does somebody please all the independent voters?
... for all the decisiveness of the independents' shift, this election hasn't resolved the most fundamental question facing the country: What should the role of government be in the 21st century?
Instead it has simply set up what figures to be a two-year debate over that question in Washington, and ensures that it will be a focal point of the 2012 election.
Thanks to independents—along with other crucial swing blocs, such as suburban women, blue-collar workers and retirees, all of whom also shifted toward the Republicans—the GOP now has the strength to stop pieces of the Obama agenda and, perhaps in some instances, roll it back.
